SEO Tips - Canonicalization - www vs. non-www
March 15th, 2008 at 07:25pm Under SEO
Whether you know only basic SEO or are into advanced SEO, one of the most important yet simple SEO strategies is optimizing your canonicalization, which is a fancy SEO term for whether or not to use www in your URL’s.
This is a really simple SEO trick and yet I see even so called SEO experts and huge sites with SEO companies working for them making this basic search engine optimization error and as far as SEO goes, this is about one of the biggest SEO blunders you can make because it is something so easily fixed, yet can really drag down your potential PR.
What you need to know about canonicalization is that Google and the other search engines see a site using both URL’s as two different pages.
Yes, you read that right.
If your site resolves to both http:// and to http:// with the www afterwards then the search engines including Google consider those to be two completely different URL’s and will allocate your Pagerank accordingly.
What this means is that for example if you are a Pagerank 4 when you load your site with www and you are also a Pagerank 4 without it then you are splitting your potential Page Rank between those two URL’s.
If you try to type in http://professionalseo.com you will see that I have placed a permanent 301 redirect to http://www.professionalseo.com/ to prevent this.
This is a very simple redirect using .htaccess but a good SEO tweak that will do wonders for getting the most out of your Page Rank.
I have chosen to redirect to www but there is absolutely no SEO benefit or loss to choosing one over the other. The important thing SEO wise is to just choose one and stick with it. Load your index page into your browser with and without the www and simply pick whichever is higher in Pagerank, or if they are both the same then just choose which one you like better.
Take note that whichever URL your link partners choose to link to you with will be a prime determining factor as to which version has a higher Pagerank so make sure in the future after you make this change to always request that link partners are consistent with linking to your chosen preferrence, although since you will be doing a redirect that link-juice will still be translated to whichever version you chose.
Once you have completed the redirect log into your Google webmasters account if you have one and set an association as to how you want Google to view your site. You can find it under: webmaster tools/dashboard/tools/set preferred domain/
It is not manditory from an SEO point of view to do this last step as eventually Google will figure it out but it is more expedient to do so and the change will be noted more quickly.
Hope you enjoyed my SEO tip for the day.
By admin Add comment
