Hi, first month using Netlify and we love it but our Google Ads account was cancelled and we wonder if it is related to the switch to Netlify. The reason is “google ads circumventing systems policy” and mentions cloaking. Googling about it we found something about canonical links that Netlify is supposed to handle automatically because all the preview deploys could be considered duplicated content. We did not find the canonical HTTP header so we added it as a meta but we are not sure if it is working.
Cloaking is when a website presents different content or URLs to search engines compared to human users. For example, your site may display Flash images to users, but serve an HTML text page to search engines.
Hi, @netlifero. I cannot troubleshoot what Google does and I don’t have any insight into what caused this. I can answer questions about Netlify though.
Enabling prerendering might cause two different pages to be served. Likewise, if you are not blocking the Netlify site subdomain with redirect rules, then the site could be served via the <subdomain>.netlify.app domain and your custom domain at the same time.
You can stop that from happening with _redirects rules like this:
You must replace <subdomain> and www.example.com with the actual subdomain and custom domain for the rules to work. The rules above force any attempt to load the site subdomain under netlify.app to be redirected the the custom domain. This stops the duplicate content.
We do include a x-robots-tag: noindex header on non-production deploys. However, if the deploy is the published production deploy and you just use the site subdomain, that header won’t be included automatically (but you can manually create it with header rules). If you have questions about creating header rules or redirect rules, please let us know.