What is Canonical URL? How to Clean Canonical URL’s and Reduce Duplicate Content

Sorry for the lack of posts for the last few days guys. I was making new sites. You know diversifying

Anyway, I’m glad to tell you that all this “site making scheme” gave me another SEO lesson. It’s duplicate content. Not the ordinary duplicate content most people know (Copying articles from another site) but duplicate content within your site. Yes, duplicate content WITHIN your site.

What’s Canonical URL’s?

No, not that

that either

Errr?

What the heck?!

How come that happens?

Google is not that smart – yet. Google is not your math teacher that wants to answer challenge questions. Google is like your little brother looking for his toys. Google wants you to feed them with information so they can eat it.

But like your bro, they don’t want ice cream over and over again, that makes their stomach ache and their teeth. So the extra waste goes down the drain or in the trash (Results in the supplemental index)

No literally, what is Canonical URL?

As Wikipedia stated:

Canonicalization is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation.

So, Canonical + URL (Uniform Resource Locator) = Duplicate Content = More supplemental results = less Google lovin’

Examples of Canonical URL’s are:

Example.com/

www.example.com
example.com/index.html
www.example.com/index.html

And many more combinations!

So, how do I clean my Canonical URL, so I get one URL representation only?

Well, you can edit your .htaccess file in the root of your site and add these lines if you want your site to use www:

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

Then upload it. That’s it. No more extra ice cream, err! pesky duplicate content on your websites