Specifying a Canonical URL The New Google Link Tag, Duplicate Content Issues (Solved)

Duplicate content on your own website, where different web addresses (“URLs”) on your site display identical content, can lead to problems in your website’s performance in the search engine. This article discusses one way to resolve this for the Google search engine.

Video Tutrioal Solve Duplicate Content

The Problem with Duplicate Content

I have discussed the problems associated with having different URLs show the same content, or what webmasters often call “duplicate content”, in my articles before.

In case it isn’t clear to you how this can come about, take the example of a site selling a product called “Widget A”. The site links to a product page showing details of widget A using the URL “http://www.example.com/widget-A/“. Like all sites with high usability, the webmaster also provides other ways in which the visitor can end up on that product page. For example, if the visitor uses the site’s “Help” function to look for a product with certain features, the site may show information about Widget A that fulfills the visitor’s criteria. The information page may use a different address, like “http://www.example.com/help.php?features=fix+kitchen+sink“. Both addresses show the exact same information, since they are talking about the same product.

Even if you don’t use scripts on your website, it’s still possible to end up with duplicate content problems. For example, the “index.html” page of a website or its directory is usually the same page displayed by a web server when the visitor accesses the site without specifying a filename. That is, “http://www.example.com/index.html” and “http://www.example.com/” are usually the same page, showing the same content. (For more information about this behaviour, and its ramifications, see “Should Your URLs Point to the Directory or the Index Page?”.)

When a page can be accessed with multiple web addresses, you run the risk of link dilution. I’ve mentioned this before in How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website, so if you’re not familiar with the term, please check that article out for details. In general, link dilution causes the relevant page on your site to rank less in the search engine results than it should had it not occurred.

The New Canonical URL Link Tag

To help webmasters solve this problem, Google has declared that it will recognize a new HTML / XHTML tag, which, if you insert into your web page, will allow you to state which URL you want to be the “official”, or “canonical”, address for that particular content.

This tag needs to be inserted into the HEAD section of your web page. It has the following format:

Replace “http://www.example.com/correct-page.html” with your actual web address. Remember: the code has to go into the HEAD section of your web page where all the meta data are, and not into the BODY section where your content lives. If you use a WYSIWYG web editor (where WYSIWYG means “What You See Is What You Get”), change to the “Source” mode to locate the right section.

What the Canonical URL Link Tag Solves

The canonical URL link tag will cause Google to take the web address you put into the tag as the “official” or “correct” version of your web address. If you have two URLs that resolve to the same content, Google will use the one declared as canonical as the actual URL. This means the following:

In search engine results, it will display the canonical URL instead of all the variants it finds on your website.
You will avoid the link dilution problem mentioned earlier. Links from other sites that point to your content using all its myriad URLs will be regarded as pointing to your canonical URL. That is to say, your page rank from all the diverse URLs will flow correctly to the page it’s supposed to be attached to.

Limitations of the Canonical URL Tag

There are some limitations to what the new link tag can do.

The information about the canonical URL does not work across different domain names. However, it works across sub-domain names.For example, if you have a URL like “a.com/something” that is identical with “b.com/something-else“, Google will not take your canonical url link tag on b.com to apply to a.com.However, if you have URLs on multiple subdomains on your domain that show the same content, like “www.example.com/xyz.html”, “my.example.com/whatever.html” and “example.com/index.html” all showing the same page, putting a canonical link tag will cause Google to accept the URL you put in your link tag as the real URL.Update: Google now accepts cross-domain canonical tags. That is, this limitation no longer exists.
The tag is currently only recognized by Google. As such, you should still continue to find ways of reducing multiple URLs that lead to the same content on your website.Update: some of the other search engines have said that they will support the canonical tag as well, although they may not necessarily give it the same weightage as Google. Nor will they necessarily support its use across different domains (see above point).

Solving the Problem of Duplicate Content

It’s probably too early to say whether this will become the definitive method that helps webmasters solve the pesky duplicate contentproblemthat plagues many sites. (The tag was only officially announced by Google on 12 February 2009.)

