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Discussion on: A Word of Caution Regarding Cross-Posting To DEV

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terabytetiger profile image
Tyler V. •

I recently noticed this in my Google Search Console - there are 2 articles that I recently updated the canonical url to point to my new url and they show as "non-canonical" in the console though.

I guess I might start taking the 'wait a few days' approach to posting too 🙃

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saul profile image
Saul Hardman •

Thanks for the comment @terabytetiger , nice to have another data point – great username btw 🐯

Google Search Console was showing my article as having been crawled, but not indexed. I think the correct terminology is "Submitted by not indexed". I can't recall if I then manually requested indexing or if it was just indexed in time.

Interesting that your pages display as "non-canonical" 🤔 Are they showing in Google Search Results at all?

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terabytetiger profile image
Tyler V. •

Thanks! I recently choose the new name and am happy with it! 😄

This is the specific message I see:

Error Duplicate without user-selected canonical; Status: Excluded

It doesn't look like my site shows for this specific search - but I requested a manual re-index for the associated pages recently. Hopefully it will help 🤞

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saul profile image
Saul Hardman •

Which articles is it that aren't showing up in the search results right now? Thanks for the screenshot 👍 Could you let me know if the problem is resolved?

Side note (and sorry if things are WIP right now and you know this already): your Blog page renders fine on the first (SSR) render, but not when I click the links in the navigation (presumably CSR). The same goes for the Lessons page actually – seems to be an issue with invalid Dates.

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terabytetiger profile image
Tyler V. •

terabytetiger.com/lessons/articles... is one of them. I'll definitely be back if I find a solution 😄

Not sure I understand/am seeing the errors with the pages - everything seems to be working fine for me.

Do you get console errors or could share screenshots? Thanks for letting me know!

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saul profile image
Saul Hardman •

Looks like you're not setting the <link rel="canonical" href="https://terabytetiger.com/lessons/articles/vue-rainbow/"> on that page? The metaInfo property on pages and templates should help you there 👍

Here are the Errors that I see in the console:

Errors in console on blog page
Errors in console on lessons page

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terabytetiger profile image
Tyler V. •

Hmm, this is weird 🤔 I don't see anything in Edge (Chromium) Beta on Windows. Which browser are you using?

I recently swapped out Moment for date-fns. Maybe that has something to do with it?

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terabytetiger profile image
Tyler V. •

Swapped back to Moment.js - maybe that solves it?

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saul profile image
Saul Hardman •

Hi Tyler, that seems to have fixed it, yes 👷‍♂️👍

I'm using Firefox btw 🔥 🦊

Quick note on canonical tags:

a) they must be absolute i.e. prefixed by https://yourdomain.com/
b) they must be identical on both the DEV post and the original article (right down to the presence of trailing slashes)
c) they need to be <link rel="canonical" href="...">, not <meta>

A screenshot of a malformed canonical tag on terrabytetiger.com

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terabytetiger profile image
Tyler V. •

Oh yay! I'm glad it's working! 🎉

Thank you so much for the tips! I (clearly) have no idea what I was doing with these 😅 This was extremely helpful 💕

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saul profile image
Saul Hardman •

You're very welcome Tyler! I've banged my head against this very wall so I'm happy to help you avoid doing the same 😅