The WordCamp 2018 site homepage has a canonical tag pointing to the 2019 site

[jonoaldersonwp]

​https://2018.us.wordcamp.org/ (the homepage template only) contains a canonical URL tag with a value of ​http://2019.us.wordcamp.org/.

This will negatively impact the visibility of the 2018 site, as well as causing issues when linking to / sharing the URL.

As a quick tactical fix, we should change the value of the tag to ​https://2018.us.wordcamp.org/

[mukesh27]

it is a silly mistake. Nice cache @jonoaldersonwp

[iandunn]

This is happening because the 2019.us site has already been created, even though the 2018 event hasn't happened yet, which is a rare exception to the process.

Probably the best way to fix this would be to update WordCamp_Canonical_Years_Plugin::wp_head() to ignore sites that are in Coming Soon mode.

This doesn't seem like a high priority to me, but maybe that's because I'm not seeing the tangible issues it's causing? The Twitter and Facebook shares seem ok.

​https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=https%3A%2F%2F2018.us.wordcamp.org%2F
​https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

Can you elaborate on the impact of this?

[jonoaldersonwp]

Any equity which the site might have in the eyes of search engines is being actively syphoned off to the wrong website. That makes the site and its pages less visible and discoverable, which means that we get fewer attendees, fewer contributors, and less market share vs content management systems which get the bare basic fundamentals of SEO right.

There's a really great plugin which we could use, which handles all of this sort of thing correctly and gracefully :)

[jonoaldersonwp]

Oh, also... even if this were the intentional/correct behaviour, we're incorrectly linking to the HTTP rather than the HTTPS version of the 2019 site.

[iandunn]

In 7866:

WordCamp Canonical Years: Wait until current event is over to add link.

Fixes #3815
Props jonoaldersonwp, iandunn

[iandunn]

In 7868:

WordCamp Canonical Years: Set HTTPS scheme for links.

See #3815
Props @jonoaldersonwp, iandunn