Canonicalization

Canonicalisation is the prevalent problem of having the exact content available on both WWW and pages without WWW (www.apppl.com and apppl.com). While it is perceived to be the same, the search engines mistakes it to be two different pages. In many cases, the search engines can figure out that they are the same page and only the inclusion of the canonical URL is in their index.

The canonical URL of any web page is the authoritative version categorized by major search engines. Determination of the canonical URL is done through Page Rank or similar measures by the search engines. Canonicalisation leads to categorizing the real problem and duplicating content issues. But most importantly, this phenomenon differentiates between both and tends to share it too. 

Canonicalisation would be more complicated if search engines add to all URL based session IDs to the URLs. Session IDs are separate URLs for each user in each session. This will result in each page having hundreds and thousands of separate URLs instead of the main one. The real problem is that the URL is unlikely to have any kind of authority as it’s a unique URL just for the session when the spider crawls the site. The real problems is that these URLs might find their way into the search engine index, and as these session URLs are likely to have any link authority and might send your site back significantly. This could also mean the spider could be reading a session Id instead of the main URL.

There are two different ways to fix this major issue hindering your website’s rank. Google recently announced supporting a new “canonical tag” that lets you specify in the HTML header, that the URL should be treated as a copy and all links and authority should flow back to it. This would mean that the search engines should index the canonical URL specified should weigh any link authority. This solution is easily implemented could have problems loading the same page. The other method is using the 301 directs.  301 direct is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. It carries over any link authority to another URL as opposed to 302 redirect, which is a temporary solution. But, with 301 direct one can avoid user complications. The only problem with 301 direct is, that it is hard to implement. As before using 301 redirect, one needs to create a .htaccess file that uploads to the root of the server. It is integral to make sure all website URLs are redirected and organized properly. Choosing one canonical URL can impact your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION efforts majorly. It’s better not to confuse the search engine spider or the user.