--- title: Adding the canonical tag to Gitea to prevent duplicate spam author: peter date: 2024-06-29 02:55:28 +0800 categories: [SelfHosting] # Blogging | Electronics | Programming | Mechanical tags: [tip, gitea, seo] # systems | embedded | rf | microwave | electronics | solidworks | automation # image: assets/img/2024-06-29-Adding-the-canonical/preview.png --- Gitea doesn't include the canonical tag in their pages, leading to a lot of duplicate pages being indexed by Google. Each page being indexed has a different sorting option, or other superflous parameter. > Duplicate without user-selected canonical > > These pages aren't indexed or served on Google Not sure if having a lot of these errors affects SEO but I've noticed a lot of my real pages are being discovered but not indexed by Google. ![Search console page getting spammed with duplicate urls](/assets/img/2024-06-29-Adding-the-canonical/search%20console.png) To fix this, 1. Create a `custom/templates/base/` directory under your Gitea installation. In my case it is in `/var/lib/gitea/custom/templates/base/`. 2. CD to the base directory and run `wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/go-gitea/gitea/main/templates/base/head.tmpl`. Make sure your Gitea is updated to the latest version, or choose the right version instead of the `main` branch. 3. Modify `head.tmpl`: Add this line somewhere in the `` section: ```html ``` 4. Restart the gitea service