I personally think it is an ingenious solution, and it puts the power of how to resolve the issues into the hands of the webmasters themselves, rather than letting the search engine, which usually does not have enough information, try to figure out the correct URL. Hopefully, the other search engines will also recognize this tag, making this a problem of the past.

Top Facebook Position Modified Issues in 2011

We all know that Facebook or myspace is an appearing foundation in latest era. An incredible number of customers will bring up to date and talk about various issues on Facebook or myspace surfaces. Would you like to know what are the hot conversations at Facebook or myspace this year. Facebook or myspace Information group published Memology 2011 with complete information of international as well as individual significant nations around the world.

Top Ten Facebook Issues in Community 2011:

Top Ten Facebook Issues in Indian 2011:

Top Ten Facebook Issues in U. s. Business (UK) 2011:

Top Ten Facebook Issues in U. s. Declares (USA) 2011:

Facebook Places rolled out globally, which is a great thing, but also raises many questions regarding Facebook Places.

The top issues that we have at Socialbakers with Facebook places (and that you have been sending us as well), are:

Places Search – When will Facebook fix the search of Facebook Places, and will there be a separate filter while searching? Try searching for JFK airport, the real checkin place is 300th in my newsfeed, despite it being the most socially relevant object to me.
Creation of Places – When will Facebook fix the mobile clients, to not allow creating so many duplicates? I’ve tried creating a 100% match on name and location at Prague Airport, and it lets me.
Duplicates – How will Facebook be dealing with Facebook Places duplicates? Merging them into the official points?
Facebook Places claiming – how are they planning to deal with this issue at scale, so even small coffee shops on the corner can claim their business?

Obviously these and other things are the top to address to Facebook, and we would like to know how Facebook will be dealing with them. Right now, Facebook is not dealing with Facebook Places on the support level, and we believe that Places will add one of the largest overhead ever so far to the Facebook teams.

Don`t blame Facebook for everything
Facebook could obviously be blamed for some of the product issues to deal with, but dont blame them if they wont support each and every one of your requests. At Socialbakers we are in daily contact with Facebook, and they are dealing with as many issues as they can, so dont blame them - were sure they`ll get there.

We addressed a few and reached out to the Facebook PR team, but haven`t received an answer yet.

How To More Guidelines on The search engines Shows more Result

t’s been a few years since my last article on getting your site noticed on Google, Tips on Improving Your Google Search Engine Ranking. The situation hasn’t changed much, and the article is still relevant today. However, over these years I have learned a couple more things about what to do and what not to do on your website with regards to your site’s placement on the search engine results.

Video Tutorial Search Engine Optimization Tips

Hidden Text

Everyone knows that search engines (not just Google, but probably every one of them) frown on hidden text. Some people use hidden text to stuff keywords on their pages so that when people type those words on the search engine, your site will show, even though your page does not have any visible sign of those words.

I have never believed in hiding my keywords in hidden text or any of those cloak and dagger stuff, and hence I don’t practise such things. Imagine my surprise, when one day, a few years back, I suddenly found my pages on thefreecountry.com receiving a Page Rank of 0 because of hidden text on the page. (See my other article on Google Page Rank if you don’t know what Page Rank is.)

No, I did not compromise on my principles or anything like that. I did not try any underhand tactics to stuff keywords, etc. The reason is more prosaic.

At that time, I had partially converted thefreecountry.com to use CSS for its site design instead of the traditional and

tags. In those years, there were still a few people using the old Netscape 4 which did not support CSS correctly. To accomodate those people, I tried to make my site degrade gracefully when it detected an old browser being used. I also put a message that contained the following text: This page uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control its appearance. Since CSS is poorly supported on old browsers like Netscape 4.X, you may notice numerous oddities in the appearance of the page. However, you should still be able to read the information and navigate using the links.

This text was enclosed in a box that was hidden from view if you were using a modern browser, but visible if you used Netscape 4. I used the usual methods of getting different browsers to load different stylesheets as mentioned in my article How to Use Different CSS Style Sheets For Different Browsers (and How to Hide CSS Code from Older Browsers).

