SEO Consult Blog

So what is URL Canonicalization and why is it important to SEO ? Well if you have been following my blogs Duplicated Content is an SEO’s nightmare, and Duplicate content, you will already know why duplicate content is very, very bad. A canonicalization problem can make the search engines believe that your web site is duplicated else were on the web, whilst it is the same site. This problem occurs when your website is accessible under both forms of the url, for example www.mysite.com and mysite.com. This is too ambiguous for a search engine to identify the address as a single site therefore it believes that the site may be duplicated on another address. This problem can also appear on the index page of your site, for example www.mysite.com/index.htm, mysite.com/index.htm & www.mysite.com etc, this is even more ambiguous for a search engine and could cause them to think your home pages is duplicated upto 4 times! Ok, we have identified the problem - but how do we fix it? The canonicalization problem can be fixed using a 301 permanent redirect on your server to point all different URL variations to www.mysite.com. This is done using one of a couple of different methods depending on your web server. On an apache server I would recommend using the rewrite engine in the .htaccess file or you can write a php script to do it. IIS Based servers are a whole different story…

iF you would not feel confident fixing this error yourself, feel free to contact us

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