What is Canonicalization?
Canonicalization is the format a website URL is presented as. If you browse across the internet you will see the different formats webmasters use to present URL’s aka Uniform Resource Locator. HTTP aka HyperText Transfer Protocol is not related. The top two canonical url formats are..
- Some have www.’theirdomain’.com included in their domain. We will call this the www canonical formatting.
- Some start with no formatting or non-www canonical formatting ’theirdomain’.com
According to Google whatever way we choose to present your URL’s you should do it consistently across you entire domain. Sticking to one convention even when inter linking is suggested. So if you start with using just www.’ yourdomain’.com then stick with that convention when giving links to your visitors to follow within the whole domain of your website. Outbound links do not need to follow this rule.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).
How to you tell search engines what type of canonicalization you want to follow?
Simply put when you submit your website to them for analytics, site submissions and webmaster tools. More importantly it can be achieved through 301 redirects. This will enable the search engines to apply the same canonicalization across your whole domain they list in their search engine.
How to apply canonicalization to your website?
Applying it is done very easily and that is through the use of 301 redirects. Simply a 301 redirect is page the redirects your website to the website url you want your visitors to be at. 301 redirects are nearly undetectable unless looking for it.
So say instead you want visitors that type in www.’yourdomain’.com to be redirected to ‘yourdomain’.com instead. Applying a redirect at the www to the non-www url will suffice. The search engines are programmed to identify these types of redirects and apply canonicalization to the website url format you choose for every link after that.
So based on the above example when the search bot comes to scan your website it will be looking for non-www format links plus when your website is submitted to the said search engine by the bot it will follow the same url format you told it to follow through that redirect.
We choose to use the non-www formatting because it is less confusion for our visitors if they want to recall a quick url and type it in a browser error free.
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