: How to handle canonical url changes like Stack Overflow Stack Overflow sites all have pretty urls which include the question title. In the HTML it also have canonical url for that page. I just
Stack Overflow sites all have pretty urls which include the question title. In the HTML it also have canonical url for that page.
I just found out that when I change the question title, the url is changed immediately. The canonical url is also updated. Does it mean that as long as the page with the old canonical url redirects to the new canonical url, then search engines will update their records of the canonical url as well?
Is there anything else that one can actively do to make the url change even more smoother?
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All questions on Stack Exchange contain a numeric ID (28070 for this question) which is the only thing that uniquely identifies a question.
So when a question title is changed, the URL such as /28070/old-question-title still shows the question because the ID is still there. The ID is looked up and the new title returned, meaning that the new URL can be determined and shown in the canonical tag.
This works perfectly well for search engines - when they see the old URL they can see the canonical URL (or get a 301 redirect in most cases), so update their index.
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