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RE: Canonical links of Hive posts and duplicate content

in #seo4 years ago

Canonical links can be used when the same content is available through different links. They are important for search engines:

  • indicate which link should be shown in search results
  • prevent duplicate content detection

As much as it may bode ill for my potential profits, @heimindanger is right at a certain level. The statement which you have made above is factually incorrect.

Canonical links are specifically intended to reference the most referenced content when a particular target piece is referenced from multiple places. It's a form of aliasing. (At least within the context of search engine design.)

If you write an article and it is referenced by three people, two of them on PeakD and one of them on Steemit.com, the proper canonical link should be the PeakD link. If the numbers happened to break the other way, the canonical link should be the Steemit.com link.

The real problem for your position is that the idea of canonicity doesn't make any sense for a distributed social blockchain interface. None of those postings have the blessing of canon because none of them is more authoritative than any of the others. They are all equivalent. The only thing that matters, from a user perspective, is that some of the interfaces through which they can be accessed have different feature sets – and that is not a concern for a search engine.

Trying to force canonicity on platforms you have no control over seems like an aggressive overreach. With content equivalence, none of that matters.

There's a strong argument that those who decided to aggressively split the original blockchain and reproduce the original content they had no rights to created a situation in which canonicity became meaningful to the people on the inside even as it remains unimportant to the wider world. Or, more explicitly, that the creators of Hive decided to create a situation which made it important who blessed certain content was a terrible, game breaking idea.

Search engine maintainers shouldn't have to keep up with the petty politics of every social media blockchain split that happens to make us happy. From their perspective, canonicity is where that content was originally found by link – and honestly, that's probably the best anyone can hope for.

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Thank you for your reply. I think that the content producer itself should be able to decide about the canonical link of his content.

I rewrote the introduction and I created a python script How to fix canonical URLs and links in your pre-fork posts that let the user decide which front-end and which blockchain should be set as canonical URL for their content.

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