Comments on: Rel=Canonical is a Band Aid not a Solution

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Sun, 27 Dec 2009 13:26:30 +0000

[...] Rel Canonical isn’t a band-aid solution – is a view that I personally agree with. The canonical should be a worst case scenario tool more so that a solution to deeper issues. Nice one Kay! [...]

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Wed, 23 Dec 2009 04:53:34 +0000

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By: Jon Henshaw

Jon Henshaw — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:39:30 +0000

That definitely sucks, and I do think you’re making a really good point with your entry. And yeah, you’re correct in holding your breath on the “same as” statement until we see it in writing

By: Kay

Kay — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:04:38 +0000

Hye Jon, thanks for the comment. I do agree that this has a great many benefits but the main reason for the post was because I’m starting to see developers thinking it is an easy way out when producing a dynamic website when it isn’t.

I recently consulted on a new website (using OSC) that produced 4 different urls for product and category pages depending on where it was linked from. The developers solution was implementing the canonical tag (cos Google said so). I looked into the software myself and found out it was a simple check box within the admin which reduced the URLs to the one with the friendly structure. No need for canonical and hardly difficult to solve ‘the proper way’.

Another issue from the SEO perspective is that the canonical tag is for search engines, not people. We can still access those other urls (and link to them).

Still not convinced it’s equivalent to a 301 from what I’ve read about it. Would love to see where google has put that in writing

By: Jon Henshaw

Jon Henshaw — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:30:31 +0000

Actually, it’s a directive, not a suggestion. Google, in particular, treats canonical URLs just like 301s (at a recent SMX panel, a Google engineer basically said it was the equivalent, not “sort of like it”). I also don’t see it as a bandaid at all, in the sense that it allows you to duplicate content in different places, including now on different domains (at least for Google). This is great for sites, like news and media sites, that have multiple properties they want to intentionally expose their content on. All while maintaining control over the true source/destination of the content.

Great thoughts though, and I agree that some (if not many) people will use it as a bandaid, instead of simply fixing their crappy information architecture and/or using 301 redirects.