Centralise all the SEO fixes

[dd32]

Over the last year we've been closing a lot of random small SEO tickets, but overtime a lot of the changes have had different fixes in different locations, often missing edgecases.

This is an attempt at removing most of the common logic into a single location, with each site filtering the defaults when needed.

Unfortunately, this is more complex than I had expected for some sites (bbPress I'm looking at you).

Ticket: https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5173

[johnjamesjacoby]

Unfortunately, this is more complex than I had expected for some sites (bbPress I'm looking at you).

How can I be helpful?

If bbPress needs changes to help make SEO tweaks easier, let’s make them happen! ❤️

[dd32]

If bbPress needs changes to help make SEO tweaks easier, let’s make them happen! ❤️

Unfortunately it's not a simple change. I probably shouldn't have called out bbPress like that, o2 has similar problems, it was just a frustration point that had delayed me making this ticket for a few weeks.

There's two major pain points with bbPress, the first is that forums/topics/replies are not queried until they're displayed, which means that in order to output archive/noindex/etc in the header we have to trigger the queries earlier (See this code but search for // Populate bbpress() in that file for more. I'm 99% certain we cause everything to be queried twice when that happens too.
The second isn't bbPress's fault, it's the crazy amount of logic that is being requested to noindex things (you'll find more query triggering in there). I'm starting to think we'd be better off noindexing all of bbpress and selectively removing it..

The first would be helped greatly if it were altering the global $wp_query object rather than making it's own, but that would require a significant change in how bbPress works, and would mean it can't be embedded within other pages as easy, so not really an option, it's just something we have to deal with :)

[dd32]

Just a note that this ticket has been sitting while I've continued to test the code, picking up edge-cases and PHP warnings all the existing canonical code in different places have been generating.

[dd32]

In 9861:

Add the Generic SEO Fixes plugin.

See #5173.

[dd32]

In 9862:

Plugin Directory: Remove specific SEO fixes that are included in the generic SEO fixes plugin.

See #5173.

[dd32]

In 9863:

Support Forums: Remove specific SEO fixes that are included in the generic SEO fixes plugin.

See #5173.

[dd32]

In 9864:

Theme Directory: Remove specific SEO fixes that are included in the generic SEO fixes plugin.

See #5173.

[dd32]

In 9865:

Breathe: Remove specific SEO fixes that are included in the generic SEO fixes plugin.

See #5173.

[dd32]

In 9866:

Developer: Remove specific SEO fixes that are included in the generic SEO fixes plugin.

See #5173.

[dd32]

In 9867:

Login: Remove specific SEO fixes that are included in the generic SEO fixes plugin.

See #5173.

[dd32]

In 9868:

Remove the Facebook/twitter canonical redirect as it's included in the SEO fixes plugin, rename this so it's more obvious as it's purpose.

See #5173.

[dd32]

In 9869:

SEO Plugin: Handle taxonomy query requests that don't actually have a taxonomy query attached.

The plugin directory sometimes redirects taxonomy queries to be a post_meta-only query.

Avoids a PHP Warning: mu-plugins/pub/wporg-seo/canonical.php:67 - count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable

See #5173.

[dd32]

In 9870:

Theme Directory: Switch to using get_queried_object() instead of get_post() due to get_post not returning correctly on the theme directory sometimes.

Also moves the outdated theme noindexing to it's own filter.

See #5173.
Fixes #4994.

[dd32]

In 9872:

SEO: Canonical: Only include the order param if it's a valid sort value.

See #5173, #5169.

[dd32]

Marking as fixed as no bugs have cropped up.

[dd32]

In 9936:

Theme Directory: Swap back to using get_post() now that it works as expected.

See [9935].
Reverts parts of [9870].
See #5173, #4994.

[dd32]

In 9940:

Developer: Remove the rel="canonical" implementation that can output incorrect links on some requests.
This will fall back to using the wporg-seo canonical implementation now instead.

See #5173.