URL canonicalization, as known as URL normalization is the process by which URLs are altered and standardized in a consistent manner. In order to reduce indexing of duplicate pages, major search engines employ canonicalization process.  Meanwhile, 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. The word canonical means “standard” or ”authoritative”. 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.  For example, it would be the same between www. abc.com and abc.com. But, both of URLs are  dissimilar. A server could return different content for all the URLs above. Hence, xyz.com and www.xyz.com are considered as individual web pages or web sites. Actually, 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.

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 in order to avoid such grave problems. Also, the way is to end the link location at a trailing slash (/) instead of adding the default.asp or index.html link in the URL. Simple tools like mod rewrite are used for a web promotion expert to tweak the site URLs for a better and affordable search engine optimization.

Tagged as: Canonicalization, duplicate pages, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, similar pages, URL, URL Canonicalization, URLs