So what is canonicalisation? Quite simply it is the situation where more than one URL points to the same content. Here is an example – the homepage for verulamwebdesign.co.uk could be accessed by typing:
www.verulamwebdesign.co.uk
verulamwebdesign.co.uk
verulamwebdesign.co.uk/index.php
or www.verulamwebdesign.co.uk/index.php
Go on try it. You will see that each time the URL changes to verulamwebdesign.co.uk. Why? Well quite simply this is a WordPress-based website and it creates a .htaccess file that has code to ‘redirect’ the 4 possibles to the one I have chosen. One reason for loving WordPress…..
So why bother? Quite simply if you don’t Google will dilute your search engine rankings. Reason is because, although these four URLs look the same, they are different and could serve different pages/content. So Google finds several routes to the same content and therefore you have ‘duplication’ and Google doesn’t like that. It can only consider one version as the ‘canonical’ URL, all the rest are duplicates.
Try your own website and see if you have this issue. Solution is to either create a .htaccess file to solve this, use WordPress or hurt your SEO.
