Canonicalization Within Large Corporations

May 31, 2010 - PRLog -- As you probably have heard, canonicalization is one of the latest announcements sweeping the SEO industry.  What you probably haven’t heard, however, is how to pronounce it – or how it will effect your website.  I’ll do my best to explain canonicalization in layman’s terms, but forgive me if it’s still tough to understand.

First of all, canonicalization is basically the process of combining all of your duplicate URLs to one original canonical version.  The main question that I want to address here is this:

Should large corporations place this tag on every page because of marketing tracking codes, tons of duplicate URLS, and load balancing servers?
At this point in time, I’d have to suggest that you do not do this for now.  I don’t think you should just throw the canonical tag on every page of your website automatically and sort of “wing-it.”  While it doesn’t really hurt to have it on every single page, it certainly is more important to have a proper website architecture.  I’d say it’s absolutely a much better idea to spend some time sorting out which pages need work and which need addressing, and which pages need to have the canonical tag.  

Studies show that 28-36% of web hosts might have duplicate content, and we know that the search engines have limited resources to crawl this content.  While we can take steps and help with not having duplicate content, sometimes it’s not a good idea to create a 301 redirect or use something else.  This page level tag will be able to tell Google that the canonical, or the main URL for this page, is “www.example.com/thisisthepage”.  Google then creates a sort of mini 301 redirect on this page, so visitors, links, etc. will not be effected.

The benefit is that you no longer have to worry about 301 hijacks or anything along this nature when using the canonical tag in the header of your PHP, HTML, XHTML, or ASP page.

While syndication is not a bad thing, is sometimes can also become a problem because of the fact that your content is then spread out throughout the internet.  Google vastly suggests that you somehow let other publishers know that this content was created by you – that it was your content, and not the other’s content.  It can be as simple as a link back to your website from the article that you syndicate.

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We invite you to view more about SEO for large websites by visiting http://www.forgetmarketing.info

Andrew Hallinan is the owner of http://www.Synergy-SEO.com, which is Tampa's Search Engine Optimization company, and is Tampa Bay's leading Search Marketing Specialist.