Google Canonical Issues and Its Solution

What is Google Canonicalization?

The word “canonical” basically refers to authoritative or standard. The particular url which you target for web marketing purpose and want your visitors to visit is generally a canonical url. When a website is designed and all of its tracking urls is arranged for internet marketing campaign, more than one url may seem right for a particular webpage. The process of the choosing the best url among the available options specifically for the home pages is known as canonicalization in Google. There are certain urls which seem to be same but are technically different. For example

• domain.com/
• www.domain.com
• domain.com/home.asp
• www.domain.com/index.html

In each of these cases the web server may return completely different web content. Therefore one should try to select the url that represents a particular webpage best from an available list for google url canonicalization.

Google Canonical Issues: -

Google canonical issues may cost search engine optimization professionals a huge cost in terms of domain url. It becomes manifold if the domain url is not set up properly. Google does not recognize both the www domain url (www.domain.com) and the non www domain url (domain.com) as the same website and considers them as completely different websites with individual pages which is not the case. When these pages get indexed by google, you may get supplemental result for duplicate content and at last your own link popularity may get severely affected with all these issues.

Solution to Canonical Problems: -

By setting up a permanent 301 redirect within your .htaccess file, you can protect your site from canonical issues as it requires FTP access only and redirects all forms of your domain url to one standard url called a canonical url. The .htaccess file is a text file which is there in your site to store directory and even site specific server information. A permanent 301 redirect within .htaccess file not only informs a search engine browser that the website it is accessing has moved permanently but also redirects that page to the new url.

Small amount of code lines within your .htaccess file located at root can fix the www/non www canonical issues. The only thing you have to do is to include the following code lines in your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]