Unfortunately, Google’s spider detected that some text was hidden, and not realizing that it was also visible in other cases, automatically assumed I was employing some sort of skulduggery to get those keywords into its index. It then penalized my site accordingly.

When I realized that my attempt to help my visitors was going to cost my site’s position in the search engine results, I immediately pulled the message, and its accompanying CSS, from the site. Visitors using old browsers would still be able to use the site, but they would not receive any friendly explanation.

Although the days of Netscape 4 are long gone, the lessons learnt from that incident are still useful today. Undoubtedly many of you will not even dream of using keyword stuffing in hidden text and the like. However, as I found out from the above incident, Google’s search engine robot is far from intelligent, and its hidden text detection algorithm can bite legitimate webmasters too. If it even senses hidden text, even for an innocuous purpose like mine, your site is history.

Some ways in which you might inadvertently use hidden text (possibly without knowing, if you use third-party scripts) include the use of drop-down menus for site navigation and browser-specific tips for users (like in my case above). I’m fairly certain that the Google programmers keep refining their engine so that the more common use of CSS to hide text for harmless purposes like navigation menus (and so on) are recognized as benign, but if you are about to use hidden text for some fancy design gimmick on your page, you might want to test it out on some obscure page on your site to see if the Google robot chokes on it. After all, always remember your site’s life depends on a robot, not a human. It may be obvious to you and other humans that the code is harmless, designed for some acceptable purpose, but a computer program can only follow a set of preprogrammed rules.

Note that neither the navigation menu created by my Free CSS Navigation Menu Button Wizard nor the one created by the Free Drop Down Navigation Menu Wizard uses hidden text for the various menu items (or anything else for that matter), so don’t worry. They are straightforward menus that do not use any trickery to accomplish their jobs.
Getting Your Link to Appear on the First Page of the Search Engine Results.

I get many queries everyday from new webmasters reading thesitewizard.com, asking me how they can get the link to their site to be shown on the first page of the Google search engine results. In fact, for some of them, getting their site to appear anywhere in the first few pages of Google’s results would already be a victory.

If you are in a hurry to get your site noticed, and have a budget allocated for your site’s search engine promotion, one instant way to get to the first page of Google’s results page is to buy advertisements (called Google Adwords) on your keywords. Before you summarily dismiss this, read everything I have to say first.

Google’s Adwords actually operates according to your budget – that is, you can spend according to what you can afford. It also allows you to place the adverts on precisely the keywords you would have wanted for your site in the search engine results. Unlike the normal search engine indexing procedure however, here you control the exact keyword which will trigger your site’s advertisement and its prominence. Of course it comes with a price. But if you’re doing a business, this is often the surefire way to get people to see your site in relation to something that they are searching for.

Many new webmasters I deal with don’t consider this as a viable option, because it involves cash-outlay. I agree that if you are merely running a personal site or a hobby site that does not receive an income, advertising this way is probably out of the question. You should then work on applying the usual search engine promotion tips to your website and hope for the best in the long run. However, if your site is a business site that yields an income, you might want to calculate the costs and benefits to see if you might actually earn more this way. Treat your expenditure on the advertisements like all other business expenditure and calculate your return on investment (ROI). If you spend (say) 50 cents per click on your advertisement, and every 100 clicks gets you one person who spends $100 on your site, you would have made a profit of $50 every hundred clicks. This is income that you would not otherwise have made had you not advertised. Of course, as in all things, it’s possible to go overboard and spend more than you earn. You might want to consider setting aside an budget for a month or two as an experiment, and adjust as you go along to see if this approach increases your profits.

Conclusion

Google is now, arguably, the most important search engine around. Knowing what you should not do and still survive Google, as well as learning shortcuts to getting an instantaneous good placement on Google’s search engine results page, is now a very important part of website promotion.

My Site Not Ranking in the Search Engines

Why Is My Web page Not Position in the Search Engines?

