web site owners
Duplicated Confusion: The Canonical Edict From The Big Three
So virtually everyone has weighed in on the new instructions from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Apparently there should be joy in the cesspool today – the search gods have shown us the way to clean up part of the confusion with canonical pages in our industry.
Okay, I know that sounds a little cynical, but like the no follow tag from a few years ago – it falls upon the web site owners to clean up the search engines’ databases. Many knowledgeable site owners have already done a lot of this work in one form or another – though users of most dynamic sites have had a problem with multiple urls pointing to the same content (the same page really arrived at through different urls).
Interestingly even the engines themselves seem to have different views on what this new tag means. If you read the three announcements you could almost be excused for thinking they were describing different things.
Yahoo wins the most confusing explanation, while Google adds art that really adds little unless you need visuals of the same page with different text pointing to it – but does do a decent job of simplifying the instructions, but Microsoft does it briefly and clearly then tells us they will be implementing it “sometime in the near future.”
It sort of reflects the positions each has in the search space. Google with their monster share see us as children, Yahoo as number two tries harder, while Microsoft gives it the same attention it gives to its flagging search percentage – short but sweet.
To be fair Yahoo may offer the most thorough explanation (you just may have to read it a couple of times) and points out a caution “if URL A marks B as canonical, and B marks C as canonical, we’ll treat C as canonical for both A and B, though we will break infinite chains and other issues.”
Interestingly, if they had published a shared announcement they would have given an example of what many people think of when they hear the term duplicate content – the same copy/text/content on different websites. This is not about that issue.
It can, however act as a 301 redirect within a domain – good for removing those www.domain, domain.com, domain.com/index.html etc problems, but not from one domain to another domain
However, this tag “defines a relationship between a document and an external resource” as Microsoft states. The fact that they are calling it a link tag scares me a little, just like the no follow one did when it came out.
People are going to get this wrong, just like they did the no follow and it will dramatically impact sites. But, I suppose we can feel okay because none of the engines have committed to using it 100%.
Google has already stated there will be penalties for anyone using it to game their results.
Thanks should go to Vanessa Fox for a solid interpretation “this tag will only work with very similar or identical content, so you can’t use it to send all of the link value from the less important pages of your site to the more important ones.
If tags conflict (such as pages point to each other as canonical, the URL specified as canonical redirects to a non-canonical version, or the page specified as canonical doesn’t exist), search engines will sort things out just as they do now, and will determine which URL they think is the best canonical version.”
Kudos to Joost de Valk for his same day roll out of plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Magento E-Commerce. He did have a few days advanced notice but the effort will be much appreciated by many.
There have been a bunch of posts about this, so mine is just another, and comments throughout Twitter. I am not as enthusiastic as Rand Fishkin who sees it as “the most important advancement in SEO since sitemaps.” Guess I would be closer to Mikkel deMib’s view posted on Twitter. “The new canonical tag is like adding a cheap layer of pain to a crappy car. Sorry guys, it doesn’t make the car much better!”
It will be interesting to get more opinions on all this next week at SES London.
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Blogging – Your Answer To SEO Needs?
I love blogs. To be honest, though, I used to NOT care about blogs at all. Yet when I started reading some really good blogs and then I started maintaining my own blog, I realized just how fun they can be. But have you heard of some web site owners who have turned to blogging [...]
Does Google Analytics Share Data with Google Trends and Ad Planner?
Google is assuring users of its Analytics product that their data is protected. Apparently, the recent announcements of Google Trends for Websites and Google Ad Planner had some web site owners concerned about how much data sharing was going on among the various offerings.
Brett Crosby from the Google Analytics team went to the blog to allay fears:
Google Analytics doesn’t share individual, site-level information with Google Trends for Websites or Google Ad Planner. These products gather data from multiple sources, then check the data against anonymous, aggregate, industry benchmarking data within Google Analytics. This helps Google Trends for Websites and Google Ad Planner calibrate category data and correct for under- or over-reporting in certain verticals. The benchmarking data comes from Google Analytics customers who’ve chosen to share their data in aggregate.
This isn’t the first time fears over data collected by Google Analytics have popped up. But not everyone is worried.
