Extension:CanonURL

MediaWiki extensions manual - list

Release status: beta
Description	Adds the canonical links to the head of Mediawiki pages according to Google Canonicalization Content Guidelines
Author(s)	(Abhi M Balakrishnantalk)
Last version	0.3 (24 March 2013)
MediaWiki	1.20
PHP	5.3
License	GPL
Download	Mirror 1 Mirror 2 Readme
Example	Secpedia
Tags seo, canonical, url
Hooks used BeforePageDisplay
Check usage and version matrix; stats

Adds the canonical links to the head of Mediawiki pages according to Google Canonicalization Content Guidelines to avoid duplicate content issues.

Introduction

Many of the Mediawiki installations out there uses Short URLs including Wikipedia. Almost all these installations makes the URLs short and easy to remember. However, this makes the content available in both long URLs and short URLs.

For Example:
Main Page of Wikipedia can be accessed from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page

Even though a normal user is not going to get disturbed by this issue, it can create major problems in search engine rankings.

There are two known methods to fix this issue:
1. Redirect long URLs to short URLs automatically or
2. Specify your canonical.

This extensions makes use of the second method, by specifying the canonical URL. In this method, content is still accessible through both the URLs, but the short URL is set as the canonical URL. Thus search engines will list short URLs only.

Wikipedia deals with this problem a third way by using robots.txt to disallow indexing of the long form url (aka http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page). Thus the search engine should only see the short version. However, Google does not recommend blocking crawler access to duplicate content on website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods.

Installation

• Download and extract the files in a directory called "CanonURL" in your extensions/ folder.
• Add the following code to your LocalSettings.php (at the bottom)

require_once( "$IP/extensions/CanonURL/CanonURL.php" );

• Clear the cache of your browser
• Check the HTML source and confirm the presence of following line before
  <link rel="canonical" href="CANONICAL_URL_OF_CURRENT_PAGE" />
• Done – Navigate to "Special:Version" on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.