Defining a canonical URL tag for an article

In Soapbox, you have the ability to define a canonical URL tag for a given article. Canonical URLs can be defined in the HTML header for a page and signal to search engines the master or preferred URL for content. This is helpful for search engine optimization particularly when there are multiple URLs that may be accessing a single content item.

For instance, you may have a blog with a menu item showing all articles in a given Category, a news module showing the latest articles in the Section that contains the blog Category, and Taxonomy terms applied to blog articles that hyperlink to terms pages. One article could be accessed in all of these different ways. Setting a canonical URL can help manage this from an SEO perspective.

To define a canonical URL for an article:

• Open the Article Manager
• Open the add/edit Article view for the article whose canonical URL you wish to define
• Click the Canonical URL module heading to expand the module
• For Canonical URL Type, select one of the following:
  • None: No canonical URL will be explicitly set for this article.
  • Automatic: Soapbox will explicitly set the URL of the page as the canonical URL
  • Manual: A URL you specific will be used to explicitly set the canonical URL for this article.
• If you chose Manual for Canonical URL Type, enter the full URL you wish to use as the canonical URL for this article (e..g., https://www.someorg.org/blog/great-article-url)
• Click Save