Add rel="canonical" on RFC pages pointing to rfc-editor.org

[JayDaley]

Now that the rebuilt rfc-editor.org can carry it, RFC pages on the datatracker should declare the RFC Editor's info page as canonical — e.g. a link rel="canonical" to https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfcNNNN/ on every /doc/rfcNNNN/ page — so search engines send RFC searches to the authoritative copy instead of splitting ranking between the two sites.

Task

• Emit a canonical link to the rfc-editor.org info page on RFC document pages

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Agent-assisted triage

• Suggested size: S
• Suggested priority: minor
• Suggested lane: standard
• Analysis confidence: high
• Updated with agent assistance on 2026-08-06

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Original report

Description

Now that a shiny new rfc-editor.org site has been launched a change is needed to DT to manage the SEO for RFC searches, which was not possible until now due to the poor design of the old rfc-editor.org site. This means adding a line of the form:

    `<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9920/">`

to all pages of the form

    `https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9920/`

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the IETF's Code of Conduct

[holloway]

Note this can be done as an HTTP header if that's preferable, eg link: <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1/>; rel="canonical" etc