We get asked this question all the time. . . what is “canonicalization” and how does it help/hurt my SEO efforts? Canonicalization is the process of deciding what the best URL is for your website. This process is important since it can effect everything from your rankings to the overall usability of your site. Linking also becomes problematic, as people may link to you in a certain format but your site may be set up a different way. The user will still get to your page but the issue can impact the link credit you’ll get by the engines, ultimately impacting your overall positioning/rankings.
Most people, for example, would consider these the same exact urls:
- www.mysite.com
- mysite.com/
- www.mysite.com/index.html
To the search engines, however, all of these URLs are different and in fact could offer different content on each of the pages, if they wanted to. This, as you can see, is problematic for both humans and search robots. Search engines deal with this issue by deciding for you what the most consistent and best use of URLs is for your site. They then use this in their search engine results. So, whatever you choose you can be sure that the engines will know it and decide for you what to show in their results. People, on the other hand, have grown accustomed to using “www” when searching for a website. So, from our perspective the best way to handle canonicalization is with using the “www” first in your URL string (first example above).
There is a great debate online about this since the “proper” way to build a site is without using “www” as a prefix (second example above). Technically speaking in fact, “www” is actually a sub-domain of your website. This debate falls on deaf ears, however, since the usability of a site is more important than being technically correct and people definitely use “www” when referencing a site. Our final argument in favor of using “www” in your URL string is based on the fact that people who want to talk, link or blog about your site will inevitable use “www” when talking about you. The link credit you could get when people link to you will be diminished if you have a different URL string than the one they use. Again, we side with the people and strongly urge the use of “www” when choosing your URL conventions.
So, for usability, linking, and being consistent with human behavior please use “www” when building your site and make your site canonically consistent and correct.
