A large number of websites that we do SEO audits on have one specific massive problem which keeps occuring and it’s something which can be fixed within seconds.

Canonicalization as Google calls it, is when pages on your website are available via different URLs, this hampers your website’s performance on search engines massively and waters down the impact of any external backlinks which you have.

For example if you had a clothing website, the product page for a tshirt may be accesible from more than one URL:

http://www.example.com/products/tshirt

http://example.com/products/tshirt

This isn’t a massive problem if you don’t have many external backlinks, however if you start building your external backlinks, having people link to the products that you sell then the majority of time Google will treat each different type of link separately and therefore water down the impact that an external backlink will have on your rankings on Google and other search engines. The problem is that search engines see http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com as completely different websites. Therefore, they rank and index them individually. Any backlinks that you have going to the non-www version will have little to no impact on your www impact.

You can improve your search rankings by merging both non-www and www by using a 301 redirect on the non-www version of your domain. Therefore, you can consolidate all of your traffic and backlinks into a single URL, thus improving your search engine rankings across the whole of your website. There are other versions of canonicalization issues that your website could be suffering which could be hampering your Search Engine Optimisation.

That’s why for many SEO compliant websites the first step is to, redirect non-www to www (or vice versa) if the site is on a linux/apache server (in the htaccess file -

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

If that means nothing to you then don’t be to worried. Visual Identity has a vast amount of experience with Search Engine Optimisation services and can offer you tried and tested ethical techniques to optimise your website. we work with you and offer bespoke services to suit your long term business aims. Why not give us a call, or see what we can do for you.

By Scott Alexander

Junior Developer

Scottie having studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the London College of Communication, has now been with us over a year. He has brought with him a unique skill set which has expanded our comprehensive list of services to our client. Having trained as a graphic designer, but specialising in website development and search engine optimisation, he has been a key variable in some of our key web-based projects.

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