Need help calling variables

DrByte:

There's no need to wait before applying that confirmed bugfix.

You want to be sure that the canonical links it's generating are the ones you want it to produce.
I'll state it this way: The next time google crawls, it will be told about whatever canonical links you're generating, and will take action accordingly.

The downside is that if it's generating canonical links that you don't want it to generate, it will rearrange its index the way you don't want it, and if you need to change something you'll have to wait for it to re-index again before it will fix whatever you want fixed, and it may take time for it to rebuild things the way you want them.

There are many rags/blogs that suggest not to just go throwing canonical urls onto pages without first verifying that it's doing what you want for your site.
There are many more that go on to say that they recommend not excluding sort or page number parameters, but then there are those that do.
The only consistent thing you'll find is that nobody really seems to know for sure. Even google doesn't spell it out exactly, but they usually don't anyway.
Hence my disclaimer.

Thanks Doc,

Not worried about sorts and page numbers, I have noindex follow on all of them now as I was getting hundreds of indexed pages with the same titles and descriptions.

Gonna give the fix and the code a blast now. I'll let you know how I get on :o)

Thanks for all your valued help

Phil

I LOVE YOU DR BYTE!

Its working perfectly now.. Going to shoot around my site a bit more to treble check but all pages are passing what I expect, though I have noticed that some products seem to have swapped their master cat ids somewhere along the line doh, but hey, happy to go over and fix that over time...

Thanks again for pointing out the code for me

:clap:

Dr Byte,

Just need to check something with you as I am not completely sure if it correct now.

The code you gave me add the canonical link tag to all products. Is that right?

so for example
duplicate
http://www.example.com/test-page
has: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/test" />

and

main
http://www.example.com/test
has: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/test" />

Is that right? I read here http://googlewebmastercentral.##########################/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html that the link goes on the duplicate content pages, however in their example they do the same as above. Just want it clarified before I leave it any longer.

Look forward to hearing back from you

Phil

philip937:

Dr Byte,

Just need to check something with you as I am not completely sure if it correct now.

The code you gave me add the canonical link tag to all products. Is that right?

so for example
duplicate
http://www.example.com/test-page
has: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/test" />

and

main
http://www.example.com/test
has: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/test" />

Is that right? I read here http://googlewebmastercentral.##########################/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html that the link goes on the duplicate content pages, however in their example they do the same as above. Just want it clarified before I leave it any longer.

Look forward to hearing back from you

Phil

sorry, forgot to add:

but a product that is not linked also is like this
http://www.example.com/notlinked
has: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/notlinked" />

philip937:

The code you gave me add the canonical link tag to all products. Is that right?
Some people advise that you only need the canonical link information on non-canonical pages. However, I've been using it on every page since Google introduced it and I've never had a problem.

Regards,
Christian.

I shall follow your lead then :o)

Thanks for the clarification Christian

Hi Christian,

Is it good practice to have a canonical link on the homepage?

something like the following in tpl_header.php ?

<?php
  if ($this_is_home_page) {
echo '<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.co.uk/" />';
  }
?>

There's no need for it. I recommend keeping it simple. Otherwise later when you want to change things you'll have too many things to consider, or remember, and could cause yourself troubles.