Status Of Url Canonicalization In Seo World

By Author: Billa Perez
Total Articles: 279
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This may sound confusing but it's actually relatively simple, and you will find that you often refer to different URLs in different ways without even realising it already. For example www.seostudio.com.au could just as easily be referred to as example.com, www.seostudio.com.au / or example.com/ etc. At the same time normally your main page, the 'home page' of your site will be called 'index.html'. This of course means that you could again refer to your home page as www.seodtudio.com.au/index.html or www.seostudio.com.au/index.htm and the list of different versions goes on. However technically these URLs are different and could contain different information. The web server (that hosts your website) will normally take care of this and ensure that all those addresses return the same page (the one you named index.html) and normally you don't have to tell them to do this. However while you will normally see the same page for the various URLs, it can still cause problems and complications if you are constantly
referring to it using different variations. This then is what canonicalisation means - consistently using the same ...
... URL in order to prevent confusion and perhaps more importantly to enhance SEO.

Of course for visitors it can be confusing, and particularly those who are perhaps a little more technophobic and don't realise that the sites are the same. This has lead to many conversations with grandparents trying to find websites and asking if perhaps they should try typing www. Or if there needs to be a forward slash at the end.

It's the SEO aspect though that we're interested in (though this general marketing point will affect your SEO indirectly - it sends more people to your site, gets more links back etc etc). Of course here Google will rank your page based on the number of different links pointing at it around the web (among other things of course) and will count these up in order to see whether your site is 'popular' or not. If those links are technically pointing in different places then, then this can of course hurt your ranking as it means each one has fewer links pointing at it overall than if they all pointed the same 'way'. At the same time you will want Google to rank the URL that you have chosen so that when someone types in a keyphrase it's the chosen URL that comes up at the top as this is what your site will become known as. Of course in order to do this you again have to make sure that all links pointing to it - both within your site and elsewhere - all use the same URL. The status of your URL canonicalization then is very important to your SEO.

More about search engine optimization (seo) and web design mildura visit http://www.freedomseo.com.au .