I mostly agree, but also... it kinda is a dark art? I just read the "Reduce duplicate content" section [1] because my gut reaction was "yeah, I agree, this guy

I mostly agree, but also... it kinda is a dark art? I just read the "Reduce duplicate content" section [1] because my gut reaction was "yeah, I agree, this guy is going to get SEO-penalized for this" but of course I don't actually know. And although my few years of experience dealing with this stuff still want to say "you will get SEO-penalized for this", Google's own guidelines do not: "If you're feeling adventurous, it's worth figuring out if you can specify a canonical version for your pages. But if you don't canonicalize your URLs yourself, Google will try to automatically do it for you. [...] again, don't worry too much about this; search engines can generally figure this out for you on their own most of the time. " [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide#reduce-duplicate-content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s...