November 18, 2020 at 4:08 am
I post on here via my RSS feed. In reviewing the source for the page I noticed the canonical URL is set to the SQLserverCentral website. The canonical URL pointing to my original post is how Google analytics lets me know how many views I've had. Only recently learned about this because Dev.to allows that to be set in the front matter.
Is it possible to get the canonical URL to reflect the original website so that the view counts will correctly show up in my website analytics? Without that, a large portion of the views of actually had never show up. Thanks!
November 18, 2020 at 4:19 pm
Not sure what you mean, Sheldon. You provided us a URL for the feed, we import the feed here and display it. Are you looking for some redirect, or some other type of URL on our side? Can you provide an example?
November 20, 2020 at 1:33 am
Appreciate the quick follow-up.
Here's two posts related to this:
[Syndication](https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-step-by-step-guide-to-syndicating-content-without-screwing-up-your-seo/)
search for the phrase: Method #1: rel=canonical tag and you'll see the details there.
[Canonical_url section](https://dev.to/laurieontech/a-primer-on-seo-49n1)
The idea, I believe, is that as a blogger, I'm syndicating my content to sqlservercentral and it's be scrapped, great! However, once that is pulled all the google analytics hits on the page don't reflect in that page's metrics because there is no link to the "original appeared on" page it's pulled from. Medium, lifehacker and others support this with the canonical tag to ensure the original source content is properly linked for analytics.
Does that make sense?
I'm not trying to complain, just bring this up as I realized in reviewing the page source that this wasn't the current link and as a result, I realized I've actually had a much higher view count on some articles, but have little way to get insight into this because it's not really linked once it's pulled into this site.
Let me know what you think. cheers
November 20, 2020 at 1:38 am
One last quick thing.
Compare the source here: Dev.to - Influxdb
You'll see this in the header
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.sheldonhull.com/blog/quick-start-to-using-influxdb-on-macos/">
That's in contrast to the feed here where it shows
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/quick-start-to-using-influxdb-on-macos">
November 20, 2020 at 2:01 am
That helps. I'll file a ticket to see if we can change this.
December 6, 2020 at 6:15 pm
Bump. ??
Wondering if any progress update?
It's not super critical, but once I learned about this it made me realize be really nice to have those metrics on my site to let me know how much actual activity I'm getting on an article across the different syndicated posts.
Appreciate it!
December 7, 2020 at 4:53 pm
No update for now. I lost my resources for a few weeks to some other high priority items. I do have a few more important items in the issue list, but I suspect this one won't take a lot of time. I'll ping the pm.
December 17, 2020 at 3:22 pm
This should be live now. Perhaps, Sheldon, you want to test with a new post? And maybe write me an article to compare 😉
January 8, 2021 at 2:57 am
I just looked and it looks great now!
In fact, I saw an older post and looked and it's also showing the same value, so I think any future reads on that would also be correct.
Really appreciate you knocking that out. Cheers!
January 8, 2021 at 6:51 pm
cheers
April 18, 2023 at 2:15 pm
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April 18, 2023 at 2:15 pm
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