51 lines
1.6 KiB
ReStructuredText
51 lines
1.6 KiB
ReStructuredText
Canonical URLs
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==============
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Canonical URLs allow people to have consistent page URLs for domains.
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This is mainly useful for search engines,
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so that they can send people to the correct page.
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Read the Docs uses these in two ways:
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* We point all versions of your docs at the "latest" version as canonical
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* We point at the user specified canonical URL, generally a custom domain for your docs.
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Example
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-------
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Fabric hosts their docs on Read the Docs.
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They mostly use their own domain for them ``http://docs.fabfile.org``.
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This means that Google will index both ``http://fabric-docs.readthedocs.io`` and
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``http://docs.fabfile.org`` for their documentation.
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Fabric will want to set ``http://docs.fabfile.org`` as their canonical URL.
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This means that when Google indexes ``http://fabric-docs.readthedocs.io``,
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it will know that it should really point at ``http://docs.fabfile.org``.
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Enabling
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--------
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You can set the canonical URL for your project in the Project Admin page.
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Check your :guilabel:`Admin` > :guilabel:`Domains` page for the domains that we know about.
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Implementation
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--------------
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If you look at the source code for documentation built after you set your canonical URL,
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you should see a bit of HTML like this:
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.. code-block:: html
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<link rel="canonical" href="http://pip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installing.html">
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Links
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-----
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This is a good explanation of the usage of canonical URLs in search engines:
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http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
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This is a good explanation for why canonical pages are good for SEO:
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http://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
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