We Have Specified Your Canonical

There's been a good discussion lately about a potential Canonical Issue on the Network Solutions Forums and I wanted to explain a little bit about it so that everyone is up to speed. Our top notch ecommerce (v7) development team made a minor software change several months ago based on client-submitted feature requests and the recommendations of our industry-leading search engine optimization experts. We added a canonical link tag to each page. It looks something like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/keyword-url.aspx" />

The intent with this dynamic tag is to indicate to the major search engines which choice is the proper URL for the page that loaded. It's possible that for the example above, a search engine may find multiple links to it formatted as...

• http://example.com/keyword-url.aspx
• http://www.example.com/keyword-url.aspx
• https://example.com/keyword-url.aspx
• https://www.example.com/keyword-url.aspx
• http://example.com/keyword-url.aspx?ref=foo
• http://example.com/keyword-url.aspx?start=25
• http://example.com/keyword-url.aspx?next

Even though a user loading the pages above would see the same content, the search bots would treat them as different --unless there is a specified canonical.

Google added support to this format to allow sites with content accessible via multiple URLs to specify a preferred URL to be returned in search results. We added this feature to point them in the right direction. This feature is a valuable improvement to help eliminate duplicate content worries.

Clients may see temporary fluctuations to their SERPs rankings as Google re-indexes their site to take into account the new format support. However, given the variables involved and recent Google update, it would be nearly impossible to determine the exact cause of any changes in their SERPs.

The forum discussion revolves around the fact that the home page is specified with a /index.aspx rather than just a /. It's perceived that home page ranking may have fluctuated due to this change. It's certainly possible, but I'm also aware that Google changes all the time and it may be unrelated. The SERPs are showing the /index.aspx for the home page, but that just might be because they are now displaying the canonical choice in the rankings page and does not indicate anything that would affect a site's actual listings.

If you'd like more information about Google and how they treat canonical, please see official Google blog post as well as Matt Cutts' post. In the future, we may be adding a new feature that will allow our merchants to specify their own home page for this link tag. But even so, normal "don't panic" rules of SEO should apply.