So, this short post is to put it in proper perspective, slap a more effective headline on the topic, and hopefully generate additional interest.

The Problem

Like any good blogger/webmaster you’ve been building up your backlinks. You’ve examined your internal linking. But looking at your server logs, you notice something odd:

Not all your backlinks are pointing to the same version of your home page.

For example:

• http://yoursite.com/
• http://www.yoursite.com/
• http://www.yoursite.com/index.php
• http://yoursite.com/index.php

You’re looking for every possible edge when it comes to search engine optimization and you’ve read that stupid Mr. Googlebot gets confused and doesn’t give you as much credit for those backlinks as if they all pointed to the exact same url.

The 30 Second Search Engine Optimization Tweak

Go over to my Canoncial URL Tool

Type in the url of your website (http://www.yoursite.com)

You’ll get some “mod_rewrite” code that you copy and paste into a file in your root directory called .htaccess

Before you do, make sure you back up your .htaccess file or your whole site if you haven’t done so in a while

This tool I’ve created makes it easy to set it up so that

1. Your website url will always have “www” in front of it
2. Links with index.php or index.html will be rewritten so that the index is removed and the trailing slash is used

Some SEO gurus believe that this gives yours site an extra little bump by not being penalized for duplicate content. In short, you want all of your incoming links to a certain page on your site to appear to all target the same page.

There’s evidence to indicate that Google sees the following urls differently:

• http://yoursite.com
• http://www.yoursite.com
• http://www.yoursite.com/index.php

This tool requires you to have a web server running Apache and access to mod_rewrite.

All you do is enter your domain, hit the button, and you get some code you can copy and paste into your .htaccess directory (at the end) and you’re good to go.

As with any changes to your .htaccess file, make sure you do a backup before you upload the changes.

Canonical URL Tool