Professional Global SEO – SEM | janet bartoli

Canonicalization Issues & Resolutions

March 31, 2008

Canonicalization, besides the fact that it’s a great word, it is important in your SEO efforts. Put simply, canonicalization is more than one URL that may be used to deliver the same resource.

To start with try this simple test to detect canonicalization issues:

1) Search for site:mysite.com, and site:www.mysite.com.
2) Similarly for the index and non-index pages.

Is there a difference in Pages Indexed?
If there is a difference, then most likely you have canonicalization issues.

Direct quote from Matt Cutts blog albeit a little dated (2006)

“But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.”

Ok, now for the newest update – just read over at search engine roundtable this morning that Jill Whalen had done some site auditing and found that Google appears to have merged the index page with the root page of the domain. In other words if you happen to have www.site.com/index.html or site.com they are now being seen by Google as one, where it always had been seen as two separate pages.

So, this could either be a one-off situation or Google may very well decide to change things up a bit – just to keep us on our toes!

Filed under: SEO Factors