The name itself sounds a bit dangerous (and oddly reminiscent of pirate ships and holy water), however, this is something important when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Canonicalization occurs when a particular website is able to be accessed with two addresses.
Canonicalization is a process where a search engine picks up the best URL when there are several options floating about cyber space. This could result in the popularity of a web page to go down. Since the incoming traffic that is supposed to go to a single URL now gets split up between two URLs. While sometimes, this might be nothing more complicated than one web page loading with the “www.” And the other loading without it, other, more extreme cases could result in more serious errors where two identical copies of your website ranks on two far apart pages on the search engine.
It is a complicated issue, but when it comes to SEO, you can’t really afford to have identical copies of your website on different rungs on the rankings ladder. So, in order to prevent search engines from making odd decisions about your website, you need to employ a few precautions to make sure that viewers are headed the right way. A ‘301 redirection’ is the most effective method to let the search engine know what your preferred URL to be directed is. This involves in the setting up of a .htaccess file in your domain root file to permanently redirect visitors to your preferred version of the URL.
Depending on the particular environment of your web, you can employ one of the many methods available to set up a 301 redirection. You will have the ability to set up the redirection using PHP, classic ASP, ColdFusion, ASP.NET or Perl. If your website has been subjected to canonicalization, it’s not the end of the world, simply employ a viable redirecting mechanism and you will be up and running in next to no time.
However, although there are other methods of redirecting to your favoured URL, they are to be avoided like the plague. The reason for me to say this is the fact that, methods such as Javascript and META refresh have been in use to obscure and disguise malicious redirection for quite a while. It is best to stick to legitimate methods rather than to experiment with fishy techniques (which could result in your website getting kicked out of the ranking lists for good. Believe me, it has happened.)
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