Location Pages and SEO elements

Thanks.

Ah, I’m seeing the city information now at least for the titles. Prior to the new release I just had the word “Location” and sitename, without any city details.

As for the canonical link element.

Currently the main location page is being referenced as canonical for all children pages.

So, example.com/location/ canonical is example.com/location/ (Ok)
But,
example.com/location/united-states/illinois/chicago/
example.com/location/united-states/illinois/new-york/

Are both canonicalized to example.com/location/

Essentially this is telling search engines that they should crawl and index the main location pages instead of these two pages, greatly diminishing the local geo-signals and possibly even excluding the Chicago and New York pages from the search engines.

Each of these should really canonicalize back to themselves, or safer to remove the canonical element entirely on those pages if that can’t be done.

Also noticed an issue on the CPT-city pages where it references back to the same page minus the trailing “/” as the canonical.

“example/cpt/chicago/” stating canonical is “example/cpt/chicago”
Problem is, that redirects to the example/cpt/chicago/, creating an endless loop.

The subcategory version is okay:
“example/cpt/chicago/restaurants/” stating itself as canonical.

The everywhere/non-city based versions of the CPT and CPT + category pages are okay.

Hope that helps.

cheers

Almost, notice how your URL has the trailing slash, but the canonical doesn’t:

http://wpgeo.directory/location/united-states/illinois/chicago/
vs
http://wpgeo.directory/location/united-states/illinois/chicago

That’s technically a different URL, and in this case, try going to that URL and you’ll find WP nicely takes you to the first URL.

But what this does for the search engines is to send them into an infinite loop. Granted, the search engines expected things like that to happen, so they gracefully exit that, but it does send a lower quality signal to them and they begin to ignore that canonical recommendation anyway.

cheers