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Canonicalization tends to confuse many webmasters so let's start from the basics. So, what is Canonicalization? This is the process wherein all URL's are standardized. Basically, a website such as kate.com would be recognized as the same website as kate.com/ even with the difference in the syntax of the URL. Why does it become a SEO issue? Canonicalization becomes an issue in the event that a search engine fails to properly normalize URL's. An example of this would be when a search engine see's "http://www.example.com" as a different website from "http://example.com" in instances such as this one, the search engine got the host names mixed up. I know what you must be thinking; this couldn't be that big of a problem as long as it still leads people to your site. However, canonicalization affects your site's search engine ranking significantly. This is because if a search engine views your page being published under different and separate URLs they might rank your pages lower than they should and in some cases, not rank them at all. Canonicalization problems can eventually cause a link split between the pages of your website if the people who link to you varies the URL that they use. Not only would this have an effect on your site's overall ranking, it would also affect your site's crawl depth. So, I know you want to know how to prevent this from happening but to get to an answer, you should first know what causes it. There could be a variety of reasons, actually as to why this problem occurs. We've already mentioned one which is the difference in the syntax of your website URLs, it could also be attributed to URLs that were not properly configured, the use of different protocols, the addition of one too many slashes in the URL, two index pages that appear in one location (index.htm vs. index.html) as well as Capitalization. So now that you know the probable causes of URL Canonicalization issues, how would you know if they are actually affecting your site's ranking? Well, you could begin by performing a manual check or you can just opt to use Google's cache date. Previously, Google allowed the use of their supplemental index marker; however, they have done away with it most recently. This supplemental index acts like a secondary index which is different from Google's main one. Think of it as a graveyard that contains all the outdated pages, ones with duplicate content and pages that have low trust scores. As mentioned, duplicate pages appear in this index and as such, if you see yours listed let this be an indicator that your site is having canonicalization issues. Now, onto prevention and the ways by which you can keep your site from having this canonicalization issue, there are plenty of ways by which you can prevent this URL problem from happening. One of which is to make sure that you plan your site well, having a good architecture or site plan from the very beginning would surely save you from a lot of problems that might arise later on. Another is to be consistent with linking conventions. Just these 2 things alone would save your site from the dreaded URL canonicalization problem and as said before, a good design from the beginning is key. So plan your site well to avoid encountering this issue later on.
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