URL Canonicalization

Note: Although this is a photoblog and as such the focus is on photos and photography I figured that occasional posts on issues related to creating a photoblog would be helpful to some of my readers.

While creating this photoblog I did some reading on SEO and one of the topics that came up was URL canonicalization. A canonical URL is the official URL for a given web page. For example, the preferred URL for this blog is http://ryanwentzelphotography.com/blog/. Notice there’s no “www” prefix in the URL. There’s also a “/” at the end of the URL. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t get to this blog using something like “http://www.ryanwentzelphotography.com/blog” or “http://ryanwentzelphotography.com/blog”, but for search engine indexing and Google pagerank it’s best to have one URL for each item on your site.

I can control all of the links on my site, but what about external sites? I can’t ensure that others will link to the official URL for the items on Ryan Wentzel Photography. This is where URL rewriting using htaccess comes in to play. I pieced together a few rewrite rules on my own, but after I found a post by Jeff Star entitled Comprehensive URL Canonicalization via htaccess for WordPress-Powered Sites I went with his recommendations and they’ve been working well so far. Jeff’s article is clear, descriptive, and provides a few helpful examples to get you going with URL canonicalization for your WordPress site.