What is Canonicalization in SEO and How To Fix it?

The world of SEO is a whole new world in the world of internet marketing that never stops evolving and become far from comprehending. No matter since how long have you been indulged yourself in practicing SEO, there is always one or two things you would found getting beyond your understanding. One such word that is making waves and making the SEO expert going baffled and that is "Canonicalization".

No doubt you took time to read that out, but if you are facing something related to that, you should go on fixing it right away, but we know, there are people who are still unaware of this term in precise. For those, we are taking a brief survey and what it is and how it can be fixed.

What is Canonicalization?
Canonicalization is an issue that pops in when 301 redirects have not been put properly and refer that your website can be searched by the search engines through different URLs. This makes the search engines potentially crawl and index your website under different URLs making it look like a site consisting of duplicate contents.

How to fix it?
The one and the only way to solve this issue permanently is by applying a permanent 301 redirect. This can be done in many and one example has been shared below for you to refer. First, you need to determine the server on which your website is hosted and then you can implement the redirect.

Log in to the Google Webmaster Tools and set-up 2 profiles with your domain name, on with the prefix "www" and one without and visit the website "configuration,>settings>preferred domain" and choose the domain who want Google to use.

In case you already have hosted your website on the mentioned below server types, you will be eligible to use a .htaccess file.

The following domains:
a) Apache
b) Linux
c) Sun Java
d) Zeus

These four servers are the most common and the easiest to execute the permanent 301 redirects. You just need to copy the code in your existing .htaccess file and follow the steps given below

a) Options + FollowSymLinks
b) RewriteEngine on
c) RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ example.com [NC]
d) RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example .com/$1 [L,R=301]
e) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)//(.*)
f) RewriteRule . http://www.example.com%1/%2 [R=301,L]
g) RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index\.html\ HTTP/
h) RewriteRule index\.html$ http://www.example.com/%1 [R=301,L]\

The coding you see here need to be changed along with the name of your domain. Check all the noteworthy details of your website and do the needful before applying these steps.