Rel="canonical" Test
January 24, 2009 Author: Adam Lee
OK i’ve started to run a test on this Rel=”canonical” code to see if and how it works.
I have created two pages – test.html and landingpage.html. I have linked to the ‘test.html’ so it will get indexed with the term ‘leeski testski’.The test.html page has the rel=canonical code linking to landingpage.html, with no other page linking to the landingpage.html.
No if this code works then the landingpage.html should get indexed when the test.html gets indexed. The test.html page is now indexed but the landingpage.html isn’t – so that hasn’t worked.
The second thing that should happen is Google should not rank the test.html page, as in-theory they shouldn’t be indexing it. When i search for ‘leeski testski’ the test page ranks – so that doesn’t work either.
So what’s wrong??
The code i have used is – link rel=”canonical” href=”landingpage.html” /
First thing that stands out is that it’s a relative link but Google Webmaster Blog says:
Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as link rel=”canonical” href=”product.php?item=swedish-fish” / ?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the link tag. Also, if you include a base link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.
So that tends to mean it should work – but to make sure i have changed it to an absolute URL.
Another reason could be that both pages need to already be indexed? This is just an idea but would make sense, i mean if it is duplicate content then Google should have found both of them already. Will test this idea later once i am sure the absolute URL isn’t the issue.
Let me know your thoughts.
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February 24th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
[...] and again noticed my posted getting indexed daily, in some cases immediately! My recent post about rel=”canonical” was indexed at 17.23 more or less a couple of minutes after i published it! It was indexed so [...]