Canonicalifier
Canonicalifier is a Rails plugin that provides a simple way to utilize Canonical URL Standards adopted by all of the major search engines to improve recognition of duplicated URLs. This allows you to represent information in several different places without harming your search engine rank.
This gem is basically a repackaged version of the canonical-url gem to make it work with Rails 4. The original gem appears to be no longer actively maintained. The name of the gem has also been changed, mainly to make it easier to refer to different versions in discussions and to make installation easier.
Installation
Add the following line to your Gemfile:
gem 'canonicalifier'
Usage
The plugin is very simple to use and consists of a controller method and a helper. To set a canonical URL you will first need to add it into your site's layout, like so:
<html>
<head>
...
<%= canonical_link_tag %>
...
</head>
...
</html>This will automatically insert a canonical URL tag into every page of your site, defaulting to the request's current URL (it will not output anything when you have not specified a canonical URL through the controller or explicitly through the link tag). Then you can set canonical URLs in the controller as follows:
class BlogController < ApplicationController
def show
@post = find_post # assume this is a standard blog post type record
canonical_url blog_post_path(post.year, post.month, post.day, post.slug)
end
endNow no matter what the routing is that takes you to the post, the canonical URL will remain the same.
License
Parts of this gem that were taken from canonical-url are copyright © 2009 Michael Bleigh and Intridea, Inc..
Everything else, copyright © 2013 Ronny Haryanto.
See LICENSE for details.
See Also
- Specify Your Canonical from Google Webmaster Central blog.
