Why do Twitter Canonicalise to Home?

[markadoi84]

I have just noticed that Twitter canonicalise back to their homepage from every profile page that I checked.

Check the source on any profile, and the canonical looks like this:

rel="canonical" href="https://twitter.com/" />

Have I completely missed something here?  I don't get why Twitter need to, or indeed would want to do this.

As far as I understand it, Twitter is hinting to Google that they should ignore profile pages and only rank the homepage.  Except Google doesn't.  If you search for "Rand Fishkin Twitter", you'll get Rand's page.  Search "[Anyone You Like] Twitter" and you'll get to their exact page.

Hope somebody can shed some light on this, as it seems counter intuitive to tell Google to ignore profile pages when I imagine a significant chunk of their search traffic comes from people searching Google for specific profiles.

Cheers,

Mark

[William.Lau]

I believe it might be for users logged in to differentiiate.

When you are at your own homepage I think its like twitter.com/#

or

It could be to point more authority to the homepage as whole. Canonical is just a "hey you SHOULD", doesn't mean you HAVE TO.

Canonical links are to help search engines.

This is my opinion.

[markadoi84]

Hi William,

Thanks for your opinion - I must admit it still seems strange to me.  OK so they want to give the Twitter homepage more authority - but in doing so make it less likely that individual profiles get ranked?  Obviously they are aware that Google will index deeper pages anyway, as that's exactly what they are doing.  I know that canonical is a hint, but it seems pointless when they must get a load of value from profile pages.

Would love to hear from somebody who has a really good idea of why - still a mystery to me!

Thanks,

Mark