canonical support

[steadyoptions]

Hello all,

My blog includes mix of original and re posted articles (from other blogs or websites).

My SEO company warned me that re posted articles can hurt my site rankings - unless I link to the original article and use rel=canonical.

How can I add rel=canonical tag to the link I include in the article?

Thanks!

[Dll]

I'd have thought you could do this with the meta tag editor (under seo in the acp). 

[steadyoptions]

Would you mind to tell me how to do it?

[bfarber]

Launch the meta tag live editor from the AdminCP and then visit the individual pages you want to add the meta tag to. You will be able to from the special sidebar that shows.

[steadyoptions]

But rel=canonical is not meta tag. All I want is to add the following line:

<link rel="canonical" href="original article url">

[Joy Rex]

The problem is you don't want to hard-code this (e.g., make all hrefs contain the rel="canonical" attribute in them), since you'll have regular hrefs that you obviously don't need that for.

Ideally, the insert link dialog would need extra attributes to be able to choose whether a link needs that attribute or not.

Even CKEditor itself doesn't have such an attribute as an option or as an addon.

You could use jQuery to add the rel="canonical" to any hyperlinks that don't match your domain... however on a page or data set with potentially hundreds of links, there might be performance issues.

[steadyoptions]

This is a bit too technical for me. I also just found out that if page includes more than one canonical, Google is likely to ignore both. Since all articles already include canonical to itself (generated automatically by IPS), adding another canonical might not be a good idea.

Can anyone suggest a solution what to do when I re post an article from another website on my blog? Or is it not an issue at all?

[Optic14]

@steadyoptions rel=canonical makes sense for forums because each post can be linked to individually, e.g.

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/446437-canonical-support/?do=findComment&comment=2748548

You don't really want all those URL parameters for each post shown in Google search results so rel=canonical is set for the first post as a strong signal as the one you want indexed...

<link rel="canonical" href="https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/446437-canonical-support/" />

And for pagination you have rel=next and rel=prev.

 

As for your use case on re-publishing an external blog article and wanting to override rel=canonical, not possible out of the box... again rel=canonical is there because on blog posts you have pagination from comments. 

I personally wouldn't worry about it, as long as you include a link back to the original article/author and include your own summary/opinion about it.

[steadyoptions]

Thank you everyone for your valuable input!