Broken canonical tag on home page

Hi,

I have noticed there’s a problem with how the Newspaper theme handles the canonical tag in the home page, and this is affecting how the site gets indexed in a negative way. The theme generates the canonical tag perfectly for categories and tags paginations, but for some reason, it does not work for the home page.

For example, this is how it works with the tags and categories paginations, where it works perfectly:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://pagexample.com/page/3/” />
<link rel=”prev” href=”https://pagexample.com/page/2/” />
<link rel=”next” href=”https://pagexample.com/page/4/” />
As you can see, it generates the rel=”prev” and rel=”next” tags.

But when we check paginations for the home page, those two tags don’t get generated, it only generates this tag:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://homepage.com/page/3/” />
So as we can see the rel=”prev” and rel=”next” tags are missing.

The problem this is causing is that those paginations are being treated as a completely single page because those two tags are missing. This causes Google to rank those pagination above the main home page in a a lot of cases, and causing other abnormal indexations. I have checked many themes and noticed the Newspaper and Newsmag themes appear to be the only themes with this inconvenience.

Even the demos put out have this issues and you can check it yourself: https://demo.tagdiv.com/newspaper_tech/

So my question is, is there any suggestion you can give me to fix this problem? I searched this forums and saw others having the same problem but a fixed was never provided.

Thank you.

Hi, Bogdam B. Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post.

I use the Yoast SEO plugin and it does not fix the problem, it works great for category and tags but the problem still persists on home page paginations.

And as for theme already including this in its codes, well it probably not working properly because the rel=”prev” and rel=”next” aren’t even generated in the demos provided by TagDiv themselves, which you can even check it yourself: view-source:https://demo.tagdiv.com/newspaper_tech/page/3/

Also I made the mistake of double posting this question and another developer/support staff confirmed that this is the case, that is is a problem that has to be fixed at the theme level through an update: https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/broken-canonical-tag-on-home-page/#post-268988

Anyway, if I am mistaken in any part please let me know, as I am not a theme developer and my understanding of the theme is very limited. But I have searched this whole forums to try to see if there’s fix for this but have only come up to the conclusion given by TagDiv staff Simion C.

Alright. Good to know. Thank you.