Requests containing 'cat=-1' omit canonical (and hreflang) tags

[jonoaldersonwp]

Requests such as ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/web-application-firewall/?cat=-1 and ​https://wordpress.org/themes/tags/blog/?example=example&cat=-1 omit canonical URL tag and hreflang tags.

These should be (re)included, and the parameter ignored.

[dd32]

In 9992:

Theme Directory: Remove Category support.

See #5290.

[dd32]

Unfortunately ?cat=-1 is a valid request, as is /tag/tagname/?cat=-1234, which is just as valid as /tag/tagname/?category_name=catname

This is an unfortunate scenario where WordPress's flexibility is incredibly hard to handle.

The challenge with multi-taxonomy queries like this, is which is the canonical? /tag/tagname/?category_name=catname or /category/catname/?tag=tagname?

If the QV should just be excluded from the canonicalisation, the further question that's raised is "Does what the canonical is actually set to matter at all? Should it just be set to the homepage for a multi-taxonomy query if one should be ignored?"

[dd32]

In 9996:

Plugin Directory: Ignore any query vars that the directory doesn't need/use.

See #5290.

[jonoaldersonwp]

Replying to dd32:

Unfortunately ?cat=-1 is a valid request, as is /tag/tagname/?cat=-1234, which is just as valid as /tag/tagname/?category_name=catname

This is an unfortunate scenario where WordPress's flexibility is incredibly hard to handle.

The challenge with multi-taxonomy queries like this, is which is the canonical? /tag/tagname/?category_name=catname or /category/catname/?tag=tagname?

If the QV should just be excluded from the canonicalisation, the further question that's raised is "Does what the canonical is actually set to matter at all? Should it just be set to the homepage for a multi-taxonomy query if one should be ignored?"

Yeah, this is nuanced and messy. Really, it shouldn't be possible to cross-query to the nth degree like that. In an ideal world we'd define all of the intersecting meta robots and canonical logic for every variations; but we have bigger fish to fry. Just need to make it less-broken for now, until we run out of other fires to put out! :)