Pay Attention to URL Canonicalization
At Aaron Wall’s SEOBook blog, Peter Da Vanzo takes an in depth look at URL canonicalization and its effects on search engine optimization. Canonicalization is they way URL’s are standardized, like http://www.example.com as opposed to http://example.com or http://www.example.com/, etc.
It is important to the SEO process to pay attention to this. Da Vanzo writes:
If the search engines sees a page as being published at many separate URLs, the search engine may rank your pages lower than they would otherwise, or not rank them at all.
Canonicalization issues can split link juice between pages if people link to variants of the URL. Not only does this affect rank (less PageRank = lower rank), but it can also affect crawl depth (if PageRank is spent on duplicate content it is not being spent getting other unique content indexed).
URL Canonicalization is also sometimes referred to a URL normalization. For more on it, read the Wikipedia page.
October 21st, 2008 at 5:33 pm
It is really important to the SEO process to pay attention. I love to read the post. I love to forward the link. It’s really great. Thanks for sharing this in your post with us. Waiting for your next post like this.
November 8th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Canonicalization is very important and having worked at an SEO firm I can confirm that not many people even know what this is, or how to correct it.
December 18th, 2008 at 9:25 am
I know URL Canonicalization is the most important for SEO ranking. But I have a question about the search engine crawls the URL “http://www.abc.com” is different with “http://www.ABC.com” ? Maybe you have seen the situation in the some websites.
You enter “www.abc.com” in your browser URL bar before the web page displays content, you should pay attention to this URL changed “www.ABC.com”. I don’t know why it is.
I give the example it’s not indicative of URL Canonicalization, how do you think?