Any coders here practice Canonicalization?

[Shogun24]

Something I picked up from the SEOmoz SEO book.

Canonicalization: "The practice of organizing your content in such a way that every unique piece has one and only one URL"

To my understanding, it's having each page of your website "combined" into a single page of your choice that would rank the best. Apparently it creates stronger relevancy and popularity overall and is good for ranking. (Telling the crawlers that multiple pages should be considered as one page)

Has anyone here tried it, and does it help in your ranking?

 

[Mahzkrieg]

URLs that need to be canonicalized generally come from old PHP non-framework way of doing things.

    /products/php?name=vacuums
    /products.php?product_id=544
    /products.php?name=vacuums&sort=1

    vs 

    /products/vacuums

You don't really see this in frameworks with routing systems.

This is because the old status quo for dynamic websites was to organize your URLs the same as your folder hierarchy and you'd use a dynamic file like products.php as your endpoint with a retarded case statement to choose which inline SQL query to run.

I encourage anyone not familiar with a routing system to check out the PHP CodeIgniter framework. It has a low learning curve and exposes you to better paradigms. It's a fast way to enter 2012 instead of lingering around 1999.

 

[Shogun24]

Thanks man, I've moved on to Rails although there was a time I dabbled with CI. This canonicalization term was new to me, so I was just curious.