Contact
Subscribe


URL Canonicalization

May 26, 2008
Web

I’m setting up my Google Analytics account for the upcoming soft-launch of Crowdify and was forced to think about the topic of URL canonicalization.  For the uninitiated, this is the single version of your homepage URL that you want to use every place you have to give out your domain name.

Recent posts in the blogosphere have caught my eye on this subject: see Search Engine Journal for example.  A recent post to the Seattle Tech Startups list made by Vanessa Fox also mentioned the issue of keeping your URLs consistent.

So – do I use www.crowdify.com or just crowdify.com?  A couple high-profile SEO people have made the argument that you should use the WWW- prefixed version, because most people are attuned to using WWW for websites.  I don’t buy it.  The non-www-version is shorter, easier to say, and affords the flexibility to have other tertiary domains that are obviously different, such as blog.crowdify.com or what have you.

The Wikipedia article is (unsurprisingly) very detailed about the process of canonicalizing URLs.  They recommend removing the www, among a host of other changes.

What canonicalization version do you prefer, and why?

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • Reddit
  • TwitThis
No Comments
Tags

2 Comments

  1. Doug  •  May 28, 2008 @11:54 am

    I use “no www” for the canonical form because it’s shorter, and of course I accept it either way. If someone comes in with http://www., I redirect them to “no www” with a 301.

    However, there’s a limitation to using “no www”. Or at least, there used to be. As far as I know, you still can’t get an SSL certificate for a domain name, just for a subdomain. If you’re planning to use HTTPS now or in the future, you should probably plan to use www as the canonical form.

  2. Vanessa Fox  •  May 28, 2008 @11:55 pm

    Hey Anthony, Did you see the post we did on this on Jane and Robot?
    http://janeandrobot.com/post/canonical-url-canonicalization-domain.aspx

    (The post is strictly about domain canonicalization; a later post will go into all the URL canonicalization issues.)

    As for www vs. non-www, totally doesn’t matter for SEO purposes and really, I don’t think it matters for user purposes. If you redirect one to the other, then no matter what the person types, you’re serving up things consistently. I prefer the non-www since it means 4 fewer keys on my mobile phone. :)

Leave a Reply

Allowed tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> <pre lang="" line="" escaped="">