As I wrote about the topic of DuplicateContent and how having the same content as someone else on theinternet can hurt your search engine rankings, there is another version of duplicatecontent that not many people talk (or even know) about. This form of duplication has nothing to dowith a potential competitor that has stolen your content; rather it deals withhow you have been structuring your website. This is commonly known in the SEO world as canonicalization ofdomain. This comes from the root "canonical",which means to reduce something to its simplest form. When we talk about canonicalization of domainfor SEO, we are talking about the process of picking the best URL when you haveseveral choices. This is most commonlyreferred to for your home page.
You may be thinking, "But I only have one website, why wouldI have several choices?" Well, at firstglance, you would think that there was only one URL. In reality, and according to the searchengines (which is what you should be concerned about), there are multipleversions of your website. Let's say thatyou have a site, "mysite.com". Here are some of the potential URLs that asearch engine could find for that domain:
- mysite.com
- www.mysite.com
- www.mysite.com/index.html
- www.mysite.com/
Although those URLs appear the same, they could turn into differentcontent when you go to each URL individually. So the question remains; how do you avoid this issue and make yourdomain canonical? Well, there are severalways. First, you could create your websiteusing the same URL structure from the ground up, but that would be impossibleif you have a site that has grown over the years. Second, you can go through your website anddetermine what version of the URL you want to set as the permanent one that youwill use from here on out, and go with it. Once you have picked the URL, you then need to create a permanent 301redirect on your server (NOT a temporary 302 redirect!). When you do this, your server will handle anyrequest for any of the alternative versions of your URL and it will respond toa request with your preferred URL. Thesearch engines will eventually realize that this is your preferred URL, and youwill have solved the issue of canonicalization of domain.
If you are unsure or you just don't feel like making changesat the server level, don't fret. Thereis a new method to achieving this result, and it is much easier. In February 2009, Google, Yahoo, andMicrosoft agreed that they were going to support the use of the Canonical LinkElement. This tag goes into the <HEAD>of your source code and it will tell the search engines what the canonical(preferred) URL is. This makes life alot easier than having to make changes on the server end. Here is the Canonical Tag code, where youwould place your preferred URL if your canonical URL was "www.mysite.com":
<linkrel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com"/>
All you have to do is add this code to your headers, and you have now used an alternative method to canonicalize your domain.
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