What is the Canonical Link Tag?
A few months ago Google introduced the Canonical Link Tag.
This tag is supposed to solve the duplicate content issue on different URL, which can negatively affect those page’s ranking. It just tells search engine the preferred version of the content, in order to be ranked better by the engines themselves.
The Canonical Link Tag should reside in the HEAD section of the page, and the href attribute should point to the URL of the chosen page. That should be enough.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourURL.com/">
Canonical Link Tag vs. Redirect
Upsides
It is way better than a 301 redireccion: it’s search engine to be redirected, not the users hence not affecting the user experience though making sure rankings wouldn’t be affected.
A 301 redireccion would actually affects search engine who have to update their rankings according to the quality of the content of those pages
Downsides
However, while the 301 redirects visitors and search engines from different domains, the Canonical link tag can be used only into a single domai, its folders and subdomains. That’s the only downside. Still it’s a pretty tool.
Possible application of the Canonical Link Tag
Usually PHP pages create dynamic content with random urls, lacking of informative content related in any way to the content. They usually have the visitor’s session ID and merge content from different sources. The Canonical Link Tag can preserve rankings of the original page which featured the content.
To learn more about the Canonical Link Tag, check out this post from Matt Cutