In a Commerce Store Accelerator application, the same content can be accessed in multiple ways using different URLs. To prevent search bots from indexing duplicate content, a preferred URL, called a canonical URL, can be specified for a page.

For any request that includes an Experience Manager cartridge handler (effectively, this is all requests), the atg.endeca.assembler.event.SEOCanonicalLinkBuilder class is triggered during the content item assembly process. This class adds a canonical link for the page to the content item with a key of canonical. Canonical links generated by the SEOCanonicalLinkBuilder class take the following format.

Request scheme (http or https)
+
://
+
Site server name
+
:
+
Site server port
+
Current site production URL, for example /csa/storeus
+
Content path, for example, /browse
+
Navigation State or Record State, depending on which is present. Navigation State
are present for browse pages and Record States are present for product pages.

Any additional query parameters at the end on the Navigation or Record State are removed in order to create a proper canonical link.