BIG issue with Newspaper theme and the Yoast Plugin, drop traffic 75%

Hello there,

The Newspaper theme has Big issue with the canonical tag and Yoast plugin. When I use + latest articles + pagination option the canonical is repeated (duplicate) in the view source code home. It affects the SEO and the drop in the Google rankings SERPs.

The canonical tag is repeated 2 times, this is terrible for SEO to ruin our traffic.

Apparently the theme breaks the Yoast code (canonical link), causing the plugin to repeat the canonical 2 times in the Home and on the next pages: /page/1 until the end.

It’s confuses for Google bots, leaving your home page in the last ranking positions, and loss of JUICE in the links.

It’s not a Yoast issue, when you deactivate the plugin, the error continues. Only disappears when you change the theme from (+ latest articles + pagination) to (latest posts) option. But here is a big problem, because you cannot activate extracts for the posts in this module 1. What should we do? Most user should have the same problem and have not noticed it.

Starting on April after the Newspaper Theme updates, the visitor drop dramatically. Many think it’s Yoast issue plugin, which mistakenly deleted the meta tags from all posts for “No index”. But it was fixed in the version 14.1.

The issue only appears on the home page and home pagination

Here the code with the 2 canonical tag:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.devocionalescristianos.org/”/><link rel=”next” href=”https://www.devocionalescristianos.org/page/2″/><link rel=”icon” type=”image/png” href=”https://cdn.devocionalescristianos.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/favicono.ico”>
<!– This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v14.1 – https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ –>
<meta name=”description” content=”Devocionales Santa Biblia Reina Valera 1960 Estudios Reflexiones Versículos Bíblicos Clases Lecciones Recursos para Iglesias Juegos Dinámicas.” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1″ />
<meta name=”bingbot” content=”index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1″ />
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.devocionalescristianos.org/” />
<meta property=”og:locale” content=”es_ES” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”website” />
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Devocionales † Cristianos: Sitio Oficial” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Devocionales Santa Biblia Reina Valera 1960 Estudios Reflexiones Versículos Bíblicos Clases Lecciones Recursos para Iglesias Juegos Dinámicas.” />

Look it the code:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.devocionalescristianos.org/”/><link rel=”next”

it should be below the Yoast tags: (and it’s above)

<!– This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v14.1 – https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ –>

Do you understanding? Any idea with it issue please?

Thank you very much!

Hello Vlad,

The temporary solution works, it removes one the two canonical tags, but the code canonical tag is above the Yoast code.

We await the final solution from the developers.

Thank you!