Usually I don’t cover basic material in this blog, but as a loyal reader, Paul Montwill, requested it, I’m happy to oblige. As I learned back in school, if one person asks a question, there are probably many others at the back of the class quietly wondering the same thing. So here is a brief explanation of web server redirects and their use to solve URL canonicalization issues.

And just what is that ecclesiastic-sounding word “canonicalization”? It was Matt Cutts and not the Pope that made it famous, as he used the nomenclature to describe a certain issue that popped up at Google. Here is the problem. All of us have these URLs:

1) sitename.com/

2) sitename.com/index.html

3) www.sitename.com 

4) www.sitename.com/index.html

You know they are all the same page. I know they are all the same page. But computers — unfortunately, they aren't on the same page. They aren’t that smart and need to be told that each one of these addresses represents the same page. One way is for you to pick one of them and use it consistently in all your linking. The harder part, however, is getting other website owners linking to you to do the same. Some might use one, others another, and a few are bound to choose a third.

The best way to solve this is to pick one URL and have your web server automatically force all requests for other variations to go to the one you picked. We can use HTTP redirects to accomplish this.

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