Canonical issues

Something that is very important but most webmasters overlook is Canonical optimisation. A common canonical mistake is having both http://www.mydomian.com and http://mydomain.com, Google will index both. Thus it causes duplicate content issues and page strength syphoning.

Examples of Bad Canonical Optimisation

http://www.mydomain.com

http://mydomain.com

http://www.mydomain.com/index.html

http://mydomain.com/index.html

Example of Good Canonical Optimisation

http://www.mydomain.com

Thanks to the guys at Search Engine Round Table, here are a few ways to fix these Canonical Issues:

• Canonicalize the domain (e.g. redirect non-www and IP address to www)
• Canonicalize my index pages (redirect “/index.html” to “/”)
• Remove multiple slashes in the URL
• Remove spurious query strings (my sites’ pages are mostly ‘static’ with a few exceptions)
• Fix-up common typos in type-in URLs
• Fix-up invalid inbound links caused by bad HTML mark-up
• Fix-up URLs resulting from bad copy-and-pastes
• Fix-up outdated or otherwise incorrect query strings
• Suppress the fix-up redirect if the resulting URL does not resolve to an existing file
• Suppress the fix-up if the link is on my own site (In this case, I want to see the 404 error)
• Suppress the fix-up if the remote user is me or a site tester (Again, we want to see the 404 error)
• Avoid recursion in mod_rewrite running in a per-directory .htaccess context
• Avoid the nasty mod_rewrite bug in Apache 1.3.x
• Do all of the above using a single 301-Moved Permanently redirect

About Neil Pursey

Neil Pursey has written 138 post in this blog.

Founder of WebGrowth, co-partner of ThinkSEO and GROW Academy. Passionate about WordPress. Happily married to his beautiful wife.

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