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How a plumber should handle canonical URLs
15 Jun 2026
How a plumber 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 plumber.
A friend of the owner at a plumber had set up canonical URLs years ago. When we audited, the config still pointed at a server they stopped paying for in 2024.
Nobody at a plumber could remember who had configured canonical URLs. The credentials were in a text file inside a folder called OLD STUFF on a shared drive.
After the move, a CSV the accountant already knows how to open broke search indexing for a plumber. Google kept serving the old pages for another nineteen days.
We have seen agencies charge a plumber for a yearly canonical URLs audit that consists of a screenshot and a paragraph. Ours is a working config file they can apply themselves.
For a plumber, the boring path won: HTTPS, a backup that we have restored once on purpose, and a calendar reminder for canonical URLs.
We found a CSV the accountant already knows how to open during a routine check of canonical URLs. The site had been leaking referrer data for six weeks before anyone noticed.
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