Canonical Home Page Issues
Canonical home page issues are usually overlooked by most webmasters. These issues pertain to the different ways of accessing a website’s home page, and their effect upon link building efforts.
For a demonstration of canonical home page issues, notice how you can successfully access DMOZ.org at each of the following URLs:
Why is this important? Because other webmasters (along with people using message boards, social bookmarking services, etc.) may use any one of these URL styles when creating links to your website.
Search engines count these links separately, spreading the linking benefit (a.k.a. PageRank) among the different home page URLs. This means that the number of links to your home page are minimized, thus worsening your position in search results and decreasing the search engine traffic to your site. Many home pages have these issues, but not all of them do.
To test if your site has canonical home page issues, try accessing it with different URLs (as listed above) and see if they work. If they work, but the URL in the address bar changes to the same, single URL each time, the issues have already been resolved. If only one URL works, there isn’t anything to worry about either.
If multiple URLs are functional and don’t redirect to a single URL, this should be changed. It is not very difficult to remedy these issues. You can do it manually, but using the cPanel interface (which most websites have) is easiest. Here are some quick step-by-step directions on how to fully resolve canonical home page issues:
1.) Log into cPanel.
2.) Click on the “Redirects” icon, under “Domains”.
3.) Select “Permanent (301)” from the drop-down menu.
4.) Choose the appropriate domain name from the 2nd menu.
5.) Leave the first field (after the slash) empty.
6.) In the field after “Redirects to >”, type your site’s full domain name, including the “WWW”. Example:
7.) Select the “Do Not Redirect www” radio button, and click “Add”.
8.) You can stop here, but the next step will redirect requests to /index.htm to a single URL as well.
9.) Click “Go Back”, and use the same information (steps 3, 4, and 6), but enter “index.htm” (or index.html, depending upon your site) in the 1st field. Select “Redirect with or without www.” and click “Add”.
This will redirect all visitors (and search engine “spiders”) to the same home page URL, with the result that your PageRank (linking credit) will be concentrated in a single URL. It is generally best not to use a META Refresh tag for redirection, particularly in this situation.
Resolving canonical home page issues is a worthwhile effort, as it can easily improve your site’s ranking in search results – especially if it has been linked to with a variety of functional URLs.
Related posts:
Strategies & Methods | seowhitehats | March 10, 2009
canonical home page issues, canonical homepage issues, home page issues, homepage issues
Great Article, always wondered how to solve this problem and you have made me figure it out with ease! Great work guys.