A lesson in Canonical URLs & Trailing Slashes

Most websites will use the http://www.website.com structure as their main website URL and this should be the address utilised in link building campaigns. However in some circumstances, you may find that Google has indexed two versions of the 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/

They are called “canonical” URLs and for the very best seo results, make sure you end all but one, and stick to it!

Use the Google site command to see if there's any extraneous URLs. Type in site:www.website.com to determine what pages are indexed. You probably have a large site, also try site:www.website.com/index.html or whatever your “index” page is. If both exist, you are likely to 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 essentially the most or link building to so that all possible link authority is transferred on the page you have been using on your link building campaign.

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

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

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

This is similar for www. vs non-www. issue. As for those the trailing slashes, Google Webmaster Central comforts you with advice that it’s not this type of bad thing having URLs with both. This is as long as there may be same content on both trailing slash pages and non-trailing slash pages and also you are according to using the popular version in internal links, sitemaps and link building from outside links. Google will usually manage to detect the preferred version and rarely will penalise you for this sort of “duplicate” content. However, if you feel particularly obsessive about disposing of the trailing slash for SEO, use a 301 redirect.
Resources:

Google Webmaster Tools
Use to ‘fetch as Googlebot, currently under “Labs” to see 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://casinoarticles.us

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

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