Website Canonicalisation

 

Forget how to pronounce it, leave the geek speak to us.

To be found online, website Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is vital. And one often-missed ingredient in successful SEO is canonicalisation.

But when we decided to write a blog post about it…well, it got geeky, and fast. Jeez, ‘Canonicalisation’ is hard enough to say out loud, let alone some of these other techy terms! And then we realized… you don’t want the might-as-well-be-speaking-Swahili details. You’ve got enough to think about, running a business! But you do need to at least understand why it’s important, and be sure that your website designer does too.

Content manageable websites (and e-commerce websites in particular) are notorious for having what could be called ‘duplicate content’. That is, different URLs that all show exactly the same – or very similar – thing.

For example, let’s say you sell a ring on your fashion website. Your visitors – and Google’s robots – might access the actual product page of that watch through many different URLs. You might find the page by searching the Men’s section, you might get to it by exploring a Clearance category, you might land on it via the Jewellery category, etc. There’s a high chance that even though you’re effectively seeing the same watch page, it’s sitting on a completely different URL.

In very simple terms, then, canonicalisation is:

The process of putting your hand up and saying to Google: “Hi Google. How are you? That’s great… Yeah, really good, thanks for asking. OK, so we have a whole bunch of URLs here that show the same content. We know that. But can you please ignore all of them except this one? This is the master URL – the one we prefer you crawl and the one we prefer you show in search results. Thanks.”

But why is it important?

In SEO, having the same content accessible through multiple URLs is not good practice – for several reasons. Here are just two:

• When the Googlebot crawls your website (stay with me - stay with me!) it doesn’t index every single page. It’s busy! Too many websites, too little time. It only crawls a limited number of pages. For every extra URL you have that shows the same content, that’s one less URL it could be crawling that has unique, keyword-rich content that could get you ranked better.

• When any other website links to yours, Google takes that as a ‘vote’ for your website. Imagine that 3 different bloggers like a product you’re selling, and they link to it. But they each got to the product page in a different way, resulting in them each using 3 different URLs to link to that product. Google would take this as 1 vote for 3 separate pages. Now, if you had they linked to the exact same URL somehow, Google would take this as 3 votes for the one product page. Much stronger, and much more likely to have a positive impact on your search engine rankings.

For any website designer worth their salt, canonicalisation is pretty easy to do.

And as well as being able, they should be very willing  – because the benefits to your search engine rankings, and thus to your business, are clear. 

Posted on the 15th of February, 2012, Written by Alana. Subscribe to our RSS Feed or our newsletter.

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