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Why canonical URLs matters for a garage
23 Dec 2025
How a garage 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 garage.
Automate canonical URLs if you can. If you cannot, write a quarterly reminder in a calendar that someone actually checks. a www record that disagrees with the apex is what happens when nobody does either.
When a garage moved hosts, the outage was not the new box — it was a www record that disagrees with the apex. We keep TTL short the week of a move, then raise it once everything is stable.
We document canonical URLs in a shared spreadsheet. It is not glamorous, but a garage can open it on their phone at midnight if something breaks.
Instead of migrating canonical URLs all at once, we ran both configurations in parallel for a week. The switch happened on a Wednesday morning — the quietest traffic window.
The vendor portal had silently rotated the key for canonical URLs, but a garage was still using the old one. Every outbound message bounced quietly.
We keep a playbook for canonical URLs. Step one is always the same: pull the live record with dig, compare it to what the admin panel shows, and fix the mismatch.
If you only touch canonical URLs once a year, a dashboard is extra risk. Files, a mailbox you read, and a person who still answers will outlast any SaaS control panel.
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