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Rev="canonical" tags to cure short url problems

shiflett.org

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Re: Rev="canonical" tags to cure short url problems

#11

Post by 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...

Re: Rev="canonical" tags to cure short url problems

#12

Post by poutine »

joshu wrote: post #10
poutine wrote: post #7

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. Peop…

"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.

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

Re: Rev="canonical" tags to cure short url problems

#13

Post by Semiapies »

poutine wrote: post #7

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. Peop…

I agree on the Link Rot Apocalypse. I've seen services like URL Tea vape to be sure, but bigger services like TinyURL are rather more stable. In fact, I use TinyURL a lot to link to news stories, and many's the time I've followed a shortened, descriptive link back to news sites to see that the sacred "canonical" link now 404s.

People are overstating both the ephemerality of shortener sites and the longevity of original URIs.

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