Rel="canonical" link should they be to or from an "SEO friendly" url

[robertdonnell]

Thanks for taking the time to review this.

So for our example, lets use the following SEO friendly link:

http://hiu.calibermediagroup.com/undergraduate-on-campus/academics/colleges/pacific-christian-college-of-ministry-and-biblical-studies/BA-biblical-studies

We'll call this link the SEO VERSION

The title of the college is" Pacific Christian College of Minstry and Biblical Studies"

The title of the program is "BA Biblical Studies"

The QUERY version of the link to this page would be something like:

http://hiu.calibermediagroup.com/undergraduate-on-campus/academics/colleges/index.php?collegeid=22&programid=34

Keep in mind that the meta title, description, and keyword tags for the page are all administerable

The SEO VERSION is automatically created from the title of the college, and the title of the program. Each one of these titles can be overidden with a URL slug individually. For instance, the admin could make the link:

http://hiu.calibermediagroup.com/undergraduate-on-campus/academics/colleges/pacific-christian-college-of-ministry/biblical-studies

by changing the slug for the college to "pacific-christian-college-of-ministry" and the slug for the program to "biblical-studies". Let's call this version the SLUG VERSION

So now we have multiple ways to get to the same content. The question on the table is what is best practice for the rel="canonical" link to keep from getting dinged for duplicate content.

Let's say that our SEO VERSION is the canonical link for 1 year.  Then the choice was made to optimize the links thru the slugs creating the SLUG VERSION.  My assumption is that we would keep the SEO VERSION as the canonical link.

But then let's say 6 months later that the title of the program is changed in the admin.  Now the SEO VERSION has changed and so has the canonical link.  Do we lose the link juice garnered over the last 18 months?

It would seem to me, that if we use the QUERY version as the canonical link, then any optimizations or changes affect everything except the canonical link, thus keeping the previous link juice earned.  But is having an ugly URL as  the canonical link detrimental to SEO?

Please advise.

[customerparadigm.com]

Robert-

My advice: use the URL structure for the canonical link that does not contain the name-value pairs, such as:
http://www.domain.com/URL-structure/avoid-name-value-pairs/

Don't use the more complicated one like this:
http://www.domain.com/search-query-result.php?id=123&page=42&query=should-you-avoid-name-value-pairs-in-SEO-urls

Instead, go with a short, human readable URL for your canonical link, and you'll have better results.

Here's why I'm making this recommendation:

In the Moz.com guide to the basics of SEO: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development, I'd recommend looking at their URL Construction Guidelnes:

Go static

The best URLs are human readable without lots of parameters, numbers and symbols. Using technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft, you can easily transform dynamic URLs like this http://moz.com/blog?id=123 into a more readable static version like this: http://moz.com/blog/google-fresh-factor. Even single dynamic parameters in a URL can result in lower overall ranking and indexing.

According to Google's Official Google Webmaster Central blog:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html

"static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls"

Myth: "Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters."
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff

[AlanBleiweiss]

Jeff's spot on. Come up with the briefest visitor readable URL that fits the proper understanding of the page identity along with its hierarchical relationship to content above it in that funnel. That's the URL that should be referenced in the canonical tag as well as links pointing to the page. If for some reason months or years later that URL needs to change (because the program name changes for some reason for example), then make that change and implement a 301 redirect to that new URL to pass any previously accumulated link value.