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a few months ago we set up canonical URLs for many page types such as http://www.wowhead.com/item=50362/deathbringers-will. This worked very well and google picked them all up.

A few days ago I implemented the same thing for blog posts but mysteriously it's not working.

<link rel="canonical" href="/blog=174055/cataclysm-beta-patch-build-13316" />

This blog post was written after my change but google shows www.wowhead.com/blog=174055 as the URL; any reason why? I can't really figure it out, the content of the pages is the same, and it's not really any different than what we did with /item and that worked.

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Your root-relative canonical URL looks funny to me. I'm inclined to include your domain name there. Google says:

The rel="canonical" attribute can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.

I would be hesitant to judge how Google is indexing until a good amount of time has passed. How old is that url?

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it happens on all NEW blog posts, even if they are only minutes old. We use relative paths for all other page types and it has always worked. – Andreas Bonini Nov 18 '10 at 16:42
And have you tested using absolutely links for any posts? I'd say test that. – artlung Nov 18 '10 at 16:46
I didn't and it would be very complex to do; since relative URLs work for all other page types I don't see why it would be the problem =( – Andreas Bonini Nov 18 '10 at 16:56
Well, your answer to the problem is that Google is not working as expected. If you want to see if it might make a difference, you'll have to test it. :-| – artlung Nov 18 '10 at 17:27
This seems to have worked; thanks. It's still very weird because pages like wowhead.com/item=2454 use and have always used relative URLs and always worked. :S – Andreas Bonini Nov 21 '10 at 15:31
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up vote 1 down vote

Using absolute versus relative URLs and giving it a bit of time should ... er, actually does work.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Cataclysm+Beta+Patch+%28Build+13316%29

Google is presenting your canonical URL.

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