Solving the canonical issue: Free .htaccess tool
by Randall McCarley
October 16th, 2006
Search engines have a problem. The “canonical problem” is that search engines see multiple versions of the same page and count them separately. These “multiple versions” usually come from the www and non-www versions of your site (that are really the same thing).
For example, www.14thc.com is this site. So is 14thc.com. See the difference?
Well, the search engines do.
So what’s the big deal? By having two versions of the same site (even though there is really only one) the search engines get confused and devalue one because it duplicates the content of the other one which may be redundant data at best and search spam at worst.
The other issue is link power. If site A links to www.14thc.com and site B links to 14thc.com shouldn’t those links count for the same site? As far as you and I are concerned the answer is “Of course, there is only one site!” but the reality is that link juice gets split.
By now you either understand what I’m talking about or are really confused that there is a problem with your site that is preventing it from doing as well as it should in the search engines but you think it may have something to do with canons.
This problem is as difficult for the search engines to solve as it is for me to explain. They’ve been at it for years and the Big Daddy update was in part Google moving toward a fix but not a fix. Plus the Google Sitemaps program offers a way to do this but it only works in Google and maybe not even there yet. My tests show mixed results so far.
Good News: there is a fix. It’s been around for years and definitely works. It requires hacking your .htaccess file (not as scary as it sounds).
Better News: I’ve automated the code-generation part of the process removing the tendency for errors, learning or even much thinking.
Still Better News: I posted it for anyone to use free of charge.
Best News: You only have to do this once and it just takes a few minutes.
Check out the latest 14th Colony article and free tool: Seeing Double: Fixing Canonical Issues in the Search Engines.
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