I couldn’t keep myself from raising the topic of URL canonicalization as the impact a non-canonical URL may have to your site is considerable.

So what is called canonical URL? Should you canonicalize the URLs of your site? According to Wikipedia

Canonicalization is the process of converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical">canonical representation.

So in its turn if to cite Webopedia

Canonical name, also referred to as a CNAME record, a record in a DNS database that indicates the true, or canonical, host name of a computer that its aliases are associated with.

Matt Cutts explain canonical URL in the following way:

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

So what could be wrong about non-canonical URLs? Could they hurt a site’s ranking? Definitely! And the reason is actually outlined by Matt Cutts – the non – canonized URLs are regarded as different pages by search engines. From this point all the problems start. And the issues could be different but all of them potentially could decrease your site’s rank.

I grouped threatens of non-canonical URLs as follows:

1. The pages under different URLs are treated as different ones by search engines and might be penalized for duplicate content.
2. The inbound links can lead to different versions of the page causing Page Rank leakage
3. The site could get “bombed” by competitors. Low quality links could be set to one of the domains with an aim to decrease site’s rank
4. In the long run, the pages contain the same content but are presented as different pages which not only might mess a search engine but might make one of the page compete with another. Does anybody needs an extra competitor for his targeted keywords? I don’t think so!

I hope you would agree with me now that it’s important to make your domain canonical. There are several ways of doing it but the best way, to my mind, is setting a 301 redirect from all the variations of your Home page to the form of domain you prefer. However, when choosing a preferred URL form one should consider which form of URL was used for internal links as well as which URL form the majority of inbound links point to.

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