I just discovered something about Addthis shares, Twitter, and rel-canonical.
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Let's say I have a page on my site with the url www.mydomain.com/page1.php?id=234.
Let's say it can be accessed by the url www.mydomain.com/page-this-is-a-keyword-rich-url
And let's say that the second example is what I have set as my rel-canonical.
I wondered what would happen when people submitted the non-canonical url to twitter. We know that Twitter shares count for something in SEO. I didn't want things to go to waste if people were landing on my short urls and sharing them on Twitter.
Well, tonight, I shared one of my own urls on Twitter. I was accidentally on the short one (not the canonical), but when I shared it via addthis the long one was shared. So, Addthis must read the canonical and use this to share.
Very cool. At least to me. I may possibly be the only person on the planet that understands what I just wrote, but this is a neat discovery for me.
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I am still using it on all of my sites... getting hundreds of actions per day. Works great - but I have very few canonical problems.
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Complicated. Does everyone still recommend addthis for social sharing?
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I'm seeing that this week on both the Twitter and FB share icons (the official, JavaScript-based ones). They seem to be picking up the canonical tag and sharing the canonical version. It doesn't matter whether the tag has been added recently or has been in place for a while, as far as I can tell.
Honestly, it's strange for my implementation. I'm trying to canonicalize updates on a 30-day challenge to the original post, so the posts aren't really duplicates (I just want to consolidate them for SEO and search usability). So, if someone RTs or Shares those pages they won't be sharing the page they actually read. That seems a bit odd to me, usability-wise.
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I have also seen AddThis starting to drop page parameters down to the base url.
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Interesting, Dr Pete has seen similar things happening when using the official twitter retweet button as well. I'm hoping he'll chime in here as well.
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Ha! I understood, that makes 2 people on the planet. Good share!
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