Building relevant backlinks to your website is one of the key strategies to ensure your website ranks well, but did you know you also need to ensure you have put into place domain canonicalization measures too?
What Is It?
Most search engines, and google, will view different versions of your website address differently, and each version can be viewed as a independent and unique website. For example, google will view each of the following URL’s as different websites:
http://www.yourdomain.com/
http://yourdomain.com/
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html
http://yourdomain.com/index.html
Thats 4 potential problems, however most website owners do not recognize this is an issue until it becomes a problem, one of which is difficult to identify, but very easy to remedy.
Why Should I Worry?
When determining where your website should rank, search engines will take a look at many factors, including your backlink profile. These backlinks may of been built by yourself, an SEO team, or you may have been linked to by other websites in your industry citing your site or it’s content as reference. There may be times where someone has forgotten to include the ‘www.’ in the link, or someone else has used the ‘/index.html’ part of the URL too. This means, your links are split across the different URL variations, and as such, your website isn’t benefiting from the full link juice your site has acquired.
You may also find that you could have both versions of your website indexed in google, and this can lead to duplicate content, and harm your rankings.
How Do I Fix It?
In 2011, Google announced it’s support for the canonical tag to be used on webpages and sites to help them identify which page is the one you want displayed. It is a good idea for you to implement this to ensure your pages are labelled as the correct version, and thus shown to the public and ranked. However, we have found that the canonical tag can take some time to be picked up by google, and used in their ranking algorithm, so we also suggest you implement a 301 redirect on your domain via a htaccess file.
An example of a 301 redirect is as follows:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Once you have implemented this rule, it may take some time (usually a few weeks to a month) for google to recognise this, and provide full benefit to your domain.
