Option to specify canonical url

[donovanglover]

Feature Request

Summary

Use <meta rel="canonical"> for SEO on all pages.

Motivation

An option is useful when a site is deployed to multiple domains and one domain is preferred

Detailed Description

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls

Additional Context

https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-rel-canonical-seo-value-cross-posted-content
https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/

[welpo]

This would only make sense as a page.extra variable, right? I.e. in individual posts but not on config.toml or sections.

[donovanglover]

Personally I would only use config.toml since I have multiple domains and one does better in search results. So https://example.link/ has canonical URLs to https://betterforseo.com/.

page.extra could be useful for one-time things though.

[welpo]

From my reading, I understood the canonical tag is intended to specify the authoritative version of each individual page, so it needs to match the content and context of that specific page.

If that's correct, setting a single URL for all pages on a site would not be appropriate.

Would you expect the canonical URL to be smart? For example, to set a base_canonical_url on config.toml and have it match the base_url content. In this case, example.com/post1 would match to example.es/post1.

[donovanglover]

That's correct.

[welpo]

I'll add the option to pages, sections and config.toml, with a warning in comments as to the "content needs to really match" issue.

[welpo]

@donovanglover would you like to test the feature on the branch feat/custom-canonical-url?

[donovanglover]

Would love to try it out! Should be able to test it sometime this weekend

[donovanglover]

Seems to work for me, thanks!

[welpo]

Thanks for testing! The feature is now live, following PR #168.