December 16, 2008 by James Oliver
Canonicalization is one of those weird computer words that a lot of people are unsure about the meaning of. Luckily, it actually isn’t that complicated. It essentially refers to the process of Google picking the best URL (the canonical URL) from several choices.
Here’s an example. Most people would see fishandchips.com as the same URL as www.fishandchips.com/ or www.fishandchips.com/index.html. However, they actually aren’t. Those URLs could contain completely different content to one another, which is why Google needs the process of canonicalization, to attempt to pick the best, most representative, URL from that list.
Unfortunately, this might not be exactly the URL you wanted them to pick.
A good way to make sure that the canonical URL is the URL you want, is to use your preferred URL throughout the site. If you want it to be www.fishandchips.com, then direct all your links to that URL, not some to it and a few to another almost identical one. Another tactic is to redirect other URLS to your preferred URL. For example, if someone types in fishandchips.com, you can do a 301 redirect to www.fishandchips.com.
Well, I hope that’s explained something. Maybe now when the word comes up in conversation you’ll be able to do something other than smile and nod.
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