What is canonical url?

I have been hearing more of this term around the web and in forums. In terms of Google, canonicalization is the way we can pick the best url when there are several choices and it usually will refer to the homepages. Canonical means “Standard” or “Authoritative”

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

Confused yet? Don’t worry it takes time to understand.  Make sure that you pick the URL you want. One thing that google looks at is the URL is consistent across the entire site. Don’t use some of your urls one way and some the other. Pick the url you prefer to use for your internal links.

For the people who want to make sure that all their webmaster ducks are in a row on this topic, here’s my two-minute advice:
- Pick one way of writing all your urls and use that consistently in your pages and your links.
- If you pick (say) www.example.com as your preferred root page, make sure that you have a permanent (301) redirect from pages such as example.com to www.example.com.  To be extra safe, feel free to use Google’s webmaster console to specify the preferred root page of your domain (www.example.com vs. example.com).

The adoption of the canonical url by Yahoo!, Live & Google allowing webmasters and site owners to eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is, in my opinion, the biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps. The Canonical URL tag attribute is similar in many ways to a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective. In essence, you’re telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one (which a 301 does).