Canonical URLs
January 1st, 2005 Ryan Jones
So it would seem that one of my sites NoSlang.com recently got hit by the so called Canonical URL bug.
Some of you may remember a while ago when MSN was posting a PageRank of 2? This wasn’t a mean Google joke, it was a case of people linking to both http://www.msn.com AND http://msn.com (without the www).
Since it’s possible (although a bad idea) to actually have 2 different sites on those urls, Googlebot got confused and thought it was 2 different sites with the same content. Thus, the pagerank of the www suffered, and the non-www was seen as a new site (so no pagerank).
This happened to Noslang.com in that it’s main page had a 0 pagerank (unless you went to /index.php of the non-www then it had a 3), but all the sub pages had a pagerank of 5.
Entry Filed under: Uncategorized