What is a canonical URL? I was reading something about that in some forums, so don’t worry if you don’t know, I also didn’t. Around Google, canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. Canonical essentially means “standard” or “authoritative”, so a canonical URL for search engine marketing purposes is the URL that you want the visitors to see. Depending of how your web site was programmed or how your tracking URLs were setup for marketing campaign, there may be more than one URL for a particular web page.

For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

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

Technically all those urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set. The problem of most search engine marketers run into deals with domains and sometimes if a domain is not setup properly, the domain URL (domain.com) and the www domain URL (www.domain.com) are considered as individual web pages, websites completely different but really both are the same and that’s a big error from the search engines side. Since both pages maybe indexed by Google, you could get hit for duplicate content and at the very least you would be splitting your link popularity.

An easiest way to protect your site is to redirect all forms of your domain to one “standard” URL, a canonical URL. To do this, you need to have some code lines in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

With that lines, I’m forcing to search engines to load http://mrjavo.com/ when someone type www. or http://www., you can try by typing some of those links on your browser and you will see how http://mrjavo.com/ will load, that’s because all those URL are technically “the same”.

I recently was reading about a kind of penalty by Google about “position six penalty.” The signs of being hit by a “position six penalty” is when you see your number one or two rankings shift downwards to position number six in Google. Many people first started noticing this happening in mid-to-late December. So I was investigating this rumor, may be is a bug and not a penalty.

When the theory was first discussed, Google’s Matt Cutts shrugged it off by saying, “Hmm. I’m not aware of anything that would exhibit that sort of behavior.” But there should be something truth on it with this much forum activity on one topic. After a weeks, the phenomenon described has now been confirmed by Google’s Matt Cutts in one of Sphinn threads on the topic.

Matt commented:

When Barry asked me about “position 6″ in late December, I said that I didn’t know of anything that would cause that. But about a week or so after that, my attention was brought to something that could exhibit that behavior. We’re

in the process of changing the behavior; I think the change is live at some datacenters already and will be live at most data centers in the next few weeks.

In general if you think a site might have a penalty (perhaps from past behavior) and you think the site is clean presently, you can do a reconsideration request in our webmaster console to ask Google to take another look at the site.

It appears from Matt’s comments that the drop for pages impacted was an “unintended consequence,” as Glengara puts it in a WebmasterWorld thread, to the December 2007 Google update. But Matt confirmed the behavior and said Google has already begun reversing it. So if you are stuck in the position six penalty, you may contact Google through Webmaster Central and request for a reconsideration, although you will most likely see it reverse itself within the next few days.

However, this is one of the many reasons why I recommend you, and not only me also so many SEOs does, that you should hold back on making drastic changes to your pages if you see a drop in rankings. Sometimes it is an issue on Google’s side and not in yours, and they make a change on their code that you simply cannot control. In this case, those that sat back for a couple months will see things return to normal within days.