linkedin-canonical-url

LinkedIn urls are "localized" to various markets, this micro-module creates a canonical url from any international one.

Why?

It can appear that a single person has multiple possible URLs and therefore its possible to have duplicate profiles. We don't like duplicate data. So we need a way of transforming the URL for any "local" version of LinkedIn into its "canonical" (unique) version.

What?

Given an international LinkedIn URL such as:
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/john-smith-82a505
into the canonical version: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-smith-82a505

This is a relatively simple example. The interesting one is where LinkedIn appends noise in the url e.g:
https://sy.linkedin.com/pub/krzysztof-marzec/a7/576/b50?trk=biz_employee_pub
Which gets re-directed to:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/krzysztof-marzec-b50576a7

Thankfully there is a pattern so we can transform the urls.

How?

npm install linkedin-canonical-url --save

Then in your script:

var transform_linkedin_url = require('linkedin-canonical-url');
var local_url = 'https://sy.linkedin.com/pub/krzysztof-marzec/a7/576/b50?trk=biz_employee_pub';
var canonical_url = transform_linkedin_url(local_url);
console.log('Transformed: ', canonical_url);
// https://www.linkedin.com/in/krzysztof-marzec-b50576a7

That's it.
Now each time you see a LinkedIn URL pass it through this transformer to ensure that you are getting the canonical version.

Note: the transformer is written to be human-readable. If you run into a "performance-bottleneck" using this code, please feel free to submit a PR to make it faster.