--- title: "URL Canonicalization Technique" description: "Google search engine wasn’t the first search engine that surfaced on the internet. But google did things in a batter way and provided results that ver" author: "Ashish srivastava" published: 2015-12-16 updated: 2019-09-07 canonical: https://www.mindstick.com/articles/11953/url-canonicalization-technique category: "search engine optimization" tags: ["seo"] reading_time: 3 minutes --- # URL Canonicalization Technique ## [Google search](https://yourviews.mindstick.com/view/87722/history-of-google-search-engine-evolution-to-advancement) engine wasn’t the first [search engine](https://www.mindstick.com/services/search-engine-optimization) that surfaced on the internet. But google did things in a batter way and provided [results](https://yourviews.mindstick.com/view/88282/boost-your-career-mindstick-technical-training-that-delivers-results) that very that were actually useful. With the help of [SEO](https://www.mindstick.com/services/search-engine-optimization) is done for all the [search engines](https://www.mindstick.com/articles/337703/how-search-engines-adapt-to-user-behavior-explain-in-detail) that [exist today](https://answers.mindstick.com/qa/40915/two-new-deal-programs-that-still-exist-today), one major search engine Google that handles most of the [traffic](https://yourviews.mindstick.com/view/87345/explained-the-importance-of-keyword-traffic) on the Internet. Whenever we talk about SEO, people assume that we are talking about optimizing the website for Google. When it comes to SEO, we need to check many factors involves in both onsite page [as well as](https://www.mindstick.com/forum/156547/difference-between-max-width-and-width-as-well-as-max-height-and-height) offsite page. But if our onsite SEO is not up to the mark, no matter how well you do your offsite SEO, we will not get the results we are expecting. \ The SEO [Technique](https://answers.mindstick.com/qa/102844/what-is-the-pomodoro-technique-and-does-it-work) Canonicalization can be tough to understand. Let me try to explain this in [simple terms](https://www.mindstick.com/forum/161510/explain-the-bias-variance-tradeoff-in-simple-terms). \ ![URL Canonicalization Technique](https://www.mindstick.com/mindstickarticle/f9b8801d-7129-4fdd-88fe-2973d1ffb304/images/0eaf5af7-7ad4-42f4-a76d-de30937eacfa.png)\ \ ##### Let’s say there are two URLs of a website: • http://onlinewebpage.org \ • http://www.onlinewebpage.org Both of those pages show same content, and none of these pages redirects to any \ one of them. This result in duplicate content issue on Google, and we can face \ penalties. Let us see one more example. There are two URLs on a website that result in the \ same page resolution. \ • http://onlinewebpage.org \ • http://onlinewebpage.org/index.php \ If both of these web pages show the same page content result, then this might \ cause an issue as well! We might not pay much attention to this issue, but this might result in serious duplicate content penalties. The problem with search engine bots is that they can’t decide which URL they should add in their index. If two pages are resolving the same content, they will just assume one copy is a copy of the other and our website will get penalized. If website have 2 URLS showing the same content, then you must fix it. We must use server settings so that whether a user opens with www or without www, the site will open on any of the one version. In this way, we can fix the canonicalization. Though, at times we would like to share same content on two URLS, then we can use rel=”canonical” tags to let Google search engine know that which is the original and which one is a copy of it. This save you from duplicate content penalties. \ --- Original Source: https://www.mindstick.com/articles/11953/url-canonicalization-technique Copyright © MindStick Software Pvt. Ltd. This Markdown version is provided for developers, AI systems, and offline reading.