Check this link to know information about canonicalization. http://cutewriting.blogspot.com/2008/12/url-canonicalization-duplicate-content.html
Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example : http://mydomain.com http://www.mydomain.com The search engines do not care whether you use www or no www in URLs on your site. There is nothing in their ranking algorithms that causes them to rank a www version of a URL higher than a non-www version of the same URL. So the www and non-www are treated exactly the same by the search engines from a ranking perspective. Whether you use www or no www to link to pages on your site is totally up to you.
hi, So website url makes simple errors which does make search engine confused with different identity.As the variations in the url makes Search engines to consider them as different Addresses like http://www.example.com/ http://example.com/ http://www.example.com http://www.example.com/index.htm..etc So this can be avoided by Redirecting the url using htaccess file in server based configuration.. Cheers!!
Canonicalization is extremely useful if you have facet navigation on you website too, so example[dot]com/?view_all=false&sort_by=foo and example[dot]com/?sort_by=foo&view_all=false will appear as the same parameter query. I have just had to use this with a full ecommerce website and manage to reduce the page duplication by x5! Hope that helps. Ryan
Canonicalization is necessary but it doesn't mean that if would not adopt it then it will adversely affect your ranking,but Google suggest it.
Yes, this is probably what the original poster needs to know. The biggest "issue" relating to canonicalization is multiple copies of the same page using URLs like the above. This means that Google doesn't know which one it should list in the search engines. Definitely make sure your "non-www" URLs redirect to the "www" versions. e.g. http://example.com redirects to http://www.example.com this will help a lot to start.