Table of Contents

About

A canonical is a short unique path identifier for a page on your website.

Usage

The canonical is used to create a named permalink in order to get quickly to a page without knowing its full path

Example:

https://yourdomain.com/your/canonical

Canonical Url

The canonical path can be used as path in the canonical url.

Tracking Metrics

The canonical path can be used in your tracking metrics in order to aggregate the page view even if the page:

  • is accessed via different url
  • or has moved

You can:

Value

The canonical path should have a meaning and be understandable by humans.

The canonical value:

  • should be unique for all pages of your website (ie domain).
  • should be written as wiki path (ie with a : semi-colon as path separator)
  • does not need to be the page path
  • is always lowercase

Demo

This page has the canonical value set to canonical and therefore is also available at the following named permalink. https://combostrap.com/canonical

You can try it your self.

Navigate to this page via its canonical URL !

or

Navigate to this page via its standard URL !

How to set the canonical value ?

Manually

To set the canonical value, uses the metadata manager and set the canonical property in a wiki path format (ie the path separator should be a colon)

Example:

my:path

Automatically

You can also create a canonical value based on the last parts of a page path. See Automatic Canonical Path

Javascript Example

If you want to retrieve the canonical value to add it to your tracking_metrics, you can access it via the JSINFO javascript variable.

Example:

console.log(`The canonical for this page is '${window.parent.JSINFO["canonical"]}'`);

Configuration

Google Analytics

You can send the canonical path as page identifier to Google Analytics.

For further information, see the Google Analytics Pageview section