What to ask your agency about canonical URLs
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on canonical URLs, these questions are worth asking early.
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Canonicals tell search engines which version is the real one. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
Self-referencing canonicals are a safe default. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
The short version
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about canonical URLs before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Self-referencing canonicals are a safe default — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.