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    4. Rel Canonical, Follow/No Follow in htaccess?

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    Rel Canonical, Follow/No Follow in htaccess?

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    • moon-boots
      moon-boots Subscriber last edited by

      Very quick question, are rel canonical, follow/no follow tags, etc. written in the htaccess file?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • moon-boots
        moon-boots Subscriber @EGOL last edited by

        Hello,

        Thank you for this information, but I have a followup question. The links you sent me refer to images and PDF's, but this isn't relative to my situation. I need to write in follow/no follow and rel=canonical via htaccess because I do not know how to do it for each individual page on my ecommerce store - additionally, htaccess is easy for me to edit if ever I need to undo something and it is nice to have everything in one place.

        Can you give me a formatted example of how a follow/no follow and rel=canonical can be placed into a page via the htaccess file please? I intend on doing this for every product category, product and also my home page on my ecommerce store.

        Thank you

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • EGOL
          EGOL last edited by

          Robots directives and rel=canonical can be assigned by .htaccess.  This is a very handy way to assign noindex or rel=canonical to .pdf documents, print formats, video transcripts, etc.  You can also use it to apply noindex or rel=canonical at scale.   Two  Moz articles (of several) that describe these are....

          https://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

          https://moz.com/blog/htaccess-file-snippets-for-seos

          moon-boots 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • seanginnaw
            seanginnaw last edited by

            Hi there,

            They'll be written in the source code of each applicable page.

            Alternatively you can dynamically add these tags via google tag manager or within your CMS platform.

            regards,

            Sean

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Mustansar
              Mustansar last edited by

              Hi

              I dont think you can use rel-canonical tags in httaccess however you can define the rule for follow / no follow tag through htacess.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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