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Jackandrew
10-18-2014, 03:44 AM
IP canonicalization - The process and its significant benefits to your website

Whenever a search engine indexes a page of a website, it is trying to gather information to the maximum possible extent including the IP address of your connection. IP canonicalization intends to save your site from the import of duplicate content. Duplicate content means the content that you copy from any other website and post it on your website. This act can be penalized by the search engine. Duplicate content posts many issues for search engine crawlers. Crawlers will be able to differentiate the unique content from the copied one. Sometimes search engines may categorize your website as duplicate content. It can be a problem if you do not fix it.

From SEO perspective, IP canonicalization is crucial for a site. If your site has several inner pages and two inner pages share the same content, still it can be a problem for your website. For example, when you type a website’s name in your address bar without adding ‘www’, it will redirect you to the same site, however, the search engine works in a different way. You can resolve this issue using 301,302,307 Redirects.

The main purpose of IP canonicalization is redirecting the web pages which are tagged as duplicate content. Using a 301 Redirect and fixing the problem will guard you from the search engine penalizing you. All websites will respond to a given IP address of the host. It means, the website can be opened with its domain address (http://example.com or http://www.example.com) and at the same time, it can be accessed using the IP address. The canonicalization problem occurs when a website’s IP address and domain address display the same page, but do not correspond to the same URL. The spiders will not be in a position to recognize the correct URL in view of the above ambiguity.
First, let us analyze the problem of duplicate pages. You can access your site in the following ways:

http://yoursite.com/
http://www.yoursite.com/

You will find that both addresses will display the required pages. Another example would be the web page which has modifiers added to the end of the URL. A typical example is an e-commerce site where the same product page can be found via different URLs depending on how filters are attached. The problem with the use of multiple URLs to get the same content is that Google will index most of the pages on your site. Then, it has to decide which one it thinks is the correct page to be allotted a higher ranking. If you assist Google in identifying similar pages, the search engine can selectively index the pages and assign the ranking accordingly. The whole sequence of this process is termed as canonicalization.

Good canonicalization is about demonstrating to Google what version of a page is to be prioritized in their index as per your choice. Their algorithms will possibly then take the cue from your suggestion when assessing the duplicate content of the pages in your website.