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On my staging subdomain I want to make the canonical URL for each page the URL of the page on my main site. My CMS is WordPress.
I want to do this so that if Google crawls my staging site I won't risk pages on my main site losing rankings because of duplicate content.
Ex: on staging.example.com
<link rel="canonical" href="example.com/{the-page}" />
Canonical URLs on my website are being set with the Yoast SEO Wordpress Plugin.
How can I accomplish this?
In your WordPress site's functions.php add the following filter.
add_filter( 'wpseo_canonical', function( $canonical ) {
return str_replace( 'staging.example.com', 'example.com', $canonical );
} );
This will catch the variable that Yoast sets for the canonical URL and swap out your staging domain for the primary domain.
This method will work across domains too, you can enter anything you like in replace of example.com but must be inside single quotes.
If you'd like a solution that supresses the Yoast SEO canonical, and and accomplishes this with a universal PHP solution see this answer.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com<?php echo $url=strtok($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"],'?');?>"> per the other answer...which actually makes that a better solution...for now
Aug 26, 2021 at 22:59
no-indexwas was set as well?noindexbecause I try to keep my staging server and my live site as much the same as possible. I try to avoidif (staging){...because I find it error-prone. That especially goes for things that aren't immediately obvious and visible such as meta tags. I was just using canonical tags because those tags would be identical on the staging and live servers with my domain name hardcoded in them.