Tagged “canonicals”
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When Google Canonicalises Two Unrelated Pages Together
A Google-selected canonical from a different section usually means two pages share an identifier or a pre-render state. Here's how to find which one.
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One robots.txt Per Host, Not Per Folder
A crawler fetches exactly one robots.txt per host, at the root. A file your CMS serves under /blog/ is inert — and the root rules still apply to /blog/.
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Moving Content Between a Subdomain and a Subdirectory
What actually changes when blog.example.com becomes example.com/blog: host boundaries, robots and sitemap scope, redirect mapping, and geo signals.
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Why an SEO Tool Might Report a Different Status Code Than Your Browser
The same URL, checked two ways, can legitimately return two different status codes. Why that happens and which one to trust for which question.
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Cross-Domain Canonicals and When They Hold
A canonical tag can point at another hostname. What has to be true for that to be honoured, and the six ways it quietly gets ignored.
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Keeping a Staging Host Out of the Index
Why noindex and Disallow both fail on a staging site, why 401 settles it, and how to clean up a staging host that is already indexed.
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Vary, Content Negotiation, and One URL Serving Two Pages
When a single URL returns different content per request, Vary is what tells caches and crawlers which version they are holding.
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Canonical Tags Are a Hint, Not a Command
Why search engines ignore canonicals, which signals outvote them, and how to make your declared canonical the one that gets picked.
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Robots.txt Cannot Deindex a Page
Disallow controls crawling, not indexing. Why blocked URLs still appear in results, and why blocking hides the noindex that would have worked.
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Hreflang and the Return-Tag Requirement
Hreflang only works when every page in a cluster points back at every other. Why one-directional annotations are ignored, and how the sets break.
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X-Robots-Tag and Files With No Head Element
A meta robots tag needs HTML. PDFs, images and feeds have none. How the header version works, and how it combines with the tag on the same URL.
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Canonical, Redirect, or Noindex: Picking the Right One
Three tools for three different problems, routinely swapped for each other. A decision path based on what you want to happen to users and signals.
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Query Parameters That Multiply Your URL Count
Tracking, sorting and session parameters each create a distinct URL. How to tell which ones need a canonical, a Disallow, or removing entirely.
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Faceted Navigation and the Crawl Space It Opens
Five filters with four options each is a combinatorial URL space. How to decide which combinations get paths, which get blocked, and which get no links.
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Pagination Without rel=next and rel=prev
Google stopped using the pagination link elements. What replaced them: crawlable links, self-canonicals per page, and no canonical to page one.