# SEO Problems with RSS duplicate content

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-problems-with-rss-duplicate-content/299375>\
**Category:** Support\
**Tags:** rss-polling, seo\
**Created:** [March 14, 2024, 5:40pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-problems-with-rss-duplicate-content/299375 "2024-03-14T17:40:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

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**Author:** ![simon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/simon/32/339122_2.png) [@simon](https://meta.discourse.org/u/simon)\
**Post date:** [March 15, 2024, 8:04pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-problems-with-rss-duplicate-content/299375/4 "2024-03-15T20:04:33Z")

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> [@ecki](#):
>
> I tried it but it does not complete work, it embeds a canonical URL which points to itself, not to the RSS source:

Try viewing the page source, instead of viewing it with your browser’s web inspector. I think you’ll see that the canonical URL is set to the RSS post’s URL when you view the page’s source, and set to the Discourse topic’s URL when you view the HTML with the web inspector. If that’s correct, you shouldn’t be getting duplicate content warnings for the RSS topics.

Here’s what I’m seeing (with `embed set canonical url` enabled ) when I view a topic pulled in from Discourse’s RSS feed in my web inspector:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/0/7/8/078a41b827a2a2528b3d42a63599361d1bab0bd0.png)

And here’s the canonical URL when I view the page’s source (by right-clicking on the page and selecting “View page source” from the menu):

```plaintext
<link rel="canonical" href="https://blog.discourse.org/2023/03/how-discourse-scaled-to-10m-arr-with-only-1-salesperson" />

```

The view page source version with the canonical URL correctly set is what a crawler will see.

The other way to see the difference is to use the web inspector, but select Googlebot as the user agent:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/9/a/1/9a1d9f5c693e171011d20c7da5043476addf01f0.png)

I think the setting is working as expected in terms of what crawler’s see, but it was confusing me. The issue seems to be that Discourse overwrites the canonical URL attribute with Javascript when the page is viewed with Javascript enabled. For reference, that happens here:

[https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/app/assets/javascripts/discourse/app/instance-initializers/meta-tag-updater.js#L25-L27](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/app/assets/javascripts/discourse/app/instance-initializers/meta-tag-updater.js#L25-L27)

> [@ecki](#):
>
> can/should this be set as featured link as well?

I don’t think it’s (currently) possible to have the featured link set for topics created from RSS feeds. I’m not an SEO expert, but I don’t think that setting it or not setting it would have any effect on SEO.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-problems-with-rss-duplicate-content/299375)._