When I spoke with Crosby last month, he told me that for every person who expresses fears over data collection in Analytics, there is another who wants to know why more isn’t being done with the data. He told me that Analytics works hard to strike a balance for people of both viewpoints, allowing those who want to share in the hopes of developing deep integrations with other Google products the ability to do so.
Of course, there’s only so far you can take integration. Google Analytics does not affect a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.
Google Yahoo MSN Live Sitemaps: Cross-Hosting Grokked by SEOs for SEOs

With sitemaps cross-hosting (or cross-submission), Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft cracked open the door for corporations to outsource search engine optimization.
How big a deal is this?
Not enough to make Robert Scoble cry. Or join the circus.
When SEL broke the news at SMX (described in excellent summary by Vanessa Fox of vanessfoxnude fame), I was hoping for a revolutionary change. Then I read the blog posts at the Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo Search and Live Search Webmaster Center blogs so you don’t have to. (I’m just kidding all you search engine PR gals … and guy.)
Robots.txt ruined my night. I felt like I was decepticonned – hoping for the breakthrough that would make outsourcing SEO much easier for major corporations. Or an announcement that might provide guidance for SEOs to improve rankings for their clients.
SEW Experts SEM Crossfire columnist Chris Boggs ended the robots nightmare: “I think it’s a big step forward in making it easier for companies to outsource, but the caveat is having full access to the robots.txt. Some industries such as banking and pharma may still have issues.”
Still, we don’t want to beat up on the search engines (unnecessarily). In the past, search engines required companies with multiple Web sites to have “one set of servers to rule them all.”
In short, search engines required sitemaps to be on the same host and path as the URLs they contained. That meant the same server needed to host both sitemaps and site content.
Google, Yahoo and Live Search put aside their fierce competition for a moment to make life a little easier for Webmasters and SEOs by standardizing sitemaps in November 2006, when the Big Three formed Sitemaps.org.
SEW Experts By The Numbers columnist, Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, noted, “The announcement affects Web site owners who don’t have the freedom to place a sitemaps file in the root directory of the domain. Historically, site owners without the ability to place a file in the root folder for their domain haven’t been able to make use of sitemaps.”
A cross-hosting sitemaps scenario or two?
“There are many scenarios. Shared hosting environments and people in large corporations who may be running subdomains of a much larger site,” said Enge. “This now allows them to place the sitemaps file in a different location, even on another server or domain. The sitemaps file then needs to be pointed to by the robots.txt file for the original domain. The site owner will still need the ability to make that change.”
Search Engine Watch, for example, has several domains and subdomains. Our main domain, searchenginewatch.com, features a few subdomains: blog.searchenginewatch.com, forums.searchenginewatch.com and jobs.searchenginewatch.com, for example.
Now we can host all our sitemaps in one location or subdomain: such as “notreally-oursitemaps.searchenginewatch.com.”
So what does cross-hosting mean for the global SEO community?
“Ultimately this opens up the site maps protocol to a large number of site owners who couldn’t make use of it before,” said Enge. “The SEO impact really relates to that fact. SEOs may not have been able to use sitemaps on a site previously, due to the limitations of the prior implementation. Now those SEOs have the capability available to them.”
Cool.
“The impact of offsite hosting for sitemaps? It will make it easier for sitemap management by allowing site owners to manage multiple sitemaps in one location,” explained Lee Odden of TopRank. “It will also make it easier for those with sites that use subdomains.”
So bottom line: will SEOs be able to leverage cross-hosting to improve rankings for targeted keywords?
“As for impact on rankings, it’s no different than the effect of making sitemap data available previously,” said Odden. “Providing a list of URLs to search engines serves as a supplemental source of information to what their spiders would find in the wild.”
Here’s how it works:
“Search engines make no guarantee that providing URLs in a sitemap will increase the number of pages indexed – but they might,” said Odden. “So in that regard, making it easier for sites that previously did not provide sitemaps, especially subdomains, may help them get more pages indexed, but I see no effect on actual rankings.”
For the Google Guy’s take on sitemaps, nofollow and other great tips, read the highest ranked Matt Cutts interview ever done (by Eric Enge).
Kim Krause Berg Podcast, Usability and SEO
Recently I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with Kim Krause Berg. It was a great chat, primarily focused on usability issues with web sites.
It reminded me though of the strong link between usability and SEO. For example, clear easy to use navigation is one of the things we talked about during [...]
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