Tag: Google Tips

I am seeing increasing client concern on the canonical link issue of their website and how Google and other engines are indexing them become almost a level of paranoia this month. Let me take a few moments to talk about this issue to help you understand more about it and what you can do to keep your website search engine friendly.

First, for those of you who don’t know what I mean when here is an example on the way that you link within your website that is a factor for which URLs search engine should recognize in their index.

http://mccordweb.com or http://www.mccordweb.com – Note the first URL has no www and the second does. This is the whirlwind that surrounds the canonical topic.

Now, my site and the sites that I have designed have never had issues here as I am nitpickingly consistent on how I link withing sites, I always use the www. It is a standard that I never waiver on. If your website or blog has used both links you may have an issue. What is at stake is which page should the search engine index? As more engines and particularly Google want to properly index your site and remove peripheral pages, you want to help Google know which page link style to use.

To understand more on this topic you can watch the video on the new canonical link element from Google Engineer Matt Cutts. If you do not know how Matt Cutts is, he is a star in the SEO industry and the Google mouthpiece on technology and Google indexing to the professional community. We all hang on what he says!

The bottom line is that the big three engines are now recognizing a new head tag link element in the source code that allows you to control the page that Google will index. Here is the syntax:

<link rel=”canonical” href=http://www.mccordweb.com/weblogs/index.php> This relates to the home page of my blog. This appears in the source code of your site. You can even create code in your template to pull in the preferred canonical link on your page if you desire and are using header and footer includes. Although for many sites this issue is really not a make or break issue and really will not significantly impact your organic placement for sites that have URLs that contain session cookies and other dynamic elements you can now tell the search engines to index your SEO friendly URL instead of the URLs that may contain session information. Now that has importance! Especially if your URL has been well crafted to contain a product name, model number or SEO keywords.

For normal websites you simply do not need to be spun up on the topic. You can now add the link code in your head tag and you could always through the Google Webmaster control panel tell Google what canonical link to use, but for dynamic sites this is important news for optimization and potentially could be used as just another tool to get better organic placement.