Canonicalization is an important SEO topic that can be relatively confusing. And one aspect seems to be coming up again frequently. The debate about the importance of www.yoursite.com vs. yoursite.com continues. Is a site’s Page Rank and/or Link Popularity affected when these URLs are not structured properly? And what is proper at least in Google’s eyes? Are they read as separate domains?

Basically, canonicalization when used in terms of a URL format is referred to by Wikipedia as :URL normalization (or URL canonicalization). It is the process by which URLs are modified and standardized in a consistent manner. The goal of the normalization process is to transform a URL into a normalized or canonical URL so it is possible to determine if two different URLs are actually equivalent and the same, not duplicate sites.

Search engines employ URL normalization in order to assign importance to web pages and to reduce indexing of duplicate pages. Web crawlers perform URL normalization in order to avoid crawling the same resource more than once. Web browsers may perform normalization to determine if a link has been visited or to determine if a page has been cached.

In other words, this is viewed as giving your website two different URL addresses which are not necessarily the same address to search engines. What you need to do is set one as the default, usually people prefer the www.yoursite.com. If you do not have a default set you really should add a 301 redirect from http://yoursite.com to http://www.yoursite.com. In doing this you can rest assured that 100% of your internal and external link juice and search rankings are being applied to your primary website.

Matt Cutts from Google recently discussed this on his blog. It seemed like a worthy topic for discussion here for anyone interested in perfecting their on site SEO, and insuring that their off site SEO is paying full dividends.

So to be sure, you should add a 301 redirect to you .htaccess file on your website. If you are not familiar with a 301 redirect you can read up on how to do this here:

http://www.beyondink.com/howtos/301-redirect.php

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html

In summary, a 301 redirect is a text file saved as .an htaccess file on your server which states 301 redirect http://johnwieber.com to http://www.johnwieber.com

I believe this is fairly important. If when visiting http://yoursite.com, you do not get redirected to http://www.yoursite.com and vice versus then you possibly have a problem.