Canonical links faulty? after latest upgrade
Hi
I am interested to know if I've been doing something wrong and if the latest update to Designer Pro+ has caught me out. And if I'm going to have to make a lot of changes.
The problem has to do with canonical links and when I recently uploaded a section of my website every page was reported to have a broken link which turned out to be the canonical link. I made changes and the 'problem' is solved. No problems like this have ever been experienced before and I would like to 'do the right thing' so that more broken links don't appear when I change and publish other sections.
Background details : I have a couple of large websites which I create in sections (maybe not a great idea but it makes them manageable in Xara). The first 'Songs of the Inland Waterways' has all the songs in alphabetical sub-directories. The second is a family history website where different branches of the tree are in different sub-directories and this is where the problem appeared. The main directory has an index file which links to sub-directories. Each sub-directory has an index.htm file and pages which link to each other, <Next>, <Previous>, etc., back to the main index (e.g. http://www.mywebsitename.co.uk) and sometimes directly to pages in other sub-directories.
As an aside, I recently added a bit of code (.htaccess - kindly provided by Egg on this forum) to the website so http: addresses get redirected to https: addresses and that seems to work fine and I haven't changed all the links on every page individually.
When Xara Designer Pro+ (23.7.0.68699 SL x64 Feb 21 2024) was used to publish a recently created section of the website into directory Dronfield the link created was, for example for page francis_dronfield-a.htm,
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mywebsitename.co.uk/francis_dronfield-a.htm" />
and this was the broken link as the page was actually in the Dronfield sub-directory.
Having looked up about canonical links I checked to see my publishing settings which were :
Sub-folder : mywebsitename/Dronfield
Website URL : www.mywebsitename.co.uk/ and these, or similar settings, have been used on my sites for years without a problem.
This resulted in all 21 pages in the subdirectory reporting broken links.
I changed the publishing settings to :
Sub-folder : mywebsitename/Dronfield
Website URL : https://www.mywebsitename.co.uk/Dronfield/
and the canonical link changed to the un-broken one :
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mywebsitename.co.uk/Dronfield/francis_dronfield-a.htm" />
So, after all that, the questions are "Do I need to change the publishing details for every section of the site?" and "Was I doing something wrong which Xara was ignoring?"
I am happy to change things so they are 'right'; time consuming though it may, be but I'd like to be sure what 'right' is.
I'm sure if anyone answers this the answer will be a lot briefer than the question - sorry! Thanks in anticipation.
Ian
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Acorn - installed Xara software: Cloud+/Pro+ and most others back through time (to CC's Artworks). Contact for technical remediation/consultancy for your web designs.
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