Setting canonical tag for front page in Drupal?

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In most of my drupal 6 sites, I use pathauto, xmlsitemap and nodewords. I like having canonical tags for all pages, as an added layer of protection against having duplicate content.

My site's front page is set to "node/31". The problem I ran into this morning was that Google had indexed "node/31" as the front page. (It was in my XML sitemap, as well as the canonical tag.) So I installed globalredirect, and so now "node/31" redirects to the "/". I also removed the home page from the xmlsitemap. I assume that google will soon remove "node/31" from its index. All is good... except that the canonical tag still shows "node/31".

I'm sure there is an easy solution here, but for some reason I just can't think what it is. The easiest solution would seemingly be to create a path alias for "node/31" to "/", but that's not possible. I also tried to set the canonical tag for the front page via admin/content/nodewords/meta-tags/frontpage but it seems to have no effect.

2
drupaldrupal-6
This question is too localized; depending on the version you are using, there could be some issues with the code. Did you try updating to the recommended version? – apaderno
It takes upto 4 months for Google to remove node/31 from its index. What's problem? Google will know pretty well that both node/31 and / contain same content so it won't use one. – AgA

2 Answers

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Try the donwords configuration, it allows for a specific front page tags, and entering tages in the node edit forms. one of this options should resolve your problem

Avner

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@kiamlaluno yeah, you're right, it's a very localized question. It's 3 questions in one, but they are all related to how different modules interact with the front page. I could have broken it up into 3 more general questions, but they all related to the aliases.

@AgA: It's all about control. I want to control the URLs that Google indexes, and I don't want duplicate content. (Also, clients just don't want to see "node/xxx" anywhere.)

I did find a solution:

  1. Remove the front page from the XML Sitemap. It will be indexed regardless.
  2. Delete any alias for the front page.
  3. In Nodewords settings, select "Use front page meta tags".

The only thing I don't like about this solution is that my site editors can no longer edit any meta tags on the node edit page. Once you select "Use front page meta tags", the only way to change them appears to be on the Nodwords admin pages.

The "Use front page meta tags" is a bit confusing, in that Nodewords was already inserting a canonical tag before I enabled this setting. Also, it's easy to enter tags at admin/content/nodewords/meta-tags/frontpage thinking they will show up on the home page, only to realize that you also have to enable "Use front page meta tags".

Problems solved.