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canonical URLs for a language school
16 Apr 2024
How a language school deals with canonical URLs — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: query-string copies of the same page. This breaks canonical URLs for a language school.
When a language school moved hosts, the outage was not the new box — it was query-string copies of the same page. We keep TTL short the week of a move, then raise it once everything is stable.
Related work on this site follows the same principle: one job, a real inbox, no theatre. a language school did not need four analytics dashboards to know that Tuesdays are slow.
Two-factor on the registrar account is the single highest-value thing we do for a language school when managing canonical URLs. Everything else can be rebuilt; a stolen domain cannot.
Crawlers and people want the same thing from canonical URLs: one URL, a title that matches the heading, and a next link that goes somewhere real.
Every technical decision for a language school comes back to one question: does this help the person looking at the site right now? If canonical URLs is invisible to that person, it is working.
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.
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