Canonical and thread renaming

Here's a question I ask myself but always get confusing answers.

What do you do with thread canonical links when the thread topic title is prone to renaming? You know the sort the thread starts off with maybe the reveal, unveiling or announcement of a new product, car, tv show etc and as time goes on new info pops up (not deserving of a new thread) and the original post gets updated and so does the title to reflect this. So now in your HTML source you have a new link for your canonical tag even though search engines and other places may be linking to you under the older url.

Example: Alien signal received by SETI url.com/thread/alien-signal-received-by-seti.9999

Short time later: Government says 'nope' quote added : url.com/threads/alien-signal-received-gov-says-nope.9999

Do you let it go this way as it's natural or do you make sure to only link to the original (somehow) or do you even just link to the thread id or maybe even something else?

What do you do? What do you do?

Makes no difference as long as the threadid at the end is the same.

Excuse my ignorance but can you explain a bit how that is the case? Thanks.

insaneadmin said:

Excuse my ignorance but can you explain a bit how that is the case? Thanks.

Click to expand...

The number at the end is what tells the forum script what thread to load. It doesn't matter what the words are in the url

Ah yeah I know that part, what I mean though with the title renaming is that won't search engines have multiple links to the same thread but just under different names? I get that they will eventually catch up and update the url if the title stays long enough but I was just wondering if a thread that is frequently updated incurs any wrath due to this.

Appreciate the insight.

Google should pick it up fairly quickly. I don't see much harm. I do it all the time.

Thanks, puts my mind at rest a little. I was in two minds whether to make the canonical url just the thread id to counter this.