Canonical issues being fixed
Before you look up canonical on thefreedictionary.com, let me give you a visual on what this means and why it is no good for search engines and the overworked webmaster.
This is a recent log snapshot from one of my stat trackers, Webalizer:
If you look at #2 and #5 , you will see they are the same URL, just one has the www and the other doesn’t. Same goes for #9 and #12. (#4 and #10 are the same but that’s not the same issue).
As to why this is no good for search engines, I will refer to Google’s Matt Cutts, SEOMoz and 14th Colony who explain it better than I ever could.
Why this is no good for the overworked webmaster (i.e. me) is it makes it harder to quickly gauge how many hits a page gets. I have to add the hits of #9 and #12 to see how many hits the E and E Club page gets. While I don’t mind hard work, I hate unnecessary work. Thankfully, this problem should be gone in the near future after a little re-coding. For all webmasters, this is something you should check out for your site too!
Technorati Tags: canonicalization, seo, sem, 302, google, web optimization, web traffic
on April 25th, 2007 at 4:29 am
Thanks for the link (Google told me about it)! The canonical issue is an undeserved pain for webmasters and SEOs alike. Just wait until Google figures it out - you’ll see a noticible jump in traffic. Good luck!