From a chance to time, I get readers to thesitewizard.com seeking that I take a look at their site. Now, I gotten a ask for to look at a site that had been listed by The search engines, but not displaying for any appropriate search concerns. A fast look at the visitor’s site unveiled the issue. Since many internet sites that I have researched in the last demonstrated the same kinds of issues, I’ve gathered some of the typical factors why a site may not be standing in the google in 1 post. This will hopefully help you when you style or bring up to date your own website.

Note that most (if not all) of these details have already been included in my other content on website campaign and web style. You should study them to be able to get a better concept of getting your site into the google. Here are some essential ones:

Typical Factors Why Your Website Is Not Displaying Up in the Look for Results.

1- Display Rush Displays for a Home Page: Thoughts Talk Higher Than (Animated) Action.

Your webpage is an essential web page on your website. It should tell people what your website is all about. Very often, when I’m requested to evaluation a website, I find a website that has the following characteristics:
The webpage has nothing but a Display rush display with some extravagant movement. If there are any thoughts on the website at all that are not included in the Display movement, it’s “Enter Site”.The HTML subject tag of the website says “Flash Release Page”.Ask yourself what the the search engines will catalog in such a case. Possibilities are that your webpage will probably only list for “enter site” and “flash intro page” since those are the only thoughts on the website many the search engines can select up. Actually, since there are so many websites with those thoughts, you may not even list for them (not that you’ll want to).

Title meta data are vital: Google uses it to a great extent and it’s an integral part of any seo helpful web style.

Text articles that can be listed is also important. Google optimization cannot know naturally what your website is about if it doesn’t have thoughts to catalog. Embedding textual articles within Display articles and anticipating the search engines to be able to identify them is a dangerous business – Google may be able to study some kinds of textual articles, or it may not. The other the search engines probably won’t be able to even draw out anything.

Get rid of the Display rush display for your webpage if you have one, and change it with a typical website. Not only will your website list better, it will also look more expert. Prohibit your use of Display to things that really need Display, like involved activities and video clips, and not websites that you want listed.

2- More Pictures Than Words: Even A Few Words is Worth More Than a Picture.

I’m sure you’ve observed the saying, “a image is truly worth a million words”. Maybe that’s real to a people. But to google optimization, using present engineering, images is ineffective for figuring out what the website is about. The powerplant cannot see images and tell that it’s images of Britney Warrior spears or your most popular cat. If you want the powerplant to know that you have images of some pop celebrity, publish thoughts to that impact. You will find more details on how to tag your images in a way google can comprehend at http://www.thesitewizard.com/sitepromotion/search-engine-friendly.shtml

3- A Web 2.0 Web page Without Conventional Web Articles and Navigation: New is Not Actually Better.

Relevant to the above details is a web page that is to a great extent based mostly on Web 2.0 engineering like AJAX or even just easy JavaScript. If the articles or the links on your web page are created using JavaScript, you may experience the same issue another of thesitewizard.com’s readers skilled — the look for engines’ lack of ability to discover other websites on the web page.

The option to this is to always have basic, conventional web articles and routing links somewhere on your web page. You do not need to decrease web 2.0 products to do this. Just think of some way to put typical textual articles and typical links onto your web page in a way that does not need a JavaScript translation to decipher them. While you can also put up a conventional web page map and make a submit using the sitemap method to help the google, nothing sounds typical backlinks on a web page that operates for both google and people readers.

4- Nobody is Backlinks to You

As mentioned in my article on How to Create Your Own Website, if your site is not linked to by any other site, some search engines, notably Google, may not even bother to visit your website to index it. Read that article for pointers to how to get started on getting some links to your site.

How to Have a look at Your Website for Search Engines Friendliness.

One way to have a look at your website to see if it’s seo helpful is to manage your technique to not present any design, not to use plug-ins and not to run JavaScripts. If your website only reveals a clear present in such a case, that’s what google optimization will see as well. If you only see a few useless thoughts on the present, then that’s what google optimization will think your website is about as well. If you find you cannot check out any other websites on your website from the main page, the google will have the same problem as well.

