Canonical URLs, and MODx Link Tags

There is an SEO issue around "Canonical URLs". Basically, on a website, the can be many variant URLs that will lead to the same content. SEO’s often use .htaccess to clean up these issues, ie:

http://example.com
http://example.com/index.html
http://www.example.com/index.html

all 301 redirected to
http://www.example.com/

I have found in the past that programmers not familiar with SEO don’t understand the point of this, so further information, recently published showing it is still an issue, can be found here straight from Google: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/03/good-housekeeping.html
...and here from SEOmoz, a leading SEO website, for those interested:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet

Now, I can use .htaccess with my MODx sites of course. But in particular, I have noticed that using MODx link tags (eg - [~2~]) for links back to the home page will always go to the alias ( http://www.example.com/index/ ) instead of the root (http://www/example.com/ ).

By default, Wayfinder does not do this - when it links to the home page, it inserts the full URL without the page alias ( http://www.example.com/ ).

Is there a way to have MODx tags function like Wayfinder when linking to the homepage, so I am not *required* to redirect www.example.com/index/ to www.example.com/ ?

URLs in 0.9.7 have been made fully canonical; your link tags will only be accessible through the proper URL’s with configurable file extensions and container extensions (i.e. you can define a container suffix as / or /index.html, etc.). To do this in current releases would require some significant effort, but you might take a look at how the SEOStrict add-on handles this.

Quote from: OpenGeek at May 02, 2008, 08:43 AM

URLs in 0.9.7 have been made fully canonical; your link tags will only be accessible through the proper URL’s with configurable file extensions and container extensions (i.e. you can define a container suffix as / or /index.html, etc.). To do this in current releases would require some significant effort, but you might take a look at how the SEOStrict add-on handles this.

hmm, so when is 0.9.7 coming out .

But seriously, for my specific problem, I would just rather do the one fix for the homepage in the .htaccess then.

But, you just alerted me now to a related MODx issue that I guess SEO Strict was made to address: that even though my document 33 has an alias of "about" and no suffix, as I want my URL structure to be:
www.example.com/about

...the same content is available at all the following URLs:
www.example.com/about/
www.example.com/33
www.example.com/33/

This is not quite the same issue as the usual dynamic URL problems and duplicate content that other CMS’s have, as the problem is less whether such content exists theoretically, and more whether these alternate URLs are used as links in practice - using MODx tags for links basically prevents that. Still, I better get SEO Strict on my site to make it more "foolproof" for SEO. Thanks for the heads up.