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FEATURE: Send a 'canonical' link header in non-canonical responses #16113

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FEATURE: Send a 'canonical' link header in non-canonical responses #16113

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rr-it
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@rr-it rr-it commented Mar 6, 2022

The html response body already has a canonical link-tag.

This might save crawler resources for non-canonical pages:
If the crawler trusts the additional canonical link response header, it does not need to parse/handle the html response body.

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FEATURE: Send a 'canonical' link header in non-canonical responses
1aacf67 
The html response *body* already has a canonical link-tag.

This might save crawler resources for non-canonical pages:
If the crawler trusts the additional canonical link response *header*, it does not need to parse/handle the html response *body*.
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rr-it commented Mar 6, 2022

See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls?hl=en#rel-canonical-header-method

If you can configure your server, you can use a rel="canonical" HTTP header (rather than an HTML tag) to indicate the canonical URL for a document supported by Search, including non-HTML documents such as PDF files.

  • 👍 We can configure our server.
  • Does use a rel="canonical" HTTP header rather than an HTML tag emphasise a preference for the HTTP header solution?

From #11553

Googlebot handles no-index headers very elegantly. It advises to leave as many routes as possible open and uses headers for high fidelity rules regarding indexes.

Maybe Google handles canonical link headers equaly elegantly to no-index headers.

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This pull request has been mentioned on Discourse Meta. There might be relevant details there:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/send-canonical-link-header-instead-of-noindex-header/220213/1

xfalcox
xfalcox requested changes Mar 8, 2022
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It doesn't makes sense to rollback the noindex feature like this.

@xfalcox xfalcox closed this Mar 8, 2022
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rr-it commented Mar 8, 2022 •
edited

noindex is not rolled back by this change.

With and without patch and the new default SiteSetting.allow_indexing_non_canonical_urls = false

  • header noindex
  • html link-tag canonical (might be ignored)

Without patch and SiteSetting.allow_indexing_non_canonical_urls = true

  • – no header –
  • html link-tag canonical

With patch and SiteSetting.allow_indexing_non_canonical_urls = true

  • header: Link: <https://forum.example.com/t/test-example/1234>; rel="canonical"
  • html link-tag canonical (might be ignored - but anyway same as header)

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This pull request has been mentioned on Discourse Meta. There might be relevant details there:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/send-canonical-link-header-instead-of-noindex-header/220213/6

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