SEO Bite #1 – LinkedIn Pulse’s Canonical Tag Opportunity

So, I published an article on LinkedIn Pulse about the state of blogging and how SEO has ruined it.

But I noticed something interesting:

When you click on the article, it takes you to this URL structure:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/yes-blogging-dead-real-time-nathan-gotch-yxgyc%3FtrackingId=qkBvYewpQViK%252BoIVbOwuNw%253D%253D/?trackingId=qkBvYewpQViK%2BoIVbOwuNw%3D%3D

But according to the Detailed Chrome Extension, it doesn’t canonicalize to a “mother” URL:

This type of URL should canonicalize to the preferred version without the tracking and URL parameters:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/yes-blogging-dead-real-time-nathan-gotch-yxgyc

However, LinkedIn has decided not to do that.

So, that means that multiple URLs for the same content are indexable.

This can lead to duplicate content, ineffective use of the crawl budget, and index bloat.

If left unchecked, it will be a nightmare for LinkedIn’s technical SEO team.

The solution is simple:

SEO Bite #1: Make sure variations of URLs canonicalize back to the mother URL.