Canonical URLs: the questions we get asked most

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. The questions about canonical URLs that come up most often on our calls.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Do we need to care about this?

Canonicals tell search engines which version is the real one. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

How do we know it is working?

Self-referencing canonicals are a safe default. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

In practice

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about canonical URLs before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Parameters and print views create duplicates quietly — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.