Canonicalisation and SEO

In an SEO campaign you want as much authority to go to your homepage as possible. You submit your site to directories, write articles, post on social networking websites and make regular blog posts that appear on twitter. All this to increase the number of backlinks to your website. And this is a good thing. The problem arrises when you have more than one way to view your homepage (or any page, for that matter).

URL Canonicalisation refers to two or more ways to view the same content, for example http://www.example.co.uk/, http://example.co.uk/, http://www.example.co.uk/index.html, and http://example.co.uk/index.html all load the homepage.

Clever search engines will be able to tell that these are all the same page and pass the authority all to the same place, but other search engines will follow all these links and pass authority to each of them seperately, the overall result being that you do not rank as high as you should. Worse, they could see these as seperate pages and penalise them for having duplicate content.

By removing the additional ‘copies’ of the homepage, the remaining page will get all the authority and your site will raise in the rankings.

There are a number of ways to fix a canonicalisation problem, but it depends on the server you are using. What works on an apache server may not work on a windows server. Below are the most commonly accepted ways of fixing a canonicalisation problem:

Apache:

On an apache server we will use a .htaccess file. If you have an .htaccess file, open it in your text editor of choice. If you do not have a .htaccess file, then you will need to create one. Most text editors will have a problem with saving the file as .htaccess as you have not specified a filename, only an extension. To get around this, open your text editor of choice and save the file as htaccess.txt. When you upload the file to your server, rename it to .htaccess. Now, in your .htaccess file, copy the following code (changing the domain name, obviously):
RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /.*index.html HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.example.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

What this is saying to the server is:

Turn on the URL rewriting module.

If the host is not www.example co.uk,
Redirect the browser to www.example.co.uk.

If the file being requested is www.example.co.uk/index.html,
Redirect the browser to www.example.co.uk/

Other Methods:

The simplest method of pointing a search engine to the right page is the canonical meta tag:
<link href="www.example.co.uk/link-to-right-page.html" rel="canonical"/>

This is an example of what it would look like in xhtml. If you are using html then remove the trailing /.
By putting this code in the head tags of your page you will effectively be telling search engines 'This page does not belong here. If you are reading this content, then please list it under this other url instead, as this is where it DOES belong.'

Source: http://www.seoconsult.com

Free Career Predictions