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SEO Advice: URL Canonicalisation

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Chameleon SEO Advice: URL Canonicalisation

If you have been told you have a canonicalisation problem with your website you will be asking yourself why no one else has told you this and is this really important?

What is a canonicalisation URL error?

Everyone spreading the word about your website will use different variations and as the Google spider goes around the Internet finding all the these links it will be collecting data and storing it into its database. But what is the chosen URL for the website so that Google can collect all this data for one website and add all the value being added to the website all in one place instead of various places.

If you are now confused we will explain, a website without a canonicalisation fix will have 4 landing pages as below:-

Now what we need is to funnel all this into one place. Also technically the web server setup may return different content for the URLs depending on the configuration.

Imagine that Google collects the data for the website as follows:-

If you configure the canonicalisation and then you will have all the value to one place. So the example above would be a total of 3360 inbound links to www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk if this is the chosen domain for Google to use.

We hope all this makes sense so far. If it does you will be wanting to do this change now so how do you do it?

Apache Web Hosting

If you have Apache web hosting you can setup a .htacess file as below:-

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^chameleonwebservices.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.html HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.chameleonwebservices.co.uk/ [R=301,L]