Canonical URLs to prevent duplication of content

Canonical URLs to prevent duplication of content

Jul 09

While I was setting up this blog as well as it’s template, I came across the term “canonical URL”  while I was viewing the HTML source code. After much researching, I’ve found out it’s importance and how you can take advantage of it to help your search engine (SEO) position better or prevent any penalties that Google or other search engines will impose on duplicate content.

So what is this thing called Canonical URLs?

Let’s say our website SEO Philippines has the URL http://seo-philippines.com

In most cases, when you type either the following, you’ll have the same page result

• http://www.seo-philippines.com
• http://www.seo-philippines.com/index.php
• http://www.seo-philippines.com/index.htm

This becomes a problem because you are going to have 3 additional duplicate content for your site and most likely get penalized for it or split the popularity of your domain between these web addresses. As an SEO professional or even a site owner, make it a practice to have a standard URL for your site.

Now my default canonical URL is http://seo-philippines.com for all purposes even on my printed materials. This means even if you type the www prefix, it will return to the default URL of my site.

As of this writing, I got to the top 3 rank of Google search results page using the keyword SEO Philippines. Unfortunately the cataloged URL was http://www.seo-philippines.com so when I set it to http://seo-philippines.com, I disappeared. So lesson learn the hard way. I hope this post helped you in some way or at least my experience will help prevent you from doing the same mistake of submitting the wrong URL. I’m also updating all my internal links and links from other sites to conform to the new URL. I hope to get back on track again with the right URL this time.