Canonical Questions

[grant]

Hi All,

We have just upgraded a client of ours to SD14 and have a question about the canonical tags.

On a product page it has
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com/acatalog/This-is-the-product.html">

Looks great - but the URL seems to have other bits after it, like

http://www.domain.com/acatalog/This-...l#.VgqIbWtpXTo etc etc

What are these extra bits please?

Cheers

[UKCCSam]

The AddThis plugin is known to cause this. It's a bug.

Anything after a # in a website URL is a reference pointer, used to jump to certain areas on a page.

For example, you might have an anchor lower down a page, such as

<a id="bottom">

. If you change the url to www.website.com/page.html#bottom, it will jump down to where this anchor is. You can then use a standard HTML hyperlink or JQuery to cause this scroll.

I've found SellerDeck also uses IDs with these on some product pages (where product pages are generated as separate pages). I'm not sure why these exist though. They always have the same ID reference, and there's no anchors for them to scroll to, so they effectively do nothing.

[grant]

The AddThis plugin is known to cause this. It's a bug.

Anything after a # in a website URL is a reference pointer, used to jump to certain areas on a page.

For example, you might have an anchor lower down a page, such as

<a id="bottom">

. If you change the url to www.website.com/page.html#bottom, it will jump down to where this anchor is. You can then use a standard HTML hyperlink or JQuery to cause this scroll.

I've found SellerDeck also uses IDs with these on some product pages (where product pages are generated as separate pages). I'm not sure why these exist though. They always have the same ID reference, and there's no anchors for them to scroll to, so they effectively do nothing.

Hi UKCCSam,

Cheers for the info

Add this is not on this site, but the last bit of what you say is right. Always the same, and seemingly doing nothing.

Just a bit concerned about SEO and nice URL's etc.

The next thing for me to get my head around is the cannonical for the home page showing .html at the end - whereas both with and without show - duplicate content?

[UKCCSam]

You wouldn't need to worry about SEO optimisation. # content is ignored by Google and the other search engines. Otherwise there would be a lot more index listings for each page.

If the content after the # is something like SID=[value], this is added to the url of a single product page ("Generate a Separate Page Just for this Product" is checked) to enable the correct breadcrumb trail to be generated when the same product page is linked to from different sections. It is also added to URLs in a number of the perl scripts.

I reckoned the # content was from Add This because errors with this plugin usually cause "#." with a combination of random letters to be added to the URL. I can't think of anything else which might use this, except some broken plugin. If it isn't Add This, maybe there is another plugin affecting this.

[peblaco]

If quoting older posts it is helpful to link to the originals, for #SID see: filtering Page Name, for AddThis anchor #.Xyz see Norman's post: URL Generated with .html#*** Problem- Help Please ?.

[grant]

Hi Louise,

Cheers for the comments. I saw your thread about filtering and this site does not use it, so I think it is OK in that regard...

As for the home page bit - when you go to http://www.domain.com you get the site
The canonical ref in the header is set as http://www.domain.com/index.html where you also get the site

2 URLs and the same page showing. I know both are correct as the index.html is the home page file, just wondering if the canonical for the home page should be set to without the /index.html after the URL ??

[peblaco]

The canonical tag uses the absolute URL with extension i.e. index.html.