Home/ Questions/Q 129959
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-11T05:52:21+00:00

I was wondering whether search engines respect the HTTP header field Content-Location . This

  • 0

I was wondering whether search engines respect the HTTP header field Content-Location.

This could be useful, for example, when you want to remove the session ID argument out of the URL:

GET /foo/bar?sid=0123456789 HTTP/1.1 Host: example.com …  HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Location: http://example.com/foo/bar …

Clarification:
I don’t want to redirect the request, as removing the session ID would lead to a completely different request and thus probably also a different response. I just want to state that the enclosed response is also available under its “main URL”.

Maybe my example was not a good representation of the intent of my question. So please take a look at What is the purpose of the HTTP header field “Content-Location”?.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. I think Google just announced the answer to my question: the canonical link relation for declaring the canonical URL.

    Maile Ohye from Google wrote:

    MickeyC said…
    You should have used the Content-Location header instead, as per:
    http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html
    ‘14.14 Content-Location’

    @MikeyC: Yes, from a theoretical standpoint that makes sense and we certainly considered it. A few points, however, led us to choose :

    1. Our data showed that the ‘Content-Location’ header is configured improperly on many web sites. Sometimes webmasters provide long, ugly URLs that aren’t even duplicates — it’s probably unintentional. They’re likely unaware that their webserver is even sending the Content-Location header.

      It would’ve been extremely time consuming to contact site owners to clean up the Content-Location issues throughout the web. We realized that if we started with a clean slate, we could provide the functionality more quickly. With Microsoft and Yahoo! on-board to support this format, webmasters need to only learn one syntax.

    2. Often webmasters have difficulty configuring their web server headers, but can more easily change their HTML. rel=’canonical’ seemed like a friendly attribute.

    http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html?showComment=1234714860000#c8376597054104610625

    • 0