🚨 SEO pain point: When canonicals work against you instead of for you!
We love SEO. We really do. But sometimes it brings us to the brink of despair.
Do you know this? You optimise your website with a lot of love for SEO and set everything up properly:
✅ hreflang implemented correctly
✅ Internal linking optimised
✅ Technical checks carried out
✅ Canonicals set correctly
And then the unexpected happens. Suddenly Google ranks the German pages in English – and vice versa! 😱
The problem?
🔹 Linkjuice was redirected to the wrong version
🔹 Google had difficulties recognising the correct language version
🔹 The rankings suffered because the signals were no longer clear
So off to investigate the causes! 🔍
➡️ hreflang checked? It was clean.
➡️ Server and caching problems ruled out? Check.
➡️ Manually set canonicals correct? Checked, no errors.
After further tests it turned out: Yoast SEO was not working properly with another plugin and kept setting the wrong canonicals.
Our solution? 🔥
We switched to RankMath – and lo and behold: no more incorrect canonicals, the hreflang structure remained stable and Google was able to index the pages correctly again.
💡 Learning:
➡️ Automatic canonicals are good – but not always reliable.
➡️ Plugin compatibility can cause invisible problems.
➡️ If an SEO bug cannot be solved manually, the cause often lies deeper in the system.
