
Rev="canonical" tags to cure short url problems - davedevelopment
http://shiflett.org/blog/2009/apr/save-the-internet-with-rev-canonical
======
garply
I think url-shortening is just a really bad idea in general. Certainly giving
normal people the ability to track who clicks on their links is a good idea,
but you don't need to obfuscate the url to do that. You could create a nice
tracking service using urls like: <http://digg.com/www.mysite.com/interesting-
blog-post>. The real cause of obfuscation is twitter's character limit, right?
What does twitter gain by including anchor text in their 140 characters?

~~~
derefr
The ability to follow links embedded in SMS messages. The whole thing is
really a problem with the SMS protocol.

------
poutine
As usual a lot of people jumping in and engineering a solution without
understanding the problem.

\- Twitter links are almost never clicked on outside of the first several
hours. 301 redirects will cause search engines to use the canonical URL as
well. This Link Rot Apocalypse is largely a bunch of nonsense.

\- People use short URL services to get analytics on the data they're sharing,
not just to shorten the URL. People like their click stats.

~~~
joshu
"almost never clicked on outside of the first several hours"

Got data to back that up?

The click stats are really great for addictiveness.

I think rev="canonical" is not a great solution either.

BTW, I meant Link Rot Apocalypse facetiously.

~~~
poutine
In fact I do have data to back that up but I cannot share.

------
scottdw2
I may be a bit dim here, but if you are doing the URL redirection your self,
because you don't what someone else hijacking your content, and long URL's are
not usable, then why not just create short URLs to begin with.

You wouldn't need any thing special, and people wouldn't need to shorten your
url.

~~~
sanswork
It's not just for shortening urls it's also for deciding where your search
engine scores go. So to take an example from a googler at a recent conference
say you have an online store that has a bunch of categories. Someone wants to
buy a red bag and they go through bags then to red and pick item 5.
/bags/red/5

Someone else goes to red things then bags than item 5 /red/bags/5

You end up with duplicate content issues and the possibility of having your
search engine score split between the two pages.

With canonical you can say on both pages that /items/5 is the real url and
thats the one that will get the search score + be indexed most likely.

~~~
gregoryl
It leads me to wonder, if google is as smart as most people see them as, why
don't they make an attempt at working this out, or at least defining a way to
deal with it themselves?

~~~
sanswork
They kind of do but this gives site owners a method to instruct Google on what
they want stored about their sites. You can't figure that out with an
algorithm.

------
jaaron
I'm all for creating a better solution for short urls, rev=canonical is not a
good option.

The proposal mixes alternative urls with the idea of a canonical url. Besides
being damn confusing (remembering the difference between rel and rev), it
opens up security issues. Moreover, the 'rev' attribute is not included in
HTML 5, making this proposal obsolete before it even starts.

I've written up a longer explanation of these problems on my blog for anyone
interested:

[http://cubiclemuses.com/cm/articles/2009/04/12/short-and-
can...](http://cubiclemuses.com/cm/articles/2009/04/12/short-and-canonical-
urls/)

------
Semiapies
Ultimately, if you want to discourage shortener services, you need to make
short, meaningful URIs.

