URL Canonicalization

[adisonclay]

Please provide me short & exact information on URL Canonicalization.

[Ace]

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:
Example Web Page (http://www.example.com)
example.com/
Example Web Page (http://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.

[janestewart]

Yes Ace is correct.

Canonicalization is the process by which URLs are standardized. For example, ACME Laboratories (http://www.acme.com) and ACME Laboratories (http://www.acme.com/) are treated as the same page, even though the syntax of the URL is different.

This issues can split link juice between pages if people link to variants of the URL. Not only does this affect rank, but it can also affect crawl depth.

[mauco]

Basically, canonicalization requires you to find a uniform format for your URL / links and stick to it. Its best to have these well laid prior to developing and launching your website so that you don't have issues later on when trying to rectify things.

[angilina]

Please provide me short & exact information on URL Canonicalization.

This video may help;

Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/)

[DuncanM]

There is a lot of good information already in these forums, just do a search on the term "canonicalization". For example, a thread started by "wige" and now a Sticky, is pretty thorough.

In addition, Google's Webmaster Central has a page on the topic:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066

And a recent Blog post (21 April 2010) has some more recent info:

"To slash or not to slash"
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

If you are wondering whether to use domain.com or domain.com/, it doesn't matter; according to the blog post, Google treats either version equally.