What is Domain Canonicalization?

What is Domain Canonicalization?

Domain canonicalization happens when a website has similar pages and the user wants to separate them in search engine results. This process uses rel canonical tags  who tell the search engines that a specific URL represents a copy of the master page. Canonical tags usually look like this  

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/" />

Why is Canonical Tags and Domain Canonicalization Important to SEO?

A long lasting white hat SEO will have multiple pages with similar content who end up looking something like this

• https://www.example.com
• http://example.com
• http://example.com/index.php
• http://example.com/index.php?

For the user, this is a single page. but for search engines, these 4 pages end up being unique pages which results in multiple copies of the same page being displayed on SERP. and as a result, the SEO of the website suffers.  

Best Domain Canonicalization Processes

• Use Canonical Tags as Self-referential.

Making rel canonical tags self-referential, you eliminate multiple steps and end up saving time and as a result SEO efficiency is increased.  

• Always Canonicalize Your Home Page

Your home page has the highest amount of duplicate URLs and by canonicalizing it, it performs more efficiently and effectively.  

• Spot Check Dynamic Canonical Tags

Bad coding leads to creating wrong URLs for websites completely bypassing the whole point of canonical tags and spot checking especially for e-commerce websites prevents disastrous errors.  

• Be Careful Around Near Similar Pages

Near similar pages have 90% similarity between them and using canonical pages can be recommended, but care must be taken as non-canonical pages are not usually ranked. So as a result if mistakes occur, the page with the highest  SEO potential might not end up getting ranked.