Advertisement
  1. SEJ
  2.  ⋅ 
  3. SEO

Google BigDaddy & Canonical URLs

Google BigDaddy & Canonical URLs

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s BigDaddy solves some long standing issues with Google. Issues which have frustrated webmasters and site owners for years.

The biggest change seems to be that the “data center lays the groundwork for better canonicalization.” Canonicalization issues have been big with Google and really all the engines. Canonical issues are ones where the engines can’t tell that:

www.yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com/index.html
www.yourdomain.com/index.html

Are in fact all the same site.

You see, search engines look at every URL as unique. That means that even though the above 4 pages are the same to humans, the engines see them as different.

So what Google has set out to do with BigDaddy is work towards solving the issue so that even if it comes across these 4 URLs it will know that they are the same and will attribute all factors to one URL.

Typically, site owners and webmasters have had to work around this shortcoming by configuring web servers to force Google and other engines to recognize the URL’s as the same. That means implementing 301 redirects on domains and ensuring that all site links (and even incoming links) are consistently pointed at a single domain. In most cases, the web server is told to tell all requests coming to yourdomain.com to be automatically (and permanently) redirected to www.yourdomain.com

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com

Category SEO
ADVERTISEMENT
SEJ STAFF Loren Baker Founder at Foundation Digital

Loren Baker is the Founder of SEJ, an Advisor at Alpha Brand Media and runs Foundation Digital, a digital marketing ...

Google BigDaddy & Canonical URLs

Subscribe To Our Newsletter.

Conquer your day with daily search marketing news.