The best technique to use for such assessments is the free Firefox web technique. The latter makes it very easy to disarm and re-enable everything, either on a site-by-site time frame, or on a international time frame. To around the globe disarm the things I described, hit the F12 key (F12 for Windows and Unix like users; Alt+F12 if you use a Mac), uncheck “Enable Java”, “Enable plug-ins” and “Enable JavaScript”. You can allow them again easily by reaching the same F12 (or Alt+F12 for Mac) key and verifying those things. To disarm pictures, hit Shift+I (all managing systems). (This is a toggle between “No images”, “Cached Images”, and “Show Images”, so reaching Shift+I again will swap between these three methods.)

This is not a simple option for verifying your website though, since Firefox is a contemporary frames-capable technique, so websites using something known as “frames” will still appear effectively in Firefox, even though they won’t actually be listed effectively by a real seo. But for fast assessments, this is by far the most user-friendly way to do that works on all the significant esteem techniques. Please be aware that I’m not driving you to swap to Firefox or anything like that – use whatever technique you like as your typical technique. But as a web creator, since you will probably have all the significant windows around to analyze your website anyway, you should use Opera’s extra usefulness functions to give your websites a fast going-over.

(Additional tip: while you do this, you can also have a look at how your website will appear in small-screen gadgets like cellular phone gadgets by reaching Shift+F11 on Windows/Linux or Shift+Alt+F11 on the Mac. Hit the same key again to come back to typical method.)

What Do You Want to List For?

One way to have a look at your website to see if it’s seo helpful is to manage your technique to not present any design, not to use plug-ins and not to run JavaScripts. If your website only reveals a clear present in such a case, that’s what google optimization will see as well. If you only see a few useless thoughts on the present, then that’s what google optimization will think your website is about as well. If you find you cannot check out any other internet sites on your website from the main web page, the google will have the same problem as well.

The best technique to use for such assessments is the free Firefox web technique. The latter makes it very easy to disarm and re-enable everything, either on a site-by-site time frame, or on a international time frame. To around the globe disarm the issues I described, hit the F12 key (F12 for Windows and Unix like users; Alt+F12 if you use a Mac), uncheck “Enable Java”, “Enable plug-ins” and “Enable JavaScript”. You can allow them again easily by reaching the same F12 (or Alt+F12 for Mac) key and verifying those items. To disarm pictures, hit Shift+I (all managing systems). (This is a toggle between “No images”, “Cached Images”, and “Show Images”, so reaching Shift+I again will swap between these three methods.)

This is not a simple option for verifying your website though, since Firefox is a contemporary frames-capable technique, so sites using something known as “frames” will still appear effectively in Firefox, even though they won’t actually be outlined effectively by a real seo. But for fast assessments, this is by far the most user-friendly way to do that works on all the significant esteem techniques. Please be aware that I’m not driving you to swap to Firefox or anything like that – use whatever technique you like as your typical technique. But as a web creator, since you will probably have all the significant windows around to analyze your website anyway, you should use Opera’s extra usefulness features to give your internet sites a fast going-over.

(Additional tip: while you do this, you can also have a look at how your website will appear in small-screen gadgets like mobile phone gadgets by reaching Shift+F11 on Windows/Linux or Shift+Alt+F11 on the Mac. Hit the same key again to come back to typical method.)
What Do You Want to List For?

A very thing to remember when developing your website is to ask yourself what your website is all about. What do you want to position for? If you want to position for “Widget X”, the thoughts “Widget X” must appear on your website in standard, noticeable textual content. This may seem obvious when I say it, but knowing from what I see when I evaluation some internet sites, it may not actually be obvious to some people. (Don’t take this as an allegation or anything like that, it wasn’t obvious to me either, when I first started.)

So here’s the article in a nutshell: When someone queries for a particular phrase, and you want your website to be outlined for those conditions, the conditions must appear somewhere on your web page, or the powerplant will not know your website shares about them. And those thoughts, to be most effective, must appear in typical textual content, not in images, not designed by JavaScript, and not included in a Screen screen on your web page. You also need links aiming to your website.

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