Community Corner — Peggy Zhu (Customer) asked a question.

April 14, 2026 at 6:51 AM
Best practice for canonical URLs on dynamic blog pages in Sitefinity

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some guidance on best‑practice canonical URL setup in Sitefinity to support SEO, specifically for blog/news listing pages using the News widget.

 

Background / Goal

For our blog, we’re trying to ensure that dynamic listing pages are self‑referencing their own canonical URLs, rather than having the canonical tag missing or pointing to a generic parent page.

Our SEO agency has flagged the following URLs as examples where this should apply:

 

What we’ve tried so far

We navigated to the page containing the News widget and updated the Advanced Settings as follows:

  • Turned off “Disable canonical URL meta tag”
  • Set Paging mode to Query parameter
  • Set Template for paging query parameter to page

This change allowed pagination to appear in the canonical URLs, which is progress.

Issues we’re encountering

  1. Unstable canonical URLs for pagination
  2. The canonical URLs appear to change frequently.
  • One day, page 1 correctly references
    • ?page=1
  • The next day, all paginated pages suddenly reference ?page=4
  • Later, they may point to ?page=3

This happens without any configuration changes, which makes us unsure whether this is related to caching, widget behaviour, or something else. While pagination is now reflected in the canonical URL, the inconsistency is concerning.

 

  1. No way to include tags or categories in canonical URLs
  2. We haven’t been able to find a way to make tag‑ or category‑filtered pages self‑canonical.
  3.  

For example:

This means tag and category pages always canonicalise back to the main blog landing page, and we haven’t found a configuration option or recommended approach to change this.

 

Questions

  • Is there a supported way in Sitefinity to make tag and category listing pages self‑referencing canonical URLs?
  • Is the unstable pagination canonical behaviour expected, or could this be caused by caching or widget configuration?
  • More broadly, what is the recommended SEO approach for canonical URLs on dynamic News widget pages in Sitefinity?

 

Any insights, documentation, or real‑world examples would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

  • 2 answers
  • 1.06K views

  • Jochem Bökkers (Enso DX)

    Hi @Peggy Zhu (Customer)​ 

     

    You're not referencing which version of Sitefinity you're on but, here's are two links to a articles ([1], [2]) describing on which widget you can set custom canonical URLs. While blog widget is on there, the classification widget isn't - but I don't believe that's the problem.

     

    Sitefinity page routing is most likely capturing the last part of the url, spots the /-xxx pattern and then ignores it for canonical (both for paging and filter). So your approach to query-string parameter approach for pagination would be the working approach.

     

    The fact that the canonical url switches the query parameter from ?page=1 to ?page=4 is most likely due to your caching approach.

    You can test it out by (for a day) go to the pages titles & properties and set the caching options to "No caching".

     

    I'd check with Progress whether their approach to the /-xxx (ignoring url segments) for query strings is by design or a bug. If it's by design, you could write some custom code that fixes it - but a product fix would be better.

     

    Jochem

  • Sarra Lin (Customer)

    For dynamic pages, I usually set a canonical in the MVC widget based on the item’s default URL and override it only when the page has real variations

    Sitefinity’s Output Cache can bite you, so I keep the canonical generation server-side. While testing different setups, I was building a tool priced similarly to projects mentioned on https://redeagle.tech/blog/bespoke-software-cost-uk, and solid canonicals helped keep duplicate URLs from tanking search traffic