Is URL Canonicalization is Must???

Dear Friends

I am doing SEO for my client website, since i am beginner, i want to know the uses of URL canonicalization. The website URL was irrelevant with content, so i have changed the major part of the URL structure. Is this will affect my website in search engines? Now my website is not performing well, in the search engines. Do i need to add <link rel> with my old URL in every page? The website is a PR4 for home page and PR2 for inner pages. This is ten years old website. But still its not performing well in search engines. What can i do for better result? Kindly help me in this issue.

I am looking for replies. Thank you.

 

Yes. because some websites can't open without www. So all website's url must be start with www.

 

Other wise Google may spam the pages due to repeated content. Which tells the Google that pages are referred to canonical so that Google may not spam

 

yup you have to avoid duplication. Using canonical you will make clear to google that contents on both the urls are same and consider only one url to rank high in search engine.

 

Thank you very much for your replies. Kindly tell me how can i assign canonical URL. Should i give my old URL structure in the head section of each page??

 

Consider this example and you will find the your answer-

Example-

page 1 and page 2 have almost same content with product in page 1 arrange in a-z and products in page 2 in z-a order.

In this case we will use canonical tag and will tell search engine that content on both the pages is same to avoid any duplication issue and inform the search engine bot to rank page 1 in search engine compared to page 2.

Following code we will add in page 2's header
-
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page1" />

Hope the example helps you understand the canonical tag.

More of the same here - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...canonical.html

Hope this helps

 

Hi
Thank you very much for your reply. Your example was awesome, now i am very clear. Thanks a lot

 

My Pleasure, if you found my reply helpful, do increase my reputation.

Cheers!

 

Yes it is must because it is duplicate issue.....
good share in this thread ....

 

hi

If your website is 10 years old then you need to put the 301 redirection if you change the structure of the URL. Try to redirect each which which is in ranking before change the URL structure. If you are able to perform this then hole you will get your old ranking with in some couple of days.

Hope you understand.

 

"page 1 and page 2 have almost same content with product in page 1 arrange in a-z and products in page 2 in z-a order."

No, no, no, no, in order to use the canonical tag the content must be identical.

wiz