Profusion Forums

1/19/2011 1:36:26 PM Donna Posts: 73	I tried to not post something new here but I have questions. dangit. I don't think I understand this canonical URL thing. The more I read about it the more confused I get. How exactly do you tell if a site has a canonical url? Here's what prompted the question. I ran a website evaluation on a site recently and we also had you guys evaluate the same site. Why? Because I wanted to see if I was doing it right. Make sure I was looking at the right things and seeing the same things that you guys would be seeing. I thought the site had a canonical url based on what I learned watching the QS on website evals. You guys say it doesn't. Now I need to know exactly how you tell so I won't make the mistake again. Deep in my heart I want this to be a mistake on your side. I'm not gonna lie... but I know it was probably me. LOL!!
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1/19/2011 3:39:51 PM pcvalentine Administrator Posts: 10	I always look forward to your posts. You get a chuckle out of me each time. Ok, so first, some information directly from Matt Cutts, Google Software Engineer... Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway? A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. 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 But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set. Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want? A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links. Q: Is there anything else I can do? A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.). Now about your question specifically. I assume you are talking about the evaluation for des-inc.com right? In our evaluation, we said "No - Contact your webmaster to have the non www version of your domain name pointed to the www version of your domain name" because on the DES site, only the homepage has the redirect in place. If you go to http://des-inc.com it will redirect you to www.des-inc.com which is great. But if you click to another page, then remove the www. and click around the site a little, it remains on the non-www version. Make sense?
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1/20/2011 1:51:51 PM Donna Posts: 73	Perfect sense. Thank you. You go over things so quickly in the video I didn't catch the part where you check from other pages on the site as well... which I should have figured out since I was checking the other pages for just about everything else.
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