search engines | Geeky Ramblings

I’ve found some more Google weirdness … this time related to how it handles declared ‘canonical’ URL’s.

A canonical URL is a meta tag that you put in a web page that says “This is the correct URL to this particular page”.

Here’s an example of the canonical tag …

<head>
   <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page.php" />
</head>

However, even when you declare a canonical URL, Google sometimes decides that there is a better URL.

In some cases it’s to another page on your site…

In this case, both pages are pretty similar (actually, they are identical) … but they are two distinct pages and both have their own canonical URL declared.

I noticed at least one case where the canonical URL that Google selected wasn’t even on my site.

Granted, this is the same content … but it’s should not be considered the canonical version of a page on my site.

Unfortunately I really don’t know how to resolve this issue … as Google doesn’t respond to webmaster raised issues related to their search engine functionality.

User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /search Disallow: /query.html Disallow: /omb/search Disallow: /omb/query.html Disallow: /expectmore/search Disallow: /expectmore/query.html Disallow: /results/search Disallow: /results/query.html Disallow: /earmarks/search Disallow: /earmarks/query.html Disallow: /help Disallow: /360pics/text Disallow: /911/911day/text Disallow: /911/heroes/text

Geeky Ramblings

Random Ramblings of a Neo-Post-Modern Geek (I have no idea what that means)

Tag Archives: search engines

Google and Canonical

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