I'm not sure this was always the case. This blog post explains how to add canonical links pointing to a new site, but when I tried it I discovered that Google has done something that leaves an extra canonical tag in the header. If you look at the template in Blogger, you won't see any reference to "canonical" but if you check the source code it turns up, and points to the URL of the source code.
Why does Google do this? I don't know. But I know how the canonical code is getting added, via this bit of code in the template:
<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
The result for me: after manually adding another bit of code to add a canonical link to a new wordpress blog, I found that the resulting blogspot page now has two canonical links: One pointing to my new wordpress blog page, and one to the original blog page on blogger. This surely is a big no-no to Google, and might have a detrimental effect on ranking if the algorithm thinks I am trying to confuse it for illicit means.
I am tempted to delete
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| Blogger settings page |
I had the same problem and was very annoyed too! I found http://www.growingwiththeweb.com/2013/12/how-to-remove-default-blogger-assets.html which suggested an idea to me: I put in style tags around the b:include as below, and then I copied back in the lines from the head-content that I wanted, but changed the href associated with rel="canonical".
ReplyDeleteCode sample below, but not sure it'll display (or look at the article I reference, except I needed 2 closing style tags instead of 1.)
< style type="text/css" > /* < style>
< b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
< /style>*/ < /style>
(Replace the < and > with < and >, of course, and format properly - as mentioned, I was having trouble displaying this code snippet.)
I should add that someone who spends a lot of time writing about the inner workings of blogger thinks that a technique like this could encourage Google to suspend the blog as spam. (See http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2013/03/some-blogger-blogs-being-locked-as.html which is a nice list of things not to do to your blogspot blog unless you want to look like you belong to a spam farm. Monkeying with blogspot's own rel=canonical tag is third on the list.) By that logic, one is just stuck with one's blogspot and needs to make the best of it (here's another post by the same author about how "Blogger blogs cannot be used as gateways," http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2013/04/blogger-blogs-cannot-be-used-as-gateways.html ).
ReplyDeleteI did take that code sample down off my own blog since I'm not 100% certain it was working.