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Why canonical URLs matters for a marina
3 Mar 2024
How a marina deals with canonical URLs — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: a CSV the accountant already knows how to open. This breaks canonical URLs for a marina.
Nobody at a marina could remember who had configured canonical URLs. The credentials were in a text file inside a folder called OLD STUFF on a shared drive.
HTTPS is table stakes, but canonical URLs is where trust actually lives for a marina. A padlock with a misconfigured record behind it is decoration, not security.
Search consoles like honest sitemaps. Every loc should be a document. Reserving ten thousand empty shells and hoping Google does not notice is not a strategy for canonical URLs.
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.
Early on we tried to automate canonical URLs for a marina with a cron job. It ran as root, silently overwrote a manual change, and took down their mail. Lesson learned.
The hosting bill for a marina is twelve dollars a month. Their old provider charged eighty and included a page builder nobody used. canonical URLs was broken on both plans.
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