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URL canonicalization: Matt Cutts' advice

Recently, I read in Matt Cutts' blog (Google Engineer), he is telling about cannonicalization of URL, which means the basic URL that should consider for google listing and ranking.

Normally, web developers uses several methods to link to the home page by www vs non-www, redirection, duplicate URLs, 302 'hijacking' etc. In most cases we can see links that are similar to the following, but going to the same page:

www.example.com
www.example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/index.html

All the above links are different in technically and web server returns different contents for all those URLs. Here are some tips to solve this issue that Matt Cutts answered:

1) Do not place different versions of links throughout in your website.
2) If Google listed different versions of URLs, try to setting up 301 permanent redirection in web server.
3) Do not use the URL removal tool to get rid of these kinds of URLs.

Matt Cutts' link to this topic:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

Some more tips:

1) Do not submit different versions of URLs in search engines
2) Use Google sitemap to set your preferred URL to index

For your reference:

Relative or absolute paths to use in your page?
How to fix indexing www and non-www versions of domain

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• Web Directory List
• Picking a good test page with Google Analytics
• How to overcome Google's minus 30 filter
• Google Search Operators
• URL canonicalization: Matt Cutts' advice
• Search engine friendly URLs
• Directory submission - Increase your site popularity
• Use your H1 tag effectively
• Blog submission links part 1
• Is robots.txt file a must?