What is canonicalization?
The word Canonical means something that corresponds to the accepted standard. Canonicization - or Canonicalization in British English - is a process that is something in accordance with the received standard. In computers, the term canonization is used to indicate meetings in several different areas. Often this is a problem when it is actually a solution to various problems. Because it is such a long word, Canonicization is shortened using its first and last letters and the number of letters between: C14N.
Canonicalization is used in several settings. It applies to the e -mail addresses, the design of the file name, the chain encoding of the Unicode, the use of the XML design (expandable mark) and the URL design (uniform resource locator). In any case, the problem is the capacity for multiple formats representing the same item of the scanning is a way of consistency and standardization.
Take XMLby way of example. XML allows syntactic changes. This means that two documents that are not identical could have the same canonical form and would therefore be functionally equivalent. The canonical XML specifications have been designed to create a method that can be determined by the identity of separate documents. The method for generating a canonical form for any given XML document is called the XML Canonicization method .
For the URL canonicalization, the idea is to link to a specific website consistently by one URL. The simplest example is two versions of the homepage, one of which has three w and the other not:
http://www.wisegeek.com
versus
http://wisegeek.com
This is a problem for SEO (search engine optimization) because it divides the message for operation, all actually goes to the same place. As a result, it seems that the site with moreURL addresses for the same pages work poorly than it actually is.
In addition to W , there are other problems. These include towed slashes and differences between the URL versions with upper and lower letters. Matt Cutts of Google® recommends that you solve this using a permanent (301) redirecting all alternative URLs to the required URL, allowing search engines to assess which canonical address of the URL.