"Canonical" problem

[Ed Hawco]

(V3 premium pack.)

I just ran a check with Xenu, looking for link rot, and the thing blew up with hundreds of broken links. After digging around I found out they're all connected to the "Canonical" tag -- which I had not heard of before. This is set in the General Settings>HREF_HELPURL variable.

I do have the top level domain in that variable, but I manage approximately 40 Help projects, and they all have unique directories under the top level domain. There is no way I'm going to run 40 different skins just so I can have non-broken canonical tags! Particularly since I don't care about search engines -- nobody arrives at our documentation via search engines. In fact we actively discourage it.

So what's my best option?

(a) Leave it as is, even though it blows up Xenu.

(b) Leave this variable blank. (Will that still blow up Xenu?)


Also, is there any other potential harm I should know about by leaving this broken?

[Tim Green]

Hi Ed,

In this situation, just remove the canonical tag from your skin. Edit the HTML page template and delete this line:

Code: Select all

<link rel="canonical" href="<%HREF_HELPURL%><%HREF_CURRENT_PAGE%>" />