In previous posts, I’ve mentioned the importance of having a clean and crawlable website structure for SEO.  The reason is simple.  Without one, you’re dead in the water from an SEO standpoint.  If your content cannot be crawled and indexed, then you can forget about the other aspects of SEO, including content optimization, linkbuilding, etc.  As part of my SEO technical audits, it’s usually not long before the important topic of canonicalization comes up.  Canonicalization is the process of ensuring you don’t provide the same exact content at more than one URL.  In a nutshell, you want to minimize (or eliminate) the number of URL’s that hold identical content, or you can run into duplicate content issues. A simple example of duplicate content would be a product detail page on an eCommerce website that resolves at five or ten different URL’s.  That’s typically due to filtering (selecting color, size, style, etc.)  There are several ways that a website can present canonical issues and you definitely want to have a plan in place for handling those problems.  For example, does your site resolve with both non-www and www, do your pages resolve with both http and https, do folders resolve with and without trailing slashes, etc.  Handling canonicalization typically includes 301 redirecting requests for potential duplicate content to the canonical url.  For example, redirecting a non-www request to the www version of the page. Sorting & Filtering On e-Commerce Sites Can Cause Duplicate Content If The URL Changes Based on the Selection: The Importance of Redirects (Beyond