What is Canonicalization?
How domain Canonicalization affects URL’s
This is an area often overlooked by SEO’s that are too busy worrying about keyword density… But the domain canonicalization of your URL’s are very important.
So what is this canonicalization?
To put it simply there’s more than one URL used to get to a website, there are many web addresses that can lead to the same page. For example:
example.com
www.example.com
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/index.html
All these URL’s point to the same page – the homepage of example.com. What users and search engines alike want is to have one URL for each page. This reduces duplicate content for the search engines and best of all will consolidate all your in-links to the same address.
If you are hosted on a Linux/apache server you can change the .htaccess file on your server to direct all users and search engines to a specific URL. If however you are hosted on a Windows Server you cannot use the .htaccess method – you can however configure this in IIS. Below is part of the .htaccess file of this website:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.architectwebdesign.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://architectwebdesign.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
These commands are telling the server to turn on the URL re-writer and instead of sending visitors to www.architectwebdesign.co.uk (line 3) it will now re-direct all traffic to architectwebdesign.co.uk (line 4). You can add as many Rewrite Conditions as you like, however usually one is enough.
I did this mainly because I already knew I had links to this website without the ‘www’ prefix so wanted to keep this up and direct users and search engines to architectwebdesign.co.uk.
There are arguments for and against keeping the ‘www’ prefix but in the end I think it comes down to personal choice. If this method is deployed it doesn’t necessarily matter which you choose as if a uses tries to gain access to www.architectwebdesign.co.uk they will be redirect to the address without the ‘www’.
And finally to complete the canonicalization of your URL, you can add this canonical tag inside the <head> of your pages:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.your-domain.com”/>
This tag tells the search engines to index your pages in the way that you choose. This tag should match the method set out in your .htaccess file. For example, if like me you decided to drop the ‘www’ prefix then your cononical tag will look like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://your-domain.com”/>
The search results of your website will now not display the ‘www’, this is a relatively new tag but is supported by all major search engines. Also, you should set the Preferred Domain in Google Webmaster Tools. This is found under Site Configuration > Settings
