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”.