Tutorial

Canonical Link Tag in Jekyll

Published on May 18, 2016
Default avatar

By Alligator.io

Canonical Link Tag in Jekyll

While we believe that this content benefits our community, we have not yet thoroughly reviewed it. If you have any suggestions for improvements, please let us know by clicking the “report an issue“ button at the bottom of the tutorial.

Canonical tags tell search engines the URL for the original content of a page. A popular and effective use of canonical tags is to set them on every page to make it clear which version is the primary one. For example, is it https://yoursite.com/page or is it http://www.yoursite.com/page/? Things like www, https or trailing / can all be seen as different versions, so it’s important for SEO purposes to tell search engines which version is the right version. Given that your website’s URL is properly defined in your _config.yml file, just insert the following in your header/head layout:

<link rel="canonical" href="{{ site.url }}{{ page.url | replace:'index.html',''}}">

As you can see, it’s fairly easy to insert a canonical tag for every page of your Jekyll website by using some simple liquid syntax. The | replace:‘index.html’,‘’ part just ensures that your homepage doesn’t come up as index.html.

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about us


About the authors
Default avatar
Alligator.io

author

Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 
1 Comments


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

I have also research Update on Canonical Link Tag: Currently, Jekyll-SEO-tag merges site URL with page URL and generates the final canonical URL. If for a specific page canonical_url is explicitly defined by the user, we can assign the URL to the canonical URL otherwise use default generated URL.

Here is my implementation:

# drop.rb
def canonical_url
  @canonical_url ||= begin
    if page["canonical_url"].present?
      page["canonical_url"].to_s.gsub(%r!/index\.html$!, "/")
    else
      filters.absolute_url(page["url"]).to_s.gsub(%r!/index\.html$!, "/")
    end
  end
end

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Join the Tech Talk
Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

Please complete your information!

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel