Canonical URL in Analytics

Question

As far as I know, canonical URLs are only recognized by search engines - a way to ensure that when a search engine crawls your page, no matter which URL got it there, all of the "link juice" points to one canonical URL. So on a DNN site when example.com/, example.com/Default.aspx, example.com/tabid/36/Default.aspx, example.com/home/tabid/36/Default.aspx are all URLS for the homepage, a search engine can compress them all into one listing in it's index rather than diluting the PageRank across several URLs.

My question is whether canonical URLs are recognized by Google Analytics, or if there is any other trick to keep that same home page from showing up as 5 or 6 different pages (URLs) in Analytics.

Answer 1

Not recognized by default. But it's easy to setup GA to track the canonical urls when they are available.

instead of calling

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

You can use:

var canonical_link;
try{
  canonical_link = jQuery('link[rel=canonical]').attr('href').split(location.hostname)[1] || undefined;
}
catch(e){
  canonical_link = undefined;
}
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', canonical_link]);