Canonical URLs (Nerdy Post)
This must be the nerdiest blog post I have ever written. However, it’s somewhat of a gift to my “community”. I’ll admit that the topic of this post is a bit of a hobby horse of mine – having sat through the NetConcepts SEO session for the last two years at Web 2.0 Expo.
It’s canonical URLs…that’s right. You read correctly. Here’s the deal. If you own a domain sometimes your host provider may not have automatically created canonical URLs. What does that mean? Well it means that your site may have duplicate versions. For example Google may be indexing http://yoursite.com as well as http://www.yoursite.com – this is hardly ideal from an SEO point of view. Even worse, it may be that your root URL goes nowhere…i.e. is redirected to oblivion.
Canonicalisation means ensuring that all your various URLs go to the same place using 301 redirects. That means everything is tidy and Google only has to index one site. Ask your host provider if you don’t know how to do it. But it’s a basic SEO principle that many web site owners miss.
