Canonicalization of URLs is not a topic that gets a lot of discussion in marketing circles. It is something that developers and people who work back-end on websites understand, but not the average website user or business owner. It is important in SEO however, as we will explain. If your business has a website, then here’s important info you need to know about what it means to use canonical URLs.
Here’s an explanation of canonical URLs from Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Search:
Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same URLs:
www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp
But technically all of these URLs are different. A web server could return completely different content for all them. When Google “canonicalizes” a URL, we try to pick the one that seems like the best representative from that set.”
How to tell if you have defined your canonical URLs
It’s common for the same content to be accessed multiple ways when you’re dealing with a website that has various product or content categories. It’s also easy for other sites to link to your site in multiple ways. To check, look at the above example and type them in, substituting your actual site for the example site. If different pages come up, or you get error messages, your canonical URLs are not defined. You can also check your site’s code. A rel=canonical tag should be placed in the header tag <head> of each page.
Why are canonical URLs useful?
The rel=canonical HTML code is an element that helps prevent search engines thinking there are duplicate pages on a website. The rel= code tells the “preferred” version of a web page. If your website doesn’t have that rel=canonical code to specify the preferred page, the search engines try to figure it out for themselves. As you can see in the above example, there are many different ways that websites can be specified. If a search engine sees different instances of what is essentially the same page, the search engine will think they are all different.
Not canonicalizing your URLs is always worse than canonicalizing your URLs. You could have the same information on your website in two different sections. If two different websites are linking to those two different pages on your website, search engines don’t know which version to show.
Once the preferred link is specified, the search engine can count all the links towards all the different versions of the page as links to the same page. This helps build your website credibility by consolidating links and page authority. On Google, if you set your preferred domain as https://www.example.com, Google treats links to https://www.example.com exactly the same as links to https://example.com.
How you can define your canonical URLs
If you are comfortable modifying your HTML code, you can add the canonical URL in the header tag of all of your pages. At this point, you will have to make a decision about whether you are going to use the www or not in your marketing and online use of your website domain name. You also need to decide if you want the slash at the end. And the http and/or https: parts of the link. Whatever your linking strategy is, it should be the same everywhere you use a link to your site. You can’t control how other sites link to you, which is why defining them for the search engines on your own site is so important.
If you are not comfortable getting into your site’s code. Get in touch with us. There are plugins that take care of some of this behind-the-scenes work that we can recommend. Our developers are also skilled in developing custom plugins or modifying plugins so they work just they way your and YOUR site need them to. If you’re having trouble building up pagerank on your website, this could be part of the problem.
