Don't use rel="canonical" as a bandaid solution

There has been some recent discussion in the SEO community about whether Google and Bing have different rules for the use of the rel=”canonical” tag. Google has said it is fine to have self-referential canonical tags (ie. the rel=”canonical” tag specifies the same URL as the page you are on), whereas Bing indicates they’d prefer the canonical tag be left blank in that case.

The proper use of rel=”canonical” can be confusing at best, and can produce devastating results at worst. So what is an SEO to do?

First of all, realize that using rel=”canonical” isn’t necessary in many cases of duplicate content. The canonical tag is a great tool for extreme situations and enterprise-level sites, but on small to medium sized websites there are often other solutions.

Choose Non-WWW to WWW, or Vice Versa

A lot of canonical issues arise because a website is available at both the WWW and non-WWW versions of the domain, and other sites may end up linking to either version. Using your favorite method, redirect the non-WWW to the WWW, or vice versa. If you do this when the site is initially built, you can eliminate most instances of the wrong version being linked to (people tend to just grab whatever URL is in the address bar, anyway). Make the choice early on, and stick with it.

Don’t Use URL Parameters

If possible, try to avoid using parameters in URLs.

• If you run an e-commerce or community-based site, store all session information in a cookie rather than as parameters. This is a programming best practice to ensure users don’t get access to each others’ information.
• Avoid specifying sort order or viewing options of a search results or product page in the URL. It is better to display the page with a static URL, and make use of AJAX for sorting and filtering.
• If you use tracking parameters for referrals, replace the question mark (?) in the URL with a hashtag (#). Don’t forget to adjust your Google Analytics tracking code to allow hashtags!

Don’t Generate URLs on the Fly

Some content management systems generate page URLs on the fly, based on how the user navigated to it. I suppose the idea behind it is that the URL then becomes sort of a breadcrumb trail so the user can easily figure out how get to higher levels, but this is just a bad idea on so many levels.

Ideally, you want each product, article, post or resource to be available at a single, static URL, regardless of how the user got there.

301 Redirects

No matter how hard you try to avoid it, you sometimes end up with pages on your site being linked to in strange ways, potentially causing duplicate content issues. In cases like this, you may want to set up redirect rules that specify certain parameters (or all parameters, if you want to be extreme) get redirected back to the root page. If it only occurs on a few pages across your site, you can individually redirect them to the preferred URL (an advantage small sites have over enterprise ones).

In general, you should try to prevent duplicate content issues before they happen, or fix them when they do. Use of the rel=”canonical” tag is advanced and shouldn’t be applied as a blanket solution to all canonicalization problems.

Photo: Jason Tester/Flickr

One of the most common problems I see in websites is the same content being available at both the WWW and non-WWW versions of a domain. I’ve encountered this in nearly every website I’ve done an SEO audit for, and I see it every day when browsing the web. Despite it being so prevalent, it is indeed a problem.

Having the same content available on both the WWW and non-WWW versions of a domain (such as authoritylabs.com and www.authoritylabs.com) is called canonicalization. While you and I might realize they are in fact the same page, search engines mistake them to be unique pages.

Most of the time, search engines can figure out that they are the same page and only include the canonical URL in their index. SEObook explains the canonical URL as:

The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines typically use PageRank or a similar measure to determine which version of a URL is the canonical URL.

Regardless, canonicalization can result in indexing problems and duplicate content issues. Most importantly, canonicalization will split the link juice between each version as people link to and share both.

What you want to see is a redirection from the WWW to the non-WWW, or vice versa, so that if the wrong version is entered or linked to, the user is automatically taken to the canonical URL. Fortunately, this is relatively easy to set up.

Google Webmaster Tools

If you’ve verified your site with Google Webmaster Tools, you can set your preferred domain by going to Site Configuration > Settings, and selecting either ‘Display URLs as www.yourdomain.com’ or ‘Display URLs as yourdomain.com’.

This will make sure that Google only indexes your preferred canonical URL. However, it doesn’t fix the problem of splitting your link juice so you should still set up a redirect using one of the following methods.

Redirect Using .htaccess

If your site is hosted on Apache, you can redirect from the WWW to the non-WWW, or vice versa, with a few lines in your .htaccess file.

Redirect WWW to non-WWW:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(yourdomain\.com)?$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirect non-WWW to WWW:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.yourdomain\.com)?$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirect Using cPanel

aka The Lazy Way to Redirect Using .htaccess

If your website is hosted with a provider that uses cPanel, you can even set up your redirects without touching a line of code. This actually adds the redirect rule directly to the .htaccess file, but sometimes I’d rather not get my hands dirty. To do this, log in to your cPanel, and go to Redirects.

Redirect WWW to non-WWW:

Redirect non-WWW to WWW:

Redirect Using IIS7

With IIS7, there are actually two ways to do this. The URL Rewrite extension is required for this.

The first method involves adding the following as the first rule in the system.webServer section of the web.config file of the site in question.

