As far as I am aware the only issue is that you need to have the allow ‘ugly’ permalinks option turned on. Unless anyone can tell me differently… I know lots of SP users are working with it.

Inside Yoast it says:

“___ Redirect ugly URL’s to clean permalinks. (Not recommended in many cases!)

People make mistakes in their links towards you sometimes, or unwanted parameters are added to the end of your URLs, this allows you to redirect them all away. Please note that while this is a feature that is actively maintained, it is known to break several plugins, and should for that reason be the first feature you disable when you encounter issues after installing this plugin.”

I think this is it.  So I have left it switched-off as that appears to be what is recommended.  I think before, he had it as default on and that caused problems on people’s sites.  So I guess now it is automatically “off”.   Is this the right area?  It sounds like it’s just for incoming links, which is why I’m confused when we’re talking about permalinks for the simple press plugin.  I just want to confirm. Thanks.

that is the only known issue…  glad we could help…

I stumbled across this article regarding Yoast SEO and Simple Press Forum issues:

http://dottech.org/101602/problem-with-post-edit-buttonow-to-make-yoast-wordpress-seo-work-with-simplepress-page-title-and-canonical-guide/

Is there still a problem?  I wasn’t quite sure if I needed to follow the guidelines in the article as I am not an expert in SEO and trying to ensure my site ranks well.

Can you clarify?  Is the article correct?  Seems to be some confusion.

I was unaware of any of this. And I do not think this is actually an issue. The only thing we know that you need to do for using Yoast SEO is to turn on the option to allow what they call ‘ugly permalinks’. I wonder if – for this particular user – this had something more to do with the way the WP theme was processing page titles…

Steve: Any thoughts, comments or knowledge on this?

I have not seen or heard of the page title issue… is the OP seeing this?

as to the canonical, I think I have posted a couple times about this…  when using an seo plugin for wp that does not understand dynamic page content, it may output an incorrect canonical url that might cause conflicts with the proper canonical url tag that sp outputs…  best thing to do is to check the page source and see if there is multiple canonical tags output…

I don’t think the other person (who wrote the article) is seeing this thread. You can contact them here:

http://dottech.org/yell-at-ashraf/

I will post on their thread and see if they respond.  The comments underneath their article make it seem like this is an issue for others as well.

This was just something I stumbled upon when researching something else and it was confusing and caused some alarm.  How do I know my simple press / wordpress combination is working correctly?  Is there a way to check this in Google?

As I said, it may be affecting others…  but we have not had many reports…  but if it is, the fixes he proposes make sense.

I just checked my site and page source for a post and I see two canonical links there:

The one that Simple Press generates:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://membershipexpert.com/community/forum/just-started-a-membership-site/” />

And the one that Yoast generates:

<!– This site is optimized with the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v1.4.4 – http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ –>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://membershipexpert.com/community/” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp,noydir”/>
<link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/105950898850363138923/”/>
<meta property=’og:locale’ content=’en_US’/>
<meta property=’og:title’ content=’Community – MembershipExpert.com’/>
<meta property=’og:url’ content=’http://membershipexpert.com/community/’/>
<meta property=’og:site_name’ content=’MembershipExpert.com’/>
<meta property=’og:type’ content=’article’/>
<!– / Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. –>

So does this mean there is a conflict?  How should this be fixed?

There are some issues with the way Yoast creates their canonical entry. They call it canonical but it really is just the page permalink which is incorrect.

See the post here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-seo-by-yoast-suggestion-remove-canonical-per-post-or-page on some work arounds.

yup, the yoast one is wrong…

so similar to what the user above recommended and we have previously, do something like this in you spFunctions.php sp theme template file:

function my_canonical_exclude( $canonical ) {
    if ( sp_is_forumpage() ) $canonical = false;
    return $canonical;
}
add_filter( 'wpseo_canonical', 'my_canonical_exclude' );

should work, but I do not know for sure when yoast fires that hook and if our template function is available… if it doesnt work then you would want something like:

function my_canonical_exclude( $canonical ) {
    global $post;
    if ( $post->ID == 6992 ) $canonical = false;
    return $canonical;
}
add_filter( 'wpseo_canonical', 'my_canonical_exclude' );

but you will need to replace 6992 with your wp page id for the forum…. hence why the first method is better…

I will also see if there is something we can do to handle this internally since we now know the needed hook…

I have added some code to our next release which should handle the canonical url and page title when running yoast seo…  should release when wp 3.6 releases later this month…

Wow you guys are fast.  Ok that is good to hear, so the next version of Simple Press will take care of the issue then. 

I am tech savvy from a users point of view but not a coder and I wouldn’t feel confident messing with code then when yoast updates or something changes, it messes everything up.  Or you have to remember to re-paste the code back in there when you change something else. 

Glad this is fixed because I’m sure I’m not the only one who had this issue.  There are probably many sites now running on Yoast SEO and Simple Press.  They should should all see a BIG boost in organic traffic from Google once the update is made. 

Thanks again!!!

You’re welcome.