Disclaimer:
I think Blogspot / blogger is a piece of cr*p. I don’t blame you for having a blogspot blog, but now that you’ve had to Google around to find a cross domain canonical fix, you know exactly how bad it is. For the love of {insert your preferred deity here}, DO NOT HOST ANYTHING WORTH OF ANY VALUE ON BLOGSPOT EVER AGAIN – sincerely, your friendly professional SEO, Dave.
Okay, so for some reason you need to create cross domain canonical tags from your blogspot blog to “wherever”, and you need to control this at page level. I am going to save you from hours of torture, hair loss, and potentially an aggravated trip to Mountain View.
I will assume the following:
- You’re not able to redirect your entire blogspot blog to a custom domain – directions here
- You have a complete list of all URLs and page titles from your blogspot blog
- You’ve exported your content and managed to load it onto a different domain – directions here
- You have admin access to the blogspot blog, obvious, but just making sure.
- You’ve got basic Excel skills and know how to Vlookup match your exported pages to your new pages via page titles
Passed all those?
Here’s the code for cross domain canonical in the template:
<b:if cond=’data:blog.canonicalUrl == “https://whatever.blogspot.com/this-post”‘><link href=”https://whatever.com/blog/this-post” rel=”canonical”/></b:if>
Easy right? Woohooo! Nay friend, nay.
Bullshit to watch out for #1 – The “canonicalURL”
whatever.blogspot.com works….so does:
- whatever.blogspot.com.es
- whatever.blogspot.co.uk
- whatever.blogspot.in
- etc…
Yep, Google decided to duplicate every single f*cking URL on international cctlds, regardless if you wanted it or not. So how do they solve the issue of ridiculous amounts of dupe content? Well, they rel canonical back to one version, slick and totally fu*king unnecessary in the first place.
There’s a bunch of old blog posts you’ll probably come across that mention using <b:if cond=’data:blog.url… which wasn’t wrong at the time, but since some drunk at Google decided to auto-implement this geo-bullshit, well, that doesn’t work so well anymore. I tried for ages, and it basically ignored <b:if cond=’data:blog.url every friggin time. Why? No clue, I’d have a better shot explaining why Taco Bell is still allowed to serve Americans grade F dog meat in their burritos.
You need to use the data:blog.canonicalUrl Blogger XML variable to get the cross domain canonical condition to fire on all ccTLDs. Don’t ask why, just do it and get back to drinking.
Bullshit to watch out for #2 – The default “canonical”
You know what happens when you have 2 canonical instructions on one page? Google ignores both completely.
In your template, you’ll probably have this line of code:
[xml]<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’>[/xml]
You know what that means? It means Google is going to automatically insert whatever they want, because they know best. In this specific scenario it’s going to insert a few extra meta tags that you don’t give a sh*t about anyway since you’re cross domain canonical’ing anyway, but most importantly, it will insert a default canonical tag which cannot be there if you need to add your own custom canonical tag.
Get rid of it, it’s about as useful as flesh eating disease to you at this point.
Bullshit to watch out for #3 – Homepage canonical
The homepage is special, you’ll need to add another if statement to handle this, preferably at the top. Pay very close attention to how I reference the blogspot.com URL, you must reference it with the trailing slash or it won’t work!
[xml]<b:if cond=’data:blog.canonicalUrl == "https://whatever.blogspot.com/"’><link href="https://whatever.com/blog/" rel="canonical"/></b:if>[/xml]
That’s it, add that to the final block of code in the final implementation section below.
Bullshit to watch out for #4 – Copy & Pasting my code
‘ ” and other characters get bastardized pretty quickly on different platforms. The biggest culprits are single quotes (‘), just re-type them in okay?
The final implementation!
Now that you’ve gotten rid of that rancid <b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-
You should probably back up your template first..
In the <head> section of the template editor (html editor), add ALL of your if statements:
[xml]<b:if cond=’data:blog.canonicalUrl == "https://whatever.blogspot.com/this-post"’><link href="https://whatever.com/blog/this-post" rel="canonical"/></b:if>
<b:if cond=’data:blog.canonicalUrl == "https://whatever.blogspot.com/another-post"’><link href="https://whatever.com/blog/another-post" rel="canonical"/></b:if>[/xml]
Save it, then go have a beer.
If you have other questions, drop me a line below – I may/may not respond (just being honest, I treasure my free time).