Canonicalisation is something that can pose a few difficulties for some sites. It helps to protect your brand but, if done badly, can create duplicate content which poses a small risk of triggering a search engine’s duplicate content filter. It also creates problems when the search engine determines which site should be displayed in the results – something you want to have as much control over as possible. There are some good ways to canonicalise your various brand-related domains while avoiding these problems.

Canonicalisation is the use of several domain names for what is essentially the one site. For example, your business might be Bob’s Roses, with the addresses www.bobsroses.co.uk, bobsroses.co.uk, www.bobsroses.com, www.bobsroses.co.uk/default.html and so on. Although search engines are getting more sophisticated all the time, these sometimes slight differences in domain names can cause problems when the engine becomes confused (even the difference between www.name.com and www.name.com/ can cause some problems). You want to link all of these domain names to your site to ensure that every approach is covered.

Canonicalisation can cause problems particularly when others link to your site. Even when you have done your best to publicise the main site address of your brand, it’s inevitable that others will confuse it with others (.com for a .co.uk address, for example). You don’t want to lose the value of these links or split your traffic.

There are many ways canonicalisation can cause problems for your site, and some of these are less than easy to spot. Session ids at the end of URLs, capitalisation in extensions, use of 302 ‘temporary’ redirects within a site, and blog archiving are just some of the issues that a lot of websites don’t think to check.

A lot of sites fail to use a 301 redirect, instead choosing to post their site complete to each address. The result is that they have their content duplicated all over the net. Search engines are capable of detecting that similar domains are related, but could also see each of these pages as separate. The 301 redirect is a code that is fairly simple to implement into a htaccess file, although it gets more complicated depending on the server you use. Using a Secure Sockets Layer certificate for your payment area can also cause problems as search engines sometimes index ‘https’ and ‘http’ URLs separately.

When dealing with canonicalisation issues, you can go some way to fix the problem by informing Google directly of which URL you would prefer them to index. This is useful, but it doesn’t cover the other search engines out there, which can still cause you to lose traffic. Fixing the problem from within is a much more solid option, although it can be much more complicated.

Brand management should be taken into account in your search engine optimisation strategy. If you do have other domain names out there, it can be a simple thing to ensure they all lead to the same site in an SEO-friendly way. The integration of multiple domain names should be part of your SEO strategy and is something SEO Consult can assist with.

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