URL Canonicalization

December 20, 2008 by dashaver

A canonical URL is uniform, meaning that all references to this web site are the same. See the examples at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_normalization
Search engines do this to remove duplicate content from their index. Imagine if you searched for something and got a 100 results referring to the same page. That would not be much help especially if the page was not relevant.

You can use Apache .htaccess files to add the www even if users don’t. Read this article to see how to do this.

Excellent post by Matt Cutts

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