CODEWITHSUNDEEP
urlpathseofacebook-opengraph
Victor
Victor

Reputation: 23972

Different canonical URLs for Facebook and Google?

The following URLs point to the same resource:

  1. http://www.domain.com/books/123

  2. http://www.domain.com/books/123-Harry-Potter

  3. http://www.domain.com/books/123-Harry-Potter-And-The-Deathly-Hallows

I would like to use (1) as the canonical URL for OpenGraph/Facebook, so if you "like" (2) and (3) then will count for (1).

But I would like to use (3) as the canonical URL for Google, because of SEO.

Is this recommended?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1205

Answers (2)

reactorr
reactorr

Reputation: 11

choose one main, create 301 the rest

Upvotes: 0

Nathan Buggia
Nathan Buggia

Reputation: 934

Hey Victor, that's a great question. As social media becomes more important it is going to be interesting to see how its technical requirements might start to clash with other thing like SEO.

From an SEO standpoint, it is pretty common for a website to have multiple URLs that point to a single page of unique content. Generally this is due to extra query parameters or some type of domain canonicalization issue (e.g. www vs. non-www). The best way to handle this whould be to use the rel=canonical tag at the top of your pages, and Google/Bing will treat that as a 301 redirect to the canonical URL. The search engines will index all 3 URLs, but through the 301 redirect, they will merge rank of the other 2 into your canonical page, and you will achieve your search objective. 

<html>
   <head>
      <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com/books/123-Harry-Potter-And-The-Deathly-Hallows" />
   </head>
</html>

Here's google's description of the Rel Canonical feature: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

From a user's perspective on a search engine, this seems like a good experience, so I don't think you'll experience any issues from the search engine (e.g. I don't completely agree with @Jan Hančič), but you might want to double check the quality standards for the Facebook like feature (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph). This seems to be a grey area from their best practices.

Good luck!

Upvotes: 2

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