QUESTION GSCANONICAL

[shawn_a]

What exactly is the point of
GSCANONICAL ?

[n00dles101]

Never used it but I think it ensures that pages redirect to the correct parent/page.

So if I have

subpages/page1

I can get to that page using
/page1
/subpages/page1

GSCANONICAL redirects /page1 to /subpages/page1 if true

EDIT: if full headers are displayed in get_header() canonical will be set to /parent/page


I think... twas before my time... 8)

[shawn_a]

From what I understand it redirects all page loads to parent/slug if they are accessed via slug only ( which works of course as we do no enforcing of permalink structures ), slugs are always accessible at end of paths.

Why does it say use with caution ? SEO problems ?

[shawn_a]

heh missed your answer

[Carlos]

GSCANONICAL enforces (with redirect) the site's permalink structure (custom or not)
E.g. if you have default fancy url's,
SITE/parent/page
SITE/page
SITE/?id=page
are all redirected to:
SITE/parent/page/

This has trouble with many plugins that use one page with URL parameters.

[shawn_a]

That is what I was thinking, I was going to edit its description to say "Enforces"since that is kind of what it does.

so...

EDIT:Actually it works fine with it off, find_url takes care of it.nm

Does it need to readd querystrings ?

Does anyone use this ? Does it need to exist ?

[Carlos]

Yes, I think there are people using this setting. Of course only in simple "static" sites that don't use plugins like I18N, I18N Gallery/Search/..., News Manager, GS Blog (and much more)...

[shawn_a]

Just wondering if it should be a plugin and removed from core.

[Carlos]

Looks like a good idea to me.

[yojoe]

I opt for leaving gscanonical as a core function.
If Carlos didn't mention that it also redirects I wouldn't guess that slugs are no more available under /anyparent/slug URI
If disabling gsc disables also redirects, and there's no other function who takes care about duplicated content, then I'm fully against touching gsc.
Despite that gsc can be enabled only through gsconfig, so why even bother with plugin ?

[shawn_a]

I think duplicate content should be handled via canonical meta tag.

Not some hack that forces redirects on possibly every page request.

I say remove it from core, because.
A. Its a kludge
B. It has nothing to do with canonical, its a redirect hack.
C. We can change core in future to only respect actual permalink structure and then this "solution" becomes pointless
D. Having a config option for a single line of code "feature" is non optimal.
E. Enabling it can cause serious issues that are hard to convey or predict to regular uses.

[Carlos]

If disabling gsc disables also redirects, and there's no other function who takes care about duplicated content, then I'm fully against touching gsc.

Enabling GSCANONICAL only enables redirection to canonical URL.
Leaving it disabled (default) doesn't affect the meta canonical link.
(To remove the meta canonical you have to use get_header(false))

[yojoe]

Carlos answered my concerns, as in 3.2.x gscanonical did not redirect faulty URIs and I noticed that on latest 3.3.x beta.

Just to give you a hint why I was against removing it, is that I ported couple months ago a website from GS to a dbase driven cms (website was started evolving too fast). Within couple days I noticed huge load of 404 errors, as search engine crawlers indexed pages on non existing paths, but ignored them as long as there was canonical link. But once website structure changed a bit, 404 errors raised like shrooms.

Once gscanonical is replaced with internal redirection (either 303 or 301) everything will get back on track