Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs allow people to have consistent page URLs for domains. This is mainly useful for search engines, so that they can send people to the correct page.

Read the Docs uses these in two ways:

  • We point all versions of your docs at the “latest” version as canonical
  • We point at the user specified canonical URL, generally a custom domain for your docs.

Example

Fabric hosts their docs on Read the Docs. They mostly use their own domain for them http://docs.fabfile.org. This means that Google will index both http://fabric-docs.readthedocs.io and http://docs.fabfile.org for their documentation.

Fabric will want to set http://docs.fabfile.org as their canonical URL. This means that when Google indexes http://fabric-docs.readthedocs.io, it will know that it should really point at http://docs.fabfile.org.

Enabling

You can set the canonical URL for your project in the Project Admin page. Check your Domains tab for the domains that we know about.

Implementation

If you look at the source code for documentation built after you set your canonical URL, you should see a bit of HTML like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://pip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installing.html">