Canonicalization. That’s really a weird word, isn’t it? Try saying it, see how it rolls off the tongue. However, as much as this word is a weird one, there’s no discounting how important URL Canonicalization is to search engine optimisation.
You may have noticed way back when you were new to the internet that you didn’t need to type in “www” before the website’s URL every time. Personally, as an internet newbie, I loved this, because it saved me from typing in four more keystrokes in my slow-as-molasses browser (Internet Explorer 5, if you’re wondering). Now what I didn’t know back then is that sites with “www” and sites without the prefix would have a huge impact in the future.
What is a Canonical URL anyway? It’s what we call the homepage of a website. Now some sites usually don’t specify their Canonical URL, and thus the homepage ends up as any of these, with all these URLs leading to the exact same content:
www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp
If you remember your basic search engine optimisation, the situation outlined above is not desirable. You’d want to have unique content per page, because we don’t want Google to penalize our sites for duplicate content.
How do we avoid the above situation and have good URL Canonicalization?
Have Consistent URLs – are you going for a website with “www” or without the prefix? Choose one variant, and stick with it on that particular site.
Set up 301 redirects – you need these 301 redirects so that if a visitor mistakenly ends up on “www.example.com” or on “example.com/home.php” they’d always get redirected to “example.com”
Don’t rely on rel=canonical – this is a neat little tag we can put in HTML hyperlinks so that search bots would know that one particular URL is the homepage only, but as far as we know only Google supports this, and they’re not the only search engine around.
What do you do to ensure proper URL Canonicalization?