Redirect WWW to non-WWW:

<rewrite>
   <rules>
      <rule name="www to non www"" enabled="true">
         <match url="(.*)" />
         <conditions>
            <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" negate="true" pattern="^www\.yourdomain\.com$"  />
         </conditions>
         <action type="Redirect" url=http://www\.yourdomain\.com/{R:1}” redirectType="Permanent" />
      </rule>
   </rules>
</rewrite>

Redirect non-WWW to WWW:

<rewrite>
   <rules>
      <rule name="non www to www" enabled="true">
         <match url="(.*)" />
         <conditions>
            <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" negate="true" pattern="^www\.youdomain\.com$" />
         </conditions>
         <action type="Redirect" url="http://www\.yourdomain.\com/{R:0}" redirectType="Permanent" />
      </rule>
   </rules>
</rewrite>

The second way is using the user interface of the URL Rewrite module. You can follow the steps outlined on Scott Forsyth’s blog. I suppose you could call that the lazy way to redirect in IIS7.

Redirect Using nginx

Nginx is starting to gain popularity due to lower overhead and higher performance than other servers. For the redirect, you will add one of the following to the top of your site’s config file.

Redirect WWW to non-WWW

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.yourdomain.com;
    rewrite ^/(.*) http://yourdomain.com/$1 permanent;
}

Redirect non-WWW to WWW

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourdomain.com;
    rewrite ^/(.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 permanent;
}

Whether you’re on Apache, IIS, or nginx these methods really only take a few minutes to set up, so you really don’t have much of an excuse not to.

Photo: Fabrizio Sciami/Flickr

The canonical tag is simply a way to silence webmasters.

Yesterday at SMX West it was announced that Google, Yahoo! and Live have agreed upon a method to help webmasters define original content within a site. The canonical tag is a meta tag used to tell search engines which page to list in SERPs when multiple listings of the same, or very similar content exist in their databases.

On-site duplicate content has been a big issue since the beginning of the web. There are lots of things that could cause search engine spiders to index the same content at multiple locations. URL canonical variations (http://www.exmaple.com vs. http://example.com) is the most common issues, but there are others. This is a good explanation of the canonical tag and how it’s implemented.

In september the Google Webmaster Central Blog published a fairly extensive post on how search engines handle on-site duplicate content in hopes of dispelling a lot of the rumors and speculation circling the issue. Despite how clear the article was, and all the other resources on the web, there were still LOTS of questions about the issue.

As new webmasters come into the space trying to understand SEO and mitigating duplicate content the easy thing to do is ask Google. If you’re site is set up correctly duplicate content shouldn’t be an issue. The canonical tag, is not the end-all be-all of duplicate content. You still need a sitemap, good URLs, redirection from the www or the non-www to the correct path, etc. This tag is simply an easy answer to the duplicate content question.

What do you think? Have you implimented the canonical tag yet? Is it really THAT important considering all the other things that still need to be done?

Tags are all the rage these days.  We’re seeing them everywhere, but why?

Tags offer a few different benefits. Essentially, tags are a way to quickly visualize what a certain type of content is about. Tag clouds can convey a lot of information very legibly. Take a look, for example, at this tag cloud of Obama’s inauguration speech. Which words stand out to you?

I see: new, nation, America, every, people and common. If I hadn’t heard the speech I would have a good idea of what he spoke about and why.  Read Write Web has a great post with a few word clouds from different inauguration speeches. These tag clouds summarize what speech writers at the time found important to the American public.

From a human usability perspective hopefully you can see why this is important. With a tag cloud people can quickly get an idea of what a post or blog is about. With these tags as links, they can drill down to interesting posts in only a couple clicks. From a search engine’s standpoint it’s easy to tell what your content is about also. If you look at the source code of a WordPress blog, for example, you can see that each tag in a tag cloud is explicity said what size it should be. WordPress has implemented tags in a very search friendly way. A lot of SEO is common sense usability. If you build it right for humans, and pay attention to the details, it’s going to be easy for search engines to understand.

The number of tags you use to describe a post is important. Again though, think about it from a usability standpoint. If you litter your content with tags, then the majority of those tags aren’t going to be relevant to the post. It’s the same reason why keywords stuffing doesn’t work. If you litter your content with keywords, just to include keywords … you’re going to confuse your readers, and you’re going to confuse the search engines. How can you tell what a post is really about when the important parts of it are diluted.

Jason Baer over at Convince and Convert has implemented tags well. On average he uses less than 10 associate with each post. He capitalizes tags that should be capitalized (according to a what looks like an AP writing style) and he includes them at the bottom of each post. I wish he would put a cloud in the right hand column, but having them at the bottom of each post gives people a way to continue reading about topic they’re interested in, and it reinforces the content within the post. I also wouldn’t use both categories and tags. Pick one or the other and stick with it. If you use both you run the risk of duplicate content, or having the same content accessible at different URLs. If you’re the New York Times, it would be something to worry about, but the average blogger should spend time on quality content, not duplicate content. Check out Google’s official statement on duplicate content for more info.

When tagging video content, there are a few other things to worry about. When most people use video within a blog post it’s uploaded at a third party provider like YouTube, or UStream for instance. There’s an entire niche around video SEO, but when it comes to content tags the important thing to worry about is making sure that your post is ranking higher than the actual video for the things you’re optimizing for. So make sure the content tags you used on your video, are on your actual post somewhere, in a way search engines can understand them. In the case of LuckyStartups, the startup that interviews startups, their tags are embedded in a flash file, which is useless for search purposes. Their lucky Ustream isn’t optimized that well, and that they have more original text content on the site, or they run the risk of their Ustream videos out ranking their posts.

In summary … Tag your content. Use tags that are relevant to that content. Don’t stuff your tags with keywords you want to rank for. Again, be relevant, but always think about what people might search for.  Don’t use all your tags in every post.  Use tags repeatedly across posts when it’s appropriate.