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Using external canonical URLs

External canonical URLs enable authors and editors to properly attribute a piece of content back to its original source. This is particularly useful if you syndicate or license third-party content and want to ensure proper SEO treatment and source attribution.

Search engines recognize a canonical URL as the authoritative source for a piece of content. Setting a canonical URL helps prevent SEO penalties due to duplicated content across multiple sites or pages. For example, if your site republishes an article originally published elsewhere, you can specify the original article’s URL as the external canonical URL. This tells search engines to treat that source as the authoritative version.

Benefits of using external canonical URLs:

  • Maintains SEO integrity when publishing syndicated or licensed content.

  • Fulfills attribution and compliance requirements for third-party content agreements.

  • Helps search engines identify the true source of the content, avoiding duplication penalties.

When authors input a fully qualified URL (for example, https://example.com/article-name) it renders in the story's <head> tag as a <link rel="canonical"> tag. This does not change the URL of the published story, it only informs search engines about the source of the content.

Best practices

  • Only use external canonical URLs for content that originates elsewhere or is licensed/syndicated.

  • Ensure the URL entered is correct, live, and matches the original source as closely as possible.

  • Do not set a canonical URL to your own domain unless you are consolidating content versions for SEO.

Procedures

Enabling external canonical URL in Composer

To enable external canonical URL in Composer, complete the following:

  1. Navigate to Composer > Settings.

  2. Navigate to the ANS meta field configuration section.

  3. Locate External canonical URL in the Available option list.

  4. Drag the External canonical URL to either the Planning or Metadata tab.

  5. Optionally, click the gear icon gear_icon.png, and select the check boxes to make the external canonical URL Required to save and Required to publish.

  6. Click Save.

Defining the external canonical URL field in Composer

To configure an external canonical URL, complete the following:

  1. Open the story in Composer.

  2. In the External Canonical URL field that you added to either the Planning or Metadata tab, enter the full URL of the original source (for example, https://example.com/original-article).

  3. Save or Publish the story.

The canonical tag is added to the page's HTML output on your front end.

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