Every page on your actor website now declares its own preferred address. It is a single line in the page's header and it resolves a problem most site owners never know they have.
The same page, several addresses
A page is typically reachable at more than one address without anybody intending it. With and without the www prefix. With and without a trailing slash. With a tracking parameter attached by whatever shared the link. On both your custom domain and the platform address.
To a search engine those are four or five distinct pages with identical content. The consequence is that whatever value the page has earned is divided between them, so the version that ranks is a coin toss and it ranks lower than it should.
What the declaration does
It states which address is the real one. Every variant then points at the same canonical page and the value consolidates there instead of being split.
This is not a trick and it is not an optimization in the doubtful sense. It is the standard way to tell a search engine something it cannot otherwise work out.
What we set it to
- Your custom domain if you have one, otherwise your platform address.
- The www form or the bare form, consistently, matching the one that resolves.
- Without tracking parameters, so a link shared with campaign tags still points at the clean page.
- Without pagination artifacts on listing pages.
Where this matters most for actors
Your name. The search you most want to win is your own name, and it is usually a close contest between your site, your profiles on casting platforms, and a database entry. Splitting your own site's value across four addresses in that contest is a self-inflicted handicap.
Nothing to configure
It applies to every site automatically. If you connected a domain, the canonical follows it, which is part of the handling described in connect your own domain.
Related technical work: automatic sitemaps, per-page titles and descriptions and the routing fix. The general picture is in SEO for actor websites.
Create your free actor website and it is handled from the first page.
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