Canonical URLs for small teams

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. Most advice about canonical URLs assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What to keep

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. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

What good looks like

Self-referencing canonicals are a safe default. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

In practice

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.