How do I decide on my canonical url

Marketing
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I have searched a lot and specifically checked the suggested topics here on Sitepoint but cannot find an answer to my specific needs. I understand what a canonical URL is. (I don’t understand why Google considers a website or web page to exist multiple times when it doesn’t !) So I have a website www.MyWebSite.com and I have an SSL certificate. Now as I understand it Google will see multiple instances of my index.html page. https://www.MyWebSite.com, www.MyWebSite.com, MyWebSite.com, and https://MyWebSite.com - possibly also another 4 with the URL ending in / and possibly another 4 permutations ending in /index.html. I do not have multiple pages with very similar content I just have one index.html how do I decide which is to be my canonical URL

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Thanks to Gandalf for the edit, can you explain why the edit please so I don’t make the same mistake again

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I simply added the backticks so your URLs didn’t look like real links. :slight_smile:

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But now nobody will visit www.MyWebSite.com - damn it :grinning:

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Which one do you want showing up on search engines?

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Well, that’s the thing, I only have one home page, I don’t really care how it shows up (do I ?) I just want it to show up as often as possible and as near the top as possible - how do I decide which one I want. I mean - isn’t that actually my question in different words?

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With an SSL certificate, you’ve just got two choices - with or without the www.

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OK thanks, is there any benefit of one over the other and should I add both properties to Google Search Console or just the one I decide is Canonical

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No real benefits either way. Without is fewer character, with is probably what most people would expect. Whichever one you decide on you need to redirect users to the chosen version in your .htaccess file (assuming you’re running on Apache).

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So as we know the reason behind choosing canonical URLs so that you can combine all link authorities that reside at different variations of your domain. You can try Moz Open Site Explorer. Enter the different variations of your website URL and Moz will return data with all kinds of metrics.

But what you should be really interested in domain authority (DA) - if you spot a website with a higher DA then that is your canonical URL.

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“Domain Authority” is a metric used only by Moz.com, and in any case applies to a domain, not to individual pages or versions of a page, so it is not relevant here.

Google provides guidance on the issue:

There is also an old article here which helps to explain the issue simply:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

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Thank you :grinning: for improving my knowledge.

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A post was split to a new topic: Forcing https and www

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It may be relevant to me - but I don’t really know - Is it ?

I am not trying to redirect one page to another because of similar content - I only have one instance of any page and none with similar content, I just want to alleviate the problem where Google sees multiple versions that do not physically exist.

I want to ensure that all domain requests resolve to https://www.mywebsite.com so https://mywebsite.com, www.mywebsite.com and mywebsite.com are not all seen as duplicate content. Should I look at DA ? Should I be doing something else ?

Hey Gandalf do you notice I’m applying the double ticks - cheers for the tip :smiley:

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