What is canonicalisation and how can I fix it?
Thursday 19 November 2009
TAGS: Canonicalisation | Search engine optimisation
So what is Canonicalisation? Do I have canonicalisation issues? And how do I solve them? Neil M Hancock, Search Marketing Manager at Silverbean opens the book on all things canonical.
Canonicalisation issues arise when you can access the same page using a number of URLs. For example, most people would consider these the same URLs:
- www.mysite.com
- mysite.com/
- www.mysite.com/index.html
However, all three of the above URLs are actually treated differently by the search engines. Each URL could in theory return completely different pages, and therefore all three could be indexed by the search engines. Try accessing your website with and without the ‘www.’ prefix, if you are not redirected to the same URL each time you have canonicalisation issues.
How do Canonicalisation issues affect my SEO potential?
Having canonicalisation issues can seriously hurt your search engine rankings in many ways;
- Having two separate copies of your pages will created duplicate content issues; this means that the search engines may believe your copy is no longer unique.
- Any links pointing into one version of the URL will be treated separately to any links pointing to the second version of the URL. This means you could potentially be splitting your backlink count in two.
- It’s possible half your domain could be indexed with the ‘www’ prefix and the other half without.
So how can I stop the canonicalisation issues?
The first and easiest method is to make sure all your internal links are using the same style, if you start to use www.mysite.com, then continue using it throughout.
The second and slightly more complicated option is to tell your web server which URL is your predominant choice. You can then create a 301 redirect (a permanent redirect to say this page has moved permanently). This means that if someone was to type in mysite.com they would be automatically redirected to www.mysite.com. This helps tell the search engines that this is your chosen URL.
To do this you need to create a file called ‘.htaccess’ (that’s a file with no name and just an extension, seems strange but trust me!).
To create this file open a new notepad file and enter the following code;
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^mysite.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
All you need to do now to replace the reference’s to ‘mysite.com’ with your domain name, and save the file as ‘.htaccess’ (that’s dot htaccess)
You now need to upload this to the root of your website, if you do not have FTP access to your website then contact your host and they will be able to show you how to upload the file.
Note*
This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite module enabled.
Neil M Hancock is the Search Marketing Manager at Silverbean. If you have any questions or would like to discuss how Silverbean can help you achieve your marketing objectives through an SEO and Link Building campaign; please contact our resident SEO expert using one of the following.