SEO Step By Step Guide– 143. What Is Google Canonicalization?

Canonicalization is one of the ways of assessing which is the best fit URL for your website to be listed when there are multiple URLs. What looks like the same page for us and other human visitors is not the same for search engines. Search engines don’t just go by the content of the page to decide whether it is the same page or not. It rather makes use of the URLs to decide whether it is accessing the same page or a different page. So if your home page is referred using a number of formats, then it can confuse the search engines.

We can have something like the following for your homepage:

www.yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com/
yourdomain.com/home.asp
www.yourdomain.com/index.html

For the search engines all these pages are unique entities. However, when a search is made and your website is listed, Google has to decide which is the best URL to be displayed to list your website. Therefore, the process of deciding the best URL to list a website when there are multiple choices available.

At times Google may not be picking up exactly the same URL that we would like to be  picked up. This will also dilute the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and the your website’s PR. Google calculates the PR for the web pages and not for the entire website. So if there are multiple choices for the same page, the pagerank of each page may vary depending on the choice of URLs you have used in your link campaign. Therefore, to avoid such confusions in canonicalization of the URLs, make sure that you use the same URL in all the pages of your website to access this particular page. This applies not only to the homepage but also to rest of the pages. Even in your link campaigns make use of a single URL so that the link juice is not spread out and diluted to various pages. Google and other search engines consider these pages different because when used online, these pages are capable of returning different results.

You can also send all your traffic to a single URL say for example www.yourdomain.com/ by using 301 redirects for all the other URLs listed above. If you use such a permanent redirect, Google will know which is your primary or canonical URL for the page under question. Do not use URL removal tool to get rid of the other URLs from the index. This can lead to complete deletion of the domain from the index and it will take a minimum of 6 months to get yourself back on to the index. Consistency pays on the long run; so keep track of how your website is being referred internally as well as in the external campaigns.

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