In the quest for better rankings, one thing that has always dogged webmasters and site owners was the issue of which URL was getting the benefit of linking campaigns, comments, link juice distribution and more. A typical web page could be rendered using any of the following:

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

While it’s probably very easy to see that they are all referring to the same page, they are in fact 4 distinct web addresses. What this did was to create a great deal of confusion in the eyes of the search engines. They didn’t know which page you wanted to be the official, or authoritative version of your site.

Understandably, this has caused a host of problems in the past, as linking campaigns were ineffective, internal linking became a nightmare, duplicate content issues arose and more. (Remember, the “duplicate content penalty” effectively only refers to content on the same domain. You can see how this could arise.)

This lead to the coining of the term “canonical URL”, which means the search engine friendly URL you want the search engines as well as your visitors to see. One solution savvy webmasters came up with was to simply redirect all “less desirable” versions of their URL to the canonical URL; in other words, the one they wanted as their authoritative URL. This worked, and still does. It is very easy to set up the control panel of your web hosting account.

Google and the other major search engines actually joined the discussion in February ’09 by instituting what has become known as the “canonical tag”. Google, MSN (now Bing) and Yahoo agreed to recognize this tag:

When placed in the header tag as a strong “hint” that this is the authoritative URL you want your site to be found for. Any other page this is placed on will be treated as a copy, and all benefit will flow back to your canonical URL.

The same effect can be done with a 301 redirect, and with perhaps more effectiveness. A 301 redirect also applies to website visitors and not only search engines, which can be useful for tracking purposes.

While this may be beyond the scope of many beginning webmasters, it can be simply accomplished via either method discussed here, by accessing your web hosting accounts control panel, and either editing the sites pages or creating redirects directly in the control panel.

If you are actively involved in a linking campaign and trying to increase search engine rankings for your sites, you may want to make doubly sure that your canonical issues re in order!