While traveling to Sea-Tac Airport today with the wonderful Ms. Christy Arneson-Jones, I started reading my free copy of Website Magazine. In their feature, “Five Steps to Outsourcing Search Marketing,” they recommend educating oneself. They included a handy quick quiz to determine what one might know right now.
Question #2 prompted a snort of derision from yours truly. Here it is:
2) Describe the word canonical.
Now, that ought to be easy. Google’s Webmaster Help Center describes it as a ‘preferred domain.’ Matt Cutts did a blog post where he defines it.
Apparently, not easy enough for Website Magazine. Their answer?
2) Refers to the non-www version of a domain (website) indexed as a duplicate of the www version.
Well, no. No it doesn’t. If you haven’t set your preferred domain through your sitemap or via a webmaster toolset, that can in fact happen. But that’s not a description of the word canonical. That’s a symptom of a failure to understand the concept of canonical.
Some webmasters prefer using their non-www as the canonical domain. And that’s just fine with a search engine.
It’s a good thing I got the magazine free. If I’d paid, I’d want a refund for just this one item. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read any more.
Canonical can also describe a melody, followed by another melody. A “Round” would be that, like “row row row your boat” or “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails at Summerfest.
My pirate ship has canonicals.