Remove Canonical Link from Old Tumblr Posts

Question

I have a blog I've been hosting at Tumblr for a number of years, using a custom domain name. Let's call this example.com. I'm planning a migration off Tumblr to a server I control.

The problem I'm facing is -- even after I point example.com to my own server (where I'll have a separate blog system running), the content will still exist at Tumblr -- just at the default tumblr domain name

https://my-tumblr-username.tumblr.com

In addition to this, Tumblr inserts a canonical <link/> tag into the <head/>

<link rel="canonical" href="http://my-tumblr-username.tumblr.com/post/545364745/post-title" />

Is there a way to control this tag in Tumblr? I'd like my domain to be the canonical source, but I didn't see an obvious way to tell Tumblr to remove this link, or to have them point to my canonical domain name. It doesn't appear to be part of the Tumblr design template.

Is my only option to delete the posts from my old Tumblr site completely?

Answer 1

i would avoid using canonical. Beside of this, you could have backlinks to your tumblr site... Why not redirect them all: tumblr to the new one?

Presume your Tumblr site has urls like

http://example.tumblr.com//posts/<POST-ID>/<POST-TITLE>

and your self hosted site has urls like:

http://example.com/<POST-TITLE>

You than make redirects from Tumblr to your self hosted site page to page with meta refresh:

Insert into http://example.tumblr.com//posts/<POST-ID>/<POST-TITLE>

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url='http://example.com/{block:PermalinkPage}{block:PostSummary}{PostSummary}{/block:PostSummary}{/block:PermalinkPage}'">

This should redirect a Tumblr post page to news site post page. If there is a non-post page on Tumblr, than it will be redirected to the root, example.com.

Surely you can manually add the url of your new page.

Or do redirects with javascript, like adding to Tumblr head something like:

<script type="text/javascript">
    window.location.replace("http://example.com/new-page.html");
</script>