subject: A Huge Mistake Many Webmasters Make When Placing Backlinks [print this page] Beyond all the usual mistakes that webmasters make, there is one in particular that could absolutely be killing your pages ability to rank and most people do not even know about it! It has to do with what is known as canonicalization. Dont worry, its an easy concept to understand and its easy to fix and/or do right from the get-go.
You can actually have many different URLs for the same page of a website. Oddly enough, Google counts all of these different URLs as different web pages. Here are some examples of the same web page with different URLs:
example.com/
example.com/?
example.com/index.html
example.com/home.aspx
www.example.com/
www.example.com/?
www.example.com/index.html
www.example.com/home.aspx
Believe it or not, they may even rank two separate URLs that are the same web page. Theyve taken care of this problem with their supposed policy of not ranking duplicate content. However, theres plenty of evidence to show that Google does rank duplicate content on a regular basis. Regardless of whether theyve taken care of it though, you dont want to take chances.
The first thing you want to do is decide on what URL you are going to use. Once you do that, commit to never changing it. So if youre going to go with the www, then commit to always going with. There is no evidence to support that Google likes either one of these combinations. So dont worry about which one you choose.
Next, youll want to log into your Google Webmaster account (or sign up for one if you dont have one already) and notify Google which version of your URL you will be using. Just one note on Google Webmaster accounts they are good for much more than this purpose. You can see your backlinks, submit XML sitemaps, and see exactly how the robots view your site (how often, how much they download, how long it takes to load, etc.)
Then, when youre doing your backlinking, always use the EXACT SAME URL every time. Do not switch between www and no www. Do not put /index.html if youve decided not to previously. Just know which URL you are using to backlink to which page and stick to it.
If you stay with your plan, you wont run into any issues with Google not registering backlinks for your site or having them register backlinks for two separate web pages. Imagine if you were actually doing half the backlinking you thought you were doing!
If you know youve made this mistake in the past and you havent already built hundreds of links, you may want to go back and make the change, if its worth your time. Otherwise, just forget about and do it the right way from this point forward.
