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canonical URLs: a field note from a small hotel
13 Jun 2024
How a small hotel 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 small hotel.
The registrar dashboard crashed twice while we were fixing canonical URLs for a small hotel. We filed a ticket; they replied four days later with a template answer.
The real issue was not canonical URLs itself — it was a www record that disagrees with the apex. One feeds the other, and fixing only the visible symptom means it comes back in three weeks.
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.
We solved canonical URLs for a small hotel by moving it behind a reverse proxy. The old configuration stayed live as a fallback for forty-eight hours, then we pulled it.
Related work on this site follows the same principle: one job, a real inbox, no theatre. a small hotel did not need four analytics dashboards to know that Tuesdays are slow.
We hand over a one-page document after every canonical URLs job. It says what was changed, what the login is, and what to check if something feels wrong. a small hotel keeps it in a drawer they actually open.
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