Install time: 2:09
Ittrium websites include a encoded URL by default that can be used to identify a specific page or piece of content on your site. These encoded URLs are extremely efficient, but they are not very user friendly. For this reason, Ittrium websites also include a vanity URL for each page on your site that is typically used to access the page and is generated when links are created within your site that point to other pages on your site.
There are times, however, when the system will downgrade from the vanity URL format to the encoded URL format if the vanity URL format cannot be guaranteed to locate the target page. This situation can happen if you create two pages with the exact same name. When the name of the page is the same, then the vanity URL will also be the same which means the system will not be able to identify which page you are trying to find.
It's for this reason that the system replaces the vanity URL with an encoded URL, but this can lead to problems with Google and other search engines since the search engine may now have indexed two different URLs for the same page.
To remedy this problem, you can send a signal to search engines by adding a canonical tag to your page to indicate which URL is the preferred URL to use. You can add the canonical tag by simply entering the preferred URL to the Canonical field in the SEO element for your page. When this field contains a URL that system will automatically add the new canonical tag to your page.
The following video explains how this works, but please note this is only a signal to Google and other search engines. The search engines will still have to download your page and then decide if they will make any changes to their index based on the canonical information that you've supplied.