URL Canonicalization is the process of picking up the best URL when several choices are available. For Example: smartblogtips.com, www.smartblogtips.com and www.smartblogtips.com/index.html are the same page, but to a search engine all three are different URLs. Reason is simple. A Web server can identify all three differently and return different content for each of the URLs.
How does Google treats it?
Google treats www.smartblogtips.com and smartblogtips.com differently. So, it might happen that your actually URL value as percieved by Google gets divided among both the formats.
If you have a fairly recent blog, its easy to setup a parmanent URL redirect and maintain consistency. But for cases where, the Blog is aged old enough, its difficult to do a permanent redirect. There would be a sudden drip in the rankings. But Google is smart enough and soon you can see your rankings return to normal.
Internal Links and URL Importance
Another important aspect of URL canocalize and how search engines determine the preferance of one over the other, would be the structure of Internal Links. Make sure you use same version of the domain name. Do not alternate between www and non-www versions.
Search Engine’s Take on URLs
Today, Search Engines to find the relevant information by making some adjustments. Some of the commonly known ones are treating www and non-www as same, removing or keeping trailing slashes, removing session IDs from forums, normalizing UPPER CASE domains, removing directory index like “index.asp” or “default.asp”, altering query strings etc. It varies from one Search Engine to another.
So, have you put thoughts in maintaining same version of URL throughout your Internanal Links? Share with us your experiences. Have a nice Days..!!
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