Thread: website canonicalization... Any Idea??

Hello Guys,

Thanks for your replies for the previous post.
Anyone have any Idea what is website canonicalization??? :frustrated:

Waiting for your answers.

SEO advice: url canonicalization (From Matt Cutt's official SEO blog at Google)

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. 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.

Haha I guess you learn something new every day. Because not only did I not know what this word or phrase meant but I have never even heard of it. Thanks for the education

Does anybody actually use this? I mean, you can specify whether to use the www prefix or simply mysite.com on Google anyway? Just wondering.

Originally Posted by Beanyhead

Does anybody actually use this? I mean, you can specify whether to use the www prefix or simply mysite.com on Google anyway? Just wondering.

It's usually specified at the server end. I can set my .htaccess file so that whenever someone goes to http://www.mysite.com it automatically redirects the request to http://mysite.com (without w's).

I chose to let google make all my sites use the www.biology-nation.com form of my site instead of biology-nation.com

I went with this because i think people are more used to seeing the www. in front of URL's also I think it looks better with my domain name being as short as it is.

now if my domain name was longer than I may have went without the www. in front of my URL's

But in order to do this in google webmaster tools you need to be sure that you add and verify both versions of your URL. With www. and without www.

Originally Posted by BiologyWebmaster

i think people are more used to seeing the www. in front of URL's also I think it looks better with my domain name being as short as it is.

I've heard that www. is deprecated and I've found plenty of web pages about it when Googling.

Originally Posted by BiologyWebmaster

But in order to do this in google webmaster tools you need to be sure that you add and verify both versions of your URL. With www. and without www.

I think that's why a server-side redirect is a little more organized and less confusing.

yea that makes sense, because then it would influence every search engine listing and not just google. Also can help improve your analytics results.

However, for webmasters like myself some of use do not have that option because our host does not allow us access to their servers or any of the files.

So it's actually bad now to have www. in front of your domain now? Wow I did not know that?

Originally Posted by BiologyWebmaster

However, for webmasters like myself some of use do not have that option because our host does not allow us access to their servers or any of the files.

Most hosts that run Linux servers allow the use of .htaccess files for that sort of thing.

Originally Posted by BiologyWebmaster

So it's actually bad now to have www. in front of your domain now? Wow I did not know that?

Not bad, just slowly going out of style... supposedly.

ok thanks, you just flipped my pancake onto its other side lol. I will ponder on the idea a bit about changing the google setting to prefer the non www. version of my domain.

Wow, you know what. I do not even know what OS my host's servers use, wow that should have been something i looked into when i first signed up with them