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A practical look at canonical URLs for a dental office
30 Jul 2024
How a dental office deals with canonical URLs — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: a www record that disagrees with the apex. This breaks canonical URLs for a dental office.
The chain of trust for canonical URLs starts at the registrar. If the registrar account uses an email nobody reads, every downstream fix is temporary.
a dental office asked us to look at canonical URLs after a customer screenshot showed a browser warning. The fix took eleven minutes; finding the cause took two hours.
Most of the damage we see in canonical URLs comes from doing too much. A single correct record beats three that were supposed to be clever.
We quoted a dental office half what the other firm did because we did not propose features they did not ask for. The scope was canonical URLs, not a rebrand.
Early on we tried to automate canonical URLs for a dental office with a cron job. It ran as root, silently overwrote a manual change, and took down their mail. Lesson learned.
When we onboard a dental office, the first thing we check is canonical URLs. It tells us more about the previous provider than any sales call.
The vendor portal had silently rotated the key for canonical URLs, but a dental office was still using the old one. Every outbound message bounced quietly.
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