Canonicalization - Make Your Site More Google Friendly

By Author: One of such recent recommendations has come from G
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World Wide Web maintains a standardised web document format to make the most out of this virtual world. There are several technologies also contribute to this Web Standardisation Process. Some of these influential technologies are Browsers, Internet Connectivity and Search Engines. Now-a-days, all available browsers are supporting most of the web document formats. Internet connectivity quality has been substantially improved with the introduction of broadband technology. In comparison to previous two, search engines are a bit slow upgrading their technology. Search engine industry leaders like Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask are investing to cover as much web document formats as they can. This process is an ongoing one and this suits the best to the ever changing web technology sector. One of such recent recommendations has come from Google - Specify your canonical. Let's learn what a Canonical URL is all about!

Though some months back the concept of Canonical URL was no where around WWW. But this has really been a great problem for those who largely depend on the search engines to make business. Search engine is all about ...
... a tool that provides relevant web documents when a search is made. Everyday millions of web documents on various niches are generated and search engines too regularly indexes them. But things become worst when a web server provides different version of URLs for a single web document. This results into indexing duplicate copies of single information. To avoid such technical shortcoming, Google introduces Canonical Tag. Google spokesman Matt Cutts informs Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. Here goes the Google defined tag:

So there is a question that how somebody ensures that Google indexes the URL you prefer? First ensure which URL (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/ or http://www.yourdomain.com/) you want to use widely and consistently throughout your website. Once that has been fixed, use that particular URL in Canonical Tag consistently. Don't make your half of the site URLs without www and half of the URLs with www.
Matt Cutts too suggests some other solutions in his famous article on Canonicalization. Checkout more information on Canonicalization in http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/.