Yes, that’s a solution for Google that can be used in case the software does not use a canonical URL.
But I see this as a last resort and a means to fix up an issue with a site. I would indeed require fixing it on an individual basis and it does not solve the ?blablah issue. And… you do know that Google is not the only search engine, right?
It’s about people changing their hostname or domain name and after three months they find out that search engines picked up that change perfectly except for their home page, which is now twice in the search engine index.
I’m a bit confused here since the necessity seems very clear to me. I see this topic has even been reclassified as a feature, while I’m convinced that the code path for the home page just forgets to call canonical_url …
Not encouraging, but supporting it would be desirable.
One specific example where this would be handy is to have a soft launch of a rebranding, where you want to communicate the new URL to search engines before communicating it to the customers.
(Real life example)
Another thing is that a third party can cause a search engine issue by causing duplicate content issues by linking to your home page with arbitrary parameters.
This is caught on every page of a Discourse installation except for the home page - because of the fact that the call to canonical_url is just omitted there. I would make a pull request if I was able to determine the exact code path for the home page…
Ya, this happens. I can confirm this. Another reason, why we may like to have canonical for the Homepage is the permalink /latest and / shows and index duplicate content.
Similarly, I have been trying hard to noindex via GTM but yet I’ve not been able to see effect.