Menu
I'm having trouble understanding canonical URLs with regards to how search engines and Facebook seem to handle them.
My Google maps powered site allows visitors to use social media to request a gig in their country. One of the pages in question can be found at: http://izzy.nogig.in/
When a user clicks on their countries marker it gives them sharing options (twitter/facebook/etc), which when shared will share the URL specifically for that country, eg: izzy.nogig.in/usa? or izzy.nogig.in/spain? etc.
All of these countries in the URL amount to a lot of duplicate content so I use the following to point search engines to the page I want ranked:-
<link rel="canonical" href="http://izzy.nogig.in/_?"/> For Facebook Likes to count towards each individual country I've set my Open Graph "og:url" as follows, eg:
<meta property="og:url" content="http://izzy.nogig.in/australia?" /> Now when I run a country-specific URL through the Facebook Object Debugger (eg. http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fizzy.nogig.in%2Faustralia%3F) it shows the following:-
Response Code: 206 Fetched URL: http://izzy.nogig.in/australia Canonical URL: http://izzy.nogig.in/australia Mismatch og:url and canonical url: og:url tag in the header is not the same URL as rel='canonical' link in the html. The above error is what's confusing me. I know they're mismatched, but I thought this was the correct way to do this.
Everything in the debugger looks good to me (correct link, description, image etc for each country), and I can't change the rel="canonical" value to match my og:url as I need it pointing to a single page (country-less) for search engines.
I believe it is all working correctly. Should I just ignore the error from the debugger, or have I set this up incorrectly? I don't want "likes" for each country all disappearing and counting towards the rel="canonical" URL.
Many Thanks - Will
517
A canonical URL is the URL of the best representative page from a group of duplicate pages, according to Google. For example, if you have two URLs for the same page (such as example.com? dress=1234 and example.com/dresses/1234 ), Google chooses one as canonical.
A canonical tag (aka "rel canonical") is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs.
No, it does not. Search engines will still crawl your pages, regardless of whether or not you've set a canonical URL pointing to a different URL. A canonical URL is merely a strong signal for search engines regarding the preferred page that should be showing up in search engine result pages.
The rel=canonical tag is used when you think you might have a duplicate content issue, but it doesn't make sense to remove one version of the content or to do a 301 redirect.
link rel="canonical" will be used by search engines where as og:url will be used by facebook
og:url basically tells the FB scraper "ignore anything on this page, and scrape this url instead"
More for Canonical link element: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element
176
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
