What is URL Canonicalization?

Author: Manish Shrivastava

URL canonicalization, also known as URL normalization is the process by which URLs are altered and standardized in a consistent manner. Major search engines employ canonicalization process in order to reduce indexing of duplicate pages. Web spiders perform URL normalization to avoid crawling the same web page more than once. This can be tricky for a web promotion specialist if he does not set up the domain properly or does not use consistent link structures throughout the site. Inconsistent link structures and improper domain setup can result in duplicate content and this could hamper search results.
The word canonical means 201Dauthoritative201D or 201Cstandard201D. There might be more than one URL for a particular web page depending on how the tracking URLs were set up or how the site was programmed for marketing campaign. E.g. for most users the following URLs would be same:
www. xyz.com
xyz.com
But, technically the above URLs are dissimilar. A server could return different content for all the URLs above. A web site promotion firm makes this mistake as it does not set up the domain properly. Hence, xyz.com and www.xyz.com are considered as individual web pages or web sites. However, actually, both are one and the same, hence search engines index both pages and the web master can get penalized for duplicate content, or he might be at the risk of splitting the content.
To avoid such grave problems, web masters should employ consistent linking structures throughout the website to ensure that they get the maximum page rank at the URLs they want indexed. The best way is to end the link location at a trailing slash (/) instead of adding the default.asp or index.html link in the URL.
Affordable web promotion is all about looking into the minute things and modifying them instead of going for costly web promotion tools. A web promotion expert uses simple tools like mod rewrite to tweak the site URLs for a better and affordable search engine optimization.

About the Author:

I am the webmaster at www.synapseindia.com 2013 A web development company offering web site promotion firm to businesses in India and abroad.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - What is URL Canonicalization?