Unique Article ID

Implementation Guides Platform
1

Many publishers reuse old content giving it a new URL and canonical.
By default, this behavior will result in a new article being created in Marfeel.

However, if you want to unify those articles, keeping the original publication time and all the accrued metrics from the original article, Marfeel offers the possibility of using a unique CMS id, which will unify the old and new versions under the same article within Marfeel.

How it works

Marfeel will look for the CMS id in each article and when a new CMS id is found, Marfeel will attach that CMS id to the canonical of the article.
If a new canonical is detected with the same CMS id, Marfeel will consolidate all past and future traffic under the new canonical.

Warning: A poor implementation of CMS id could lead to inconsistencies in your data. Please read the implementation guide carefully.

Implementation

CMS id is set in the HTML header as a meta property

<meta property="mrf:cms_id" content="your_unique_id_for_the_content" />

Please take into consideration the following factors when implementing it. Errors could affect not only your future data, but also your past data:

  • Never use the same CMS id for different content
  • In case you have more than one property under the same account, ensure that the ids are unique across all properties. Using a prefix in the CMS id will help achieve this.
  • Once a new article is published under the same CMS id, ensure that the old article is inaccessible, usually by redirecting it to the new article.
  • Check that in case the CMS id is not present, the meta tag is not displayed. By default Marfeel will ignore empty cms_id tags, but any content such as undefined, null, not set… will be considered a valid CMS id.
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