A lesson in Canonical URLs & Trailing Slashes

Most websites will use the http://www.website.com structure as their main website URL and this will be the address utilised in link building campaigns. However in some circumstances, many times that Google has indexed two versions of your homepage. E.g.

* http://www.website.com
* http://www.website.com/
* http://website.com
* http://website.com/
* http://www.website.com/index.html
* http://www.website.com/index.html/

These are called “canonical” URLs and for one of the best google search results, i suggest you terminate all but one, and stick with it!

Use the Google site command to check if you will find any extraneous URLs. Type in site:www.website.com to determine what pages are indexed. If in case you have a large site, also try site:www.website.com/index.html or whatever your “index” page is. If both exist, you ought proceed through your website links and point your “home” links to only one of them. Also consider putting a 301 redirect on extra pages to the URL that you have been using the most or link building to so that all possible link authority is transferred to the page you are using for the link building campaign.

For those who have several pages that contain largely identically content, e.g. an e-commerce site which has two URLs for one product – where one is navigated through “Brand” and one is navigated through “Style”, the smartest thing to do is to 301 redirect one of the best URL through your.htaccess file.

http://www.fantasticfashionstore.com/brand/red-dorothys-shoes

http://www.fantasticfashionstore.com/high-heels/red-dorothys-shoes

This is the same for that www. vs non-www. issue. As for those the trailing slashes, Google Webmaster Central comforts you with advice that it’s not such a bad thing having URLs with both. This is provided you have same content on both trailing slash pages and non-trailing slash pages and you are in line with using the popular version in internal links, sitemaps and link building from outside links. Google will usually manage to detect the well-liked version and rarely will penalise you for this sort of “duplicate” content. However, if you are feeling particularly obsessive about getting rid of the trailing slash for SEO, use a 301 redirect.
Resources:

Google Webmaster Tools
Use to ‘fetch as Googlebot, currently under “Labs” to determine what Google sees and also tell Google your preferred domain.

URL Rewriting Examples
This blog explains five useful instances.

Google Page Speed
What status server codes does your page return? Downloadable as a Firefox plugin.

Status Server Codes
Is it a 200, 301 or 404? (and what does it mean?)

Article Source: http://gamblingarticlessite.com

Ryan James is a successful search engine marketing consultant who works for an award winning SEO Company.

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