I’m wondering if there’s a way to remove canonical links entirely from a Discourse forum. I’m referring to the /2, /3, /4, etc extensions that show up for each topic URL as a user scrolls down the page. I would like to have every reply within a topic simply refer to the original URL (not redirectin…

This has come up a little bit before: Google indexing same page multiple times: Issue with canonicals [image] SethWilliams: When Google indexes a lot of extra pages and these pages don’t get much activity, it tells Google that the domain as a whole has a lot of low-quality URLs and it hurts the…

This has come up a little bit before: Google indexing same page multiple times: Issue with canonicals If I’m following this conversation correctly, this seems to be referring to a slightly different issue than what I’m talking about above. It’s not a problem to create multiple canonical URLs for…

Good to know. Sounds like a big step in the right direction. For what it’s worth, we’ve actually seen some instances in our current forum (back when it was still public) where we had added the robots.txt file to certain subfolders of our forum, and Google was crawling them anyway. I believe this is…

[image] SethWilliams: added the robots.txt file to certain subfolders of our forum, and Google was crawling them anyway . Yes, that way we will be using the header tag instead of putting those in the robots.txt file.

I am not sure I understand what is happening here. [image] SethWilliams: It’s not a problem to create multiple canonical URLs for a topic if they’re grouped by 20 replies at a time and have unique meta descriptions (page=2, page=3, etc). The problem is when a new URL is created for every indivi…

[image] RGJ: But why is this happening? That page does have a correct canonical URL. I don’t know. My wild guess is that those links appear elsewhere in the wild so those are the ones that get indexed?

[image] pfaffman: so those are the ones that get indexed? Canonical is there to prevent that from happening. At least - in theory.

[image] RGJ: But why is this happening? That page does have a correct canonical URL. I had a lengthy discussion about this with a blog-centric community here in Brazil that uses Discourse, and it’s what pushed me to try this new approach by sending the noindex header for those post specific p…

But why is this happening? That page does have a correct canonical URL. Exactly. It shouldn’t be happening (in theory) but it does, and as we experienced with our site, it really will do some damage to the health score of a domain, which can eventually have a big negative impact on the entire dom…

Removing the /2, /3, /4, etc links for each reply within a topic URL

Development

Falco (Falco) November 19, 2021, 4:56pm 5

Worth noting that it’s in our roadmap to add a X-Robots-Tag: noindex header to the response payload of those pages.

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Removing the /2, /3, /4, etc links for each reply within a topic URL

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