Enough spammers I’ll say, because Wikipedia added nofollow to all external URLs since last Saturday. It looks like Wikipedia was targeted by some SEO guys running an SEO contest. I’m not sure if it was a fun rumor or no, but Wikipedia admins didn’t wait to make the decision and stopped all those who used the free encyclopedia for SEO purpose whatever free or paid.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-January/061137.html
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Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages:
• www.domain.com
• domain.com/
• www.domain.com/index.html
• domain.com/home.asp
• http://home.domain.com
• www.home.domain.com
Technically all of these URLs are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the URLs above. When a search engine “canonicalizes” a URL, it’s trying to pick the URL that seems like the best representative from that set.
Don’t make half of your links go to http://domain.com/ and the other half go to http://www.domain.com/. Instead, pick the URL you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.
Let’s say you want your default URL to be http://www.domain.com/. You can modify .htaccess file so if someone requests http://domain.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/. That helps search engines know which URL you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).
