Chorus provides a few options for limiting or editing how search engines find your stories. You may occasionally want to signal to search engines that a story has a canonical URL, or that you don’t want search engines to index the story.
Setting any of these options will limit how your story appears in search engines. Each are intended for different situations, so make sure you follow team policy before using these options.
Your organization may have set up several of these options for customizing how stories behave for search engines. Check to see which options can be used for your team.
Set the canonical URL
If your story is duplicated elsewhere on the web—whether that’s on a Chorus site or another domain entirely—you have the option to set the canonical URL in Chorus. A canonical URL is the preferred or “most representative” URL.
Setting a canonical URL in Chorus tells search engines which URL you want audiences to find in search results. Search engines may continue crawling your story, but they will crawl the canonical URL more frequently. This means that your story will be comparatively pushed down or even removed from search results and organic traffic, so proceed with caution. If you have any questions about this feature, please reach out to seo@voxmedia.com.
As Google notes, you may decide to set a canonical URL to:
- Manage syndicated content
- Consolidate links and search authority from similar or duplicate content (similar to what you might use a 301 redirect for, but a canonical URL allows audiences to continue accessing the individual links)
- Simplify analytics tracking for a particular story or topic
To set a canonical URL for a story:
- Head to the Finalize screen.
- Expand the Advanced section.
- Paste the URL in the Canonical URL field.
- Publish the changes.
Restrict indexing
You have the option to prevent a story from appearing in search results by restricting it from search indexing. When a crawler comes across the story, it will drop it from search results in the future.
You may want to restrict indexing on a story if:
- You don’t want it to appear in search results but you want audiences to be able to access it through other methods, like direct links
- The content is potentially a target for spam, harassment, or abuse
- It is considered “untrusted” archival content
To restrict search engines from indexing a story:
- Head to the Finalize screen.
- Expand the Advanced section.
- Select Do not index. This adds noindex to the metadata.
- Publish the changes.
Restrict link following
You have the option to restrict search engines from following links, which affect SEO value and rankings. You may want to restrict link following for paid or sponsored stories where Google does not allow publisher to pass SEO value, for example.
To restrict search engines from following the links in a story:
- Head to the Finalize screen.
- Expand the Advanced section.
- Select Do not follow links. This adds nofollow to the metadata.
- Publish the changes.