I know what you’re thinking, what the heck is a ‘canonical URL’ when it’s at home? Well, it’s the URL that you want your visitors and Google to see when they come to your site. Now, if you’re a bit like I was a few years ago, you’re thinking that surely visitors can only see one version of your site anyway.

You’re probably wrong.

For example, some websites will display their content if you type in the domain name without the ‘www’ in front as well as with it intact and what this means to Google is you have two websites. Oh yeah, you’ve got double websites going on with the same content.

Go check out your site. Type in the domain both with and without the ‘www’ in it and see what happens. If your site displays the same without the ‘www’ as it does with it then you have a problem that you need to fix. Read the rest of this entry »