# Do topic links need to redirect to the canonical URL?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/do-topic-links-need-to-redirect-to-the-canonical-url/126972>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Created:** [August 27, 2019, 9:40pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/do-topic-links-need-to-redirect-to-the-canonical-url/126972 "2019-08-27T21:40:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![seanblue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/dc4da7/32.png) [@seanblue](https://meta.discourse.org/u/seanblue)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2019, 12:19am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/do-topic-links-need-to-redirect-to-the-canonical-url/126972/3 "2019-08-30T00:19:57Z")

</div>

Ah, search engine indexing does seem like a big deal. That never even crossed my mind. I was just doing [some reading](https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/) on `rel="canonical"` since I’d never seen that before, and it certainly is interesting. It seems like this is a valid “workaround” of sorts if you can’t / don’t want to redirect, so maybe that’s why Amazon doesn’t get penalized much (besides their size).

For Discourse, I imagine it could be difficult to use effectively (assuming you even wanted to) since each post has its own URL and theoretically should be separately indexed.

Anyway, thanks for the explanation. 🙂

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/do-topic-links-need-to-redirect-to-the-canonical-url/126972)._