Ability to edit canonical tag on all COS pages

[adefranco]

It would be nice to be able to edit a canonical on blog pages. We have urls with and without capitals and fear that Google is seeing this as duplicate content. Hubspot supports canonicals but we need to be able to edit them.

[smileyjeno]

This is wonderful! Can't wait to try it out!

[Nciruolo]

Thanks for all of the feedback around this issue, this is now live. Details: https://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/edit-the-canonical-url-of-a-page

[gorand]

Amazing!

Thank you @hroberts! Send our greetings to the rest of HubSpot team!

[mmandel]

Thank you!!! 

[IvanSifuentes]

Thanks for the work on the pages and blogs entries.

But still missing the ability to edit it for a blog listing page, it keeps getting automatically generated and is wrong, see the example from page 2 of a live blog listing (http://blog.movegb.com/page/2😞

<link rel="prev" href="//blog.movegb.com/page/1"> <<--- page/1 exists but ideally should be without it
<link rel="next" href="//blog.movegb.com/page/3">
<link rel="canonical" href="http://blog.movegb.com">  <<--- This should be href="//blog.movegb.com/page/2

[SeanHenri]

It's great that we can now manually edit these, but they should still default to self-canonicalizing. It will be a huge pain to have to manually set these on each/every blog post, which is something that should be done if we can't have done by default.

[hroberts]

@SeanHenri thanks for bringing up that concern about the change in default behavior! Given that search engines have gotten really good at attributing canonical content, we felt setting the default as blank was the most appropriate. That way, in the event the search engine was wrong you would have canonical tags as a solution. Had we defaulted to self-canonicalize and the search engines had it wrong, the problem would be much harder to troubleshoot.

[Anonymous]

Come on guys - how can you make a sweeping change like this without doing your research? Google has explicitly recommended that all pages use self-referential canonicals. This is basic SEO 101 and has just dumped a lot of work on my lap. The ability to edit is great but pages should have a self-referential canonical by default. This is important for variants of the page that can be generated through parameters but also for content that is scraped from our sites.

From Google's John Mueller (https://youtu.be/XOGOhWyNSf8😞

“I recommend doing this self-referential canonical because it really makes it clear to us which page you want to have indexed, or what the URL should be when it is indexed.

Even if you have one page, sometimes there’s different variations of the URL that can pull that page up. For example, with parameters in the end, perhaps with upper lower case or www and non-www. All of these things can be cleaned up with a rel canonical tag.

Is my only option now to go through every web page and blog post on the site and update the canonical manually? 

[Anonymous]

Woops sorry - I think I misunderstood and thought that existing self-canonicals had been removed - that's a relief. I still do think that the default behavior should be self-referencing though, as described above. 

[Jim_B2BML]

@hroberts  Firstly, thanks for enabling this new feature - being an SEO guy primarily, the ability to edit canonical tags is a welcome addition to the HubSpot platform. 

However, I have to disagree with your comment that making blank the default setting rather than self-canonicalize was the more appropriate approach.

From a process standpoint as a partner agency, we now have to ensure every person involved in creating new website content (clients and our own team) are aware of this feature and that they input it correctly, in order to ensure canonical tags are in place on every page. There is now far resource required and more room for human error! Compare this to a single SEO needing to make edits to one or two canonical tags on the few occasions where there are two pages with the same content.

Is there any chance the feature can be edited so that we can choose between setting blank or self canonical as default? 

[emjbutler]

Agree with @Jim_B2BML. The default set to blank is a partner agency nightmare. Self-canonicalize should be the default. The ability to edit canonical is a welcome improvement, but I'm dealing with multiple publishers who do not know to manually put self-canonicalize in place or they make mistakes and mess it up. 

Can this feature be updated to default to self-canonical and option to edit it?

[Nciruolo]

Hey All,

Thanks for your feedback on this thread. Based off of your feedback and varying needs of our diverse customer set, we changed a few things that are now live for everyone.

First, HubSpot will automatically set self-referencing page and blog post canonical URLs by default, like we did before. These URLs will remain editable on a per page/post basis. Any URLs you have customized to this point will NOT be impacted by this change.

Second,  we've changed the default behavior for blog listing pages. HubSpot will not set a canonical URL by default for all blog listings pages.

Third, we added a feature in Content Settings that allows you to change the default behavior I just described. Check out the full details on the release here. https://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/edit-the-canonical-url-of-a-page

[SeanHenri]

@Nciruolo Thank you to you and the rest of the team to listening to our concerns and making this change. The new solution sounds perfect!

[emjbutler]

@Nciruolo Wonderful news! Thank you for making this update.

[DaniellePeters]

@Nciruolo The new option in Content Settings is a great improvement. However, it's slightly limited in that it's a global setting for all pages/blog posts. It would be great to be able to set that on a per blog level. We have a seperate blog for AMP posts and would like to be able to programmatically set the the canonical tags (i.e. disable this setting and then use HubL in the Head HTML) to point to the original post rather than have to set it in the post editor each time.

[dtran]

I do agree that this change is very much welcomed and is very helpful. However, I'm still running into issues with my paginated blog pages being indexed by google due to the lack of a self referencing canonical.

As @Makechu pointed out earlier in the thread, the proper mark up in a paginated series should have the proper rel="next" an rel="prev" as well as the correct rel=canonical.

Looking at my blog listing pages now, the pagination are correct but there are no canonicals showing. By doing a quick crawl, I can see that there are at least 40+ pages with duplicated H1s since it's part of a paginated series.

To make matters worse, there are other subfolders in my company website as well as topic pages with the same pagination setting which further exacerbate the duplicated content issue.

Looking at the example provided on: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/cos-blog/how-does-hubspot-address-duplicate-conte... I see that the example provided has "Add self referencing canonical URLs to all blog listing pages" but now it's been changed to "Add canonical to first page in series" even though that goes against Google's recommendation.

Would love to have any insights on this.

[prosa]

@dtran I created a tutorial on how to remove this kind of issues from Blog listing pages, Author listing pages, and tag listing pages. 

hubspot-blog-listing-canonical-issues This is my first tutorial please be kind 😛