Iāve just found a bug on two Webflow sites Iām developing where Webflow is generating an additional incorrect Canonical tag on CMS collection items. This is very damaging to SEO
No response from WF Support after 24 hours, so Iām now wondering if everyone is getting this bug?
To test, republish your site and navigate to a collection item on the live site (such as a blog post). Then, view the source code on that page (right-click, āView Page Sourceā).
In my case, Iām getting an additional canonical tag generated just after the ā¦ element, which references the domain with the collection name, but without the page Slug.
For example: <link rel="canonical" href="https://project.webflow.io/blogs"/> Rather than: <link rel="canonical" href="https://project.webflow.io/blogs/page-slug"/>
Are you sure you donāt have a canonical in your custom code as well?
Check site-wide and page-specific.
Other thing Iād check is whether you have a default locale set for your site under site settings, if not, some weird things happen for some people. Might be related, i.e. two separate mechanisms competing- the default auto-canonical, and a new localization-specific path canonical feature.
Same problem here ! Iām getting a wrong additional canonical URL.
I just added the locals to my webflow project last friday when the feature got out so maybe itās related ?
Itās definitely Webflow causing it. I spent hours debugging it and running tests to try and work around it. I even tried cloning one of the sites but experienced the same issue.
I imagine itās likely connected to the localisation stuff, as others have suggested.
Gaah. Well, self-help wins here. Must protect that SEO investment.
A few things you could try-
Disable auto canonicals, at least until this is fixed. You can manually re-add them to your most heavily trafficked pages
Or, remove them with script
Or, reverse proxy and remove them that way
Note solutions 1 and 2 would still show errors in tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs, but Google should be fine with both of them and theyāre easy to implement.
Definitely donāt want that /blog/ one hanging around, that would essentially be telling google to unlist every single blog article you have.
Canāt see how to disable auto-canonicals, I tried to empty the field where we can put the Global canonical tag URL but it didnāt delete the canonicals on my pages
Solution 1 definetly not working, I managed to unable the auto canonicals and added manually on all my pages the good canonical but the one that was added before didnāt disappear. So the problem remain the same
<script>
// Immediately remove the first canonical tag
document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function () {
// Find all canonical tags
var canonicalTags = document.querySelectorAll('link[rel="canonical"]');
// If there is more than one canonical tag, remove the first one
if (canonicalTags.length > 1) {
canonicalTags[0].parentNode.removeChild(canonicalTags[0]);
}
});
</script>
This setting here in Romainās screenshot.
When the Global canonical URL field is blank, Webflow doesnāt [didnāt] auto-generate canonical tags. Itās possible thatās changed with localization, but Iām not sure why that would be.
That looks good, I donāt have a site showing this problem to test it on. Keep in mind once the bug is fixed, this would be removing your main canonical since it would then become the first one.
Note: As this uses clientside Javascript (e.g. runs via the browser after the page has initially loaded), any crawlers that donāt render clientside Javascript (which is most) will still pick up the canonical tag.
I finally got a answer from the support and they basically said that they identified the issue and they are working on it but no timeframe for the resolve.
The solution they gave me was a link to this post telling me to use the script from above ahaha
.
In fact I tried the script and tested it with my SEO expert and it seems that sometimes the script does work and sometimes not. But in the worth case if google search manager detect 2 different canonical it just consider there is NO Canonical which is better than identifying the wrong one.
I canāt believe Webflow would launch something with such a big bug!!! Itās making me reconsider using Webflow to be honest!
Iāve put the script in the custom code across the site, thank you @Serhat_Yildirim so much, life saver, iām hoping this works well enough for Google.
Lets hope Webflow actually have people working on this issue.
I removed localisation, which i had hoped would remove this issue, but its still present in the code.
Iām beyond angry at Webflow right now!
Also very worrying that itās been 2 days since this issue has been flagged and they havenāt fixed it!
In my experience, SEO-related issues and features have always taken a backseat within Webflow.
Whatās lousy, though, is if I hadnāt spotted the issue before launching my clientsā new sites (which are replacing old sites), their new site would have received a massive SEO hit, damaging our relationship with a new client.
This situation is especially tricky as Iām also working with an SEO company who arenāt keen on using the Webflow CMS anyway
If their support team has suggested using Javascript as a workaround, it shows a lack of knowledge about SEO and how crawlers work. It isnāt a solution.
On another note, Iāve created another post which asks for a Webflow Bugs Page, so that Webflow users can quickly look up any active bugs without wasting loads of time trying to figure out if itās their project instance or a problem with Webflow itself: Webflow Bugs Page
