Nov 28

In technology, or moreover, computer science, canonicalisation is the operation of transfiguring data that has multiple potential representations into a single, canonical representation.

In search engine optimisation, this refers to the avoidance of having more than a single representation of your data, ie; website. Millions of websites have two options to their website, firstly, website.com, and secondly, www.website.com. This may seem like a trivial point, but when it comes to the indexing of your website, the algorithm by which your pages are ranked may or may not choose the best option, and that is something out of your control, except for removing the options in the first place.

Avoiding canonicalisation is extremely simple to achieve, but many websites fall in to the trap of believing that having two sites indexed, two likely identical sites its worth mentioning, will improve their rankings, or at the very least increase brand/site exposure.

The fact is this just isn’t the case. If you’re a webmaster, or business owner with a website through which you wish to receive traffic and potential custom, it’s important that you correctly and clearly define the channels through which a search engines spider should travel.

This is unlikely to lead to any ‘duplicate content’ penalisation, but its good practice, and is ultimately one of the fundamental actions that should be taken upon the launch of any website, particularly one of significant depth.

If you are unsure whether your domain has correctly taken the steps to avoid canonicalisation, simply type website.com in to your browser (replacing website.com with your own URL of course). If this redirects you to www.website.com, then you are fine, but do not fear if it doesn’t, there is a simple procedure to ensure you communicate your site correctly.

Firstly, open your text editor of choice, and copy the following code in:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.website.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Then, replace website.com and www.website.com with your own domains equivalents, and save this with the filename .htaccess, with which you can perform other techniques to improve your chances of ranking your site correctly, including rewriting your URL’s, but this is generally for smaller sites as you will need to include the code for each URL individually. For larger sites this is usually done through a combination of database category allocation and PHP (or similar) code.

Once you have saved this file, place it in your local root directory, save, then upload it to the root directory of your remote (hosting) server. Now, give it a try and you will find that if you type in website.com it will automatically redirect to www.website.com,thus avoiding canonicalisation and incorrect indexing of your sites information/services.

Try some examples. Follow the first link:
http://harrisfowler.co.uk - good personal injury site, you will find yourself at www.harrisfowler.co.uk.

Now, try the following link:
http://youclaim.co.uk - bad personal injury site, you will find you are at the URL originally shown.

Remember, if you have a website, let it serve it purpose.

Expert Author On Ezine Articles
Aug 21

I recently wrote about Advanced Web Ranking, and the issues faced with that, but it transpires that Google has blocked all ranking software available for SEO’s and webmasters. Google is successful at presenting information to the world almost purely because that information has been presented to them, and by who? SEO’s of course. If it weren’t for us we’d have titles like “home”, and alt tags missing, which, although they can get abused at times, are still providing much needed information to the blind community. We use these softwares to measure how successful we are presenting our clients web-pages, and we require them to provide proof of our efforts.

Google has put itself in a position of authority, and is operating an intentional maneuver to secure more PPC business. I had never viewed it that way until my boss brought this to my attention this morning, and how very right he seems now. Google shouldn’t necessarily embrace SEO, but they are abusing their position as the worlds number one search engine and manipulating businesses to part with their cash in their on-going pursuit of becoming the internets China. Google and SEO need to be like two old band members that just tolerate each other for the greater good, occasionally we’ll bicker and we may even exchange the odd blow, but we’ll still stick together and maybe even swap Christmas cards, but right now Google has an AK47 pressed right between our eyes and they’re not afraid to pull a trigger or two.