{"id":450,"date":"2011-11-28T21:08:29","date_gmt":"2011-11-28T21:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/?p=450"},"modified":"2011-11-28T21:08:45","modified_gmt":"2011-11-28T21:08:45","slug":"careful-canonicals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/careful-canonicals\/","title":{"rendered":"Careful with those Canonicals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is more of a high-level summary of this post:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/support\/webmasters\/bin\/answer.py?answer=139394\">http:\/\/www.google.com\/support\/webmasters\/bin\/answer.py?answer=139394<br \/>\n\t<\/a><\/p>\n<p>But, I think it&#39;s a very important and often overlooked aspect of specifying canonical pages. That is, simply stripping any query string parameters from the URL, i.e.<\/p>\n<p>Page: http:\/\/www.example.com\/products\/?id=320<\/p>\n<p><code>&lt;link rel=&quot;canonical&quot; href=&quot;http:\/\/www.example.com\/products\/&quot; \/&gt;<\/code><\/p>\n<p>What you are telling search engines with this tiny but dangerous tag is that all &quot;versions&quot; of the \/products page are essentially duplicates of each other. Very bad!<\/p>\n<p>A more appropriate use of canonicals is to &quot;strip&quot; query strings which don&#39;t actually affect page content. For instance:<\/p>\n<p>http:\/\/www.example.com\/products\/?id=13&#038;message=Out%20%of%20Stock<\/p>\n<p><code>&lt;link rel=&quot;canonical&quot; href=&quot;http:\/\/www.example.com\/products\/?id=13&quot; \/&gt;<\/code><\/p>\n<p>This prevents the SE&#39;s from assuming that the page with the message query string parameter is actually a different page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is more of a high-level summary of this post: http:\/\/www.google.com\/support\/webmasters\/bin\/answer.py?answer=139394 But, I think it&#39;s a very important and often overlooked aspect of specifying canonical&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"amp_status":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[114],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":452,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions\/452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}