📜SEO

Link License Builder

Build the <link rel="license"> tag declaring the content license.

URL da licença

Declare your content license in the head

You published a piece of writing or a photo under Creative Commons and said so in the footer, in prose, for human readers. What is missing is the machine-readable version, the one aggregators, extensions, and crawlers can read without parsing a sentence. It is a single line in the page head, and the usual question is which address belongs in the href.

One field, the license URL, and out comes the finished tag, prefilled with the CC BY 4.0 address as an example. The license value is standardized in HTML and means exactly one thing: the current document is covered by the license found at that address. So point it at the official license page on creativecommons.org or opensource.org, rather than at a generic terms-of-use page on your own domain.

The tag covers the page it sits on, not each image inside it. If your goal is licensing information showing up in Google Images, what counts is per-image structured data using the schema.org license and acquireLicensePage fields, or IPTC metadata embedded in the file itself. The same rel value works on a footer link, with the advantage of being visible. If the content is proprietary, just leave the tag out, since declaring the wrong license is worse than declaring none.

Frequently asked questions

Does this produce the licensable badge in Google Images?

Not on its own. That label comes from per-image metadata via schema.org or IPTC. A head tag declares the document license, which is a different claim.

Can I point it at my own terms of use?

You can, and HTML accepts any URL. But a public license with a canonical address is recognized automatically by tooling, whereas your own page has to be read by a person.

Does it apply to the whole site?

Only to the page carrying it. If the license is identical everywhere, put the line in your head template so it ships on every page.