Katsbiz Internet Marketing Blog

Ever heard about canonicalization domain? It’s actually the method to choose the best url when there are some several choices that lead you to the same page. It’s not been seen by many user that when you go to http://domainname.com or http://www.domainname.com or http://www.domainname.com/index.php or http://domainname.com/, they go to the same page, but for search engine robots, they are actually seen as 4 different pages.

In that circumstances, search engine will calculate the value or the back links for this page as separate 4 pages, which actually go for the same page. It then of course will hurt the rank of the page since it’s divided to 4 different URLs.

So it is important to solve this canonical domain issue if you want to market your blog, or website, so you don’t risk duplicate content and so that your marketing efforts will be focused on one URL.

There is no need to be confused in choosing between using www or non www though, because from SEO point of view it really doesn’t matter whether you’d like to use www or non www for your homepage url. But please prefer one and stick to it, so you can get all potential backlinks to one of them.

How to get the search engine robots see your site as what you like?

1. Setting the parameter on Set Preferred Domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

Before doing it, of course you should submit your site using the chosen url. When it’s verified, just go to Dashboard - Tools - Set Preferred Domain, and define which version of URL that you choose for your homepage to be seen by the robot. This process will help the google robot to more accurately determine your site’s page rank. Though your site will be updated in the Google search results over a period of time, this information will be used for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. Keep in mind that this feature is only available for root sites and not support the subdomains or subdirectory sites.

2. Use 301 permanent redirect to facilitate the robot knows which URL you prefer to be canonical. For example, if you choose your defult URL to be http://www.domainname.com, then use 301 redirect to go to http://www.domainname.com whenever someone request http://domainname.com. You can do it by modify your .htaccess file. This 301 redirect will influence your results on all search engine (not only Google) and it also helps to fix all your permalinks, helps visitors link to your preferred domain name and is good for search engine optimization.

3. For wordpress user, you can go to wordpress admin panel, Settings - General. Then set your preferred URL in to the Wordpress Address field and Blog Address field.

That’s it. After you do this canonicalization method, you can focus to optimize the preferred URL that you’ve choose previously. And you will no longer have the canonical problem that will hurt your page rank later.

Read more about wordpress SEO tips from internet marketing Indonesia blog and Asian brain resources. Find out how to get traffic to website (blog or site built on any other platform) - visit the quoted site.

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