Perth SEO Specialist Matt Lynch - Perth, WA

Showing posts with label Canonical. Show all posts

Friday, July 17, 2015

Using Canonical Meta Tags to address Duplicate Content site issues

If you are conscious about your website’s ranking in the search engine results, then one of the last things you want to find out is that you have several instances of duplicate content in your site. In case you do find an accumulation of duplicate content, don’t worry. You can always use the canonical meta tag as an effective means to address the issue.

What is the canonical tag?

The canonical meta tag is placed in the HTML header of a web page. It tells search engines that the page is a copy of the URL indicated in the tag and that it should be treated as such. This prevents search engines from imposing penalties for duplicate content on your page because of the existence of said copies. This is the canonical tag:

“Wait,” you say. “I don’t create duplicate content. I don’t need the canonical tag.”

Indeed. Any responsible website owner knows that creating duplicates is one of the easiest ways to drop out of the rankings. As such, many go to great lengths if only to ensure that every page is populated by unique content. Duplicates, however, do not necessarily have to be created by you. Here are some of the instances by which duplicate content may be created without your knowledge—or consent:

· The system may create session ID URLs in lieu of cookies or other URL trackers if they are disabled in your system.

· Different URL cases are usually redirected to the same location but at times, they may be recognised by search engines as duplicates of each other.

· E-commerce pages often make multiple URLs for the same page, especially if there are multiple available options for a single product. They also tend to use country-specific URLs to accommodate different currencies but these may be identified as duplicates of a single page.

· The mobile version of a page is also prone to getting mislabelled as a duplicate.

· Different mirrors of secured pages are often crawled separately and as such, may be read as duplicate content.

The canonical tag can be used to prevent these instances from having a detrimental impact on your website. While the process itself of applying the tag is straightforward, there are a number of ways that you can get it wrong.

1. Do not have more than one canonical tag in a single page. A single canonical tag at the <head> section of every page is enough. Having more or putting the tag in the wrong place will lead the crawlers to ignore the tag(s).

2. Do not use the canonical tag for multiple pages. In cases when you really must deal with multiple pages, you can use the prev and next tags instead of the canonical tag. You can also redirect crawlers to index a “View All” page instead. This page collates all the results together for easy review.

3. Do not use your homepage as your preferred site. A canonical tag tells search engines to crawl the indicated URL instead of the page with the tag. Use this opportunity to have search engines reference the other pages in your site.

4. Do not use canonical tags for featured content. There is a good chance that these pages will be ignored, making you lose some of the traffic for your features.

5. Do not use 301 redirects and canonical tags interchangeably. While they do have similarities, 301 redirects are useful for when you have performed changes on your site’s structure. A 301 effectively redirects traffic, too. Canonical tags redirect crawlers, not traffic, and are great only for addressing duplicate content.

For all its apparent benefits, the canonical tag is effective only when you use it correctly. Keep in mind the proper mechanics before implementing it in your pages. You can look for strategies on the Internet on how you can use it or which other tags and techniques you can pair it with to give you better results.

Vorian Agency’s dedicated SEO – Search Engine Optimisation division is Search Group. Vorian Agency is a Google Partner, Bing Ads Professional, Hootsuite Solutions Company and a MailChimp expert company. We provide free seminars on SEO and marketing best practices for businesses in Perth, Western Australia. We will help you get acquainted with the tools you can use to help you reach your marketing goals. Contact us now on 1300 100 333, visit us at www.vorianagency.com.au or email info@vorian.com.au to get started.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Sorting out Canonical Issues for SEO

Information on how to use Canonical link reference, and 301 redirects (permanent redirect) to fix duplicate issues in SEO

I am still surprised at the number of websites I come across daily with this problem. The following information is supplied to look at resolving this issue.

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Set the Canonical source reference, indicating the primary page where ranking is to be delivered if you have duplicate content, by including the following metatag. The following tag tells the SEs to treat the page that they are on as if it is a copy of the listed domain/page, and that all of the link and content metrics that the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.

Note: 301s carry cross-domain functionality, meaning you can redirect a page at domain1.com to domain2.com and carry over those search engine metrics. This is NOT THE CASE with the Canonical URL tag, which operates exclusively on a single root domain (it will carry over across subfolders and subdomains).

The “301 Permanent Redirect” is the most efficient and search engine friendly method for redirecting websites. You can use it in several situations, including:

* to redirect an old website to a new address

* to setup several domains pointing to one website

* to enforce only one version of your website (www. or no-www)

* to harmonize a URL structure change

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ASP Sites – 301 Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>

Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”

Response.AddHeader “Location”, “http://www.example.com/keyword.asp”

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ASP Single Page 301 Redirect (a variation on the above)

This redirect method is used with the Active Server Pages platform.

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"

Response.AddHeader='Location','http://www.new-url.com/'

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ASP Canonical Redirect

The Canonical Redirect with ASP must be located in a script that is executed in every page on the server before the page content starts.

If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 Then

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"

Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www."

& Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST")

& Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")

End if

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PHP Single Page 301 Redirect

In order to redirect a static page to a new address simply enter the code below inside the index.php file.

Header(“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);

Header(“Location: http://www.new-url.com/page.html”);

exit();

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PHP Canonical Redirect

The Canonical 301 Redirect will add (or remove) the www. prefixes to all the pages inside your domain. The code below redirects the visitors of the http://domain.com version to http://www.domain.com.

<?php

if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != 'www') {

header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');

header('Location: http://www.'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']

.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

}

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PHP Sites – 301 Redirect: Add to .htaccess file

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]

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Apache .htaccess Singe Page Redirect for Linux Servers

In order to use this method you will need to create a file named .htaccess (not supported by Windows-based hosting) and place it on the root directory of your website, then just add the code below to the file.

Redirect 301 /old/oldpage.htm /new/http://www.domain.com/newpage.htm

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Apache .htaccess Canonical Redirect for Linux Servers

Follow the same steps as before but insert the code below instead (it will redirect all the visitors accessing http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com)

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]

rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

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Thursday, September 2, 2010

Comparing 301 redirects and the canonical url tag

The Canonical URL tag attribute
<link rel="canonical" href=http://www.yoursite.com/page>
is very similar to the use of a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective.

Effectively you are telling search engines that several pages should be considered as one ,which the 301 does, without actually redirecting visitors to the new URL.

Note however; a 301 redirect redirects all traffic (search bots and human visitors), the Canonical URL tag is just for the search engines to see, meaning you can still separately track visitors to the unique URL versions. As well, a 301 is a better indicator that multiple pages have a single, canonical source. The power of a 301 redirect is in its ability to carry cross-domain functionality, meaning you can redirect a page from one domain to another and carry over those search engine metrics. This is not something that you can do with the Canonical URL tag, which operates exclusively on a single root domain (it will carry over across subfolders and subdomains).

Monday, August 30, 2010

The Canonical URL tag

Yahoo!, Bing & Google all support the "canonical url tag" with the aim to assist webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index.
The tag is part of the HTML header on the web page:
<link rel="canonical" href=http://www.yoursite.com/page>

This would tell Yahoo!, Bing & Google that the page in question should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL www.yoursite.com/page and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.