URL Canonicalization - Please Don't Get Confused Here!

byArjunUllaz

1.6K followers

9 years ago

What Is URL Canonicalization stands for?

The definition of canonicalization is quite difficult therefore I will explain to you in some simple steps by taking two URLs of a website:

• http://yourdomainname.com
• http://www.yourdomainname.com

If both of the above-mentioned web pages shows content and none of them redirects to any of them then this can lead to content duplication penalties from Google. The problem with the Google bots or any other search engine bots is that they can't decide which version of URL they should add in order to index.

You must fix this problem using your server settings or using All-in-one or Yoast plugins so that your visitors can open your site with or without "www".

When to use Url canonicalization?

Some important conditions that can be prevented with Url canonicalization:

• Presence of different Url's in same content
• Various tags & categories that result in same content
• Various ports
• When Url's having HTTP & HTTPs resulting in same content
• When sharing syndicated content
• When a website has both www and non-www
• Displaying same content on different Url or subdomain in mobile websites

When not to use Url canonicalization?

There are some situations which we may not perform Url canonicalization:

• You are not supposed to add Url canonicalization tag on the second page of Url as that won't get indexed by any search engines especially Google
• Don't add multiple canonical tags for your websites
• Don't use canonical tags on shortened Urls
• Don't point a canonical Url to a website with non-200 status code
• Don't ever use canonicalization for page sculpting

You should not have to pay much attention to this issue but at the same time, it is better to fix this problem in order to avoid penalties.

You can check whether your site hits with this canonicalization problem using this site: http://seositecheckup.com/tools/url-canonicalizati...

Thank you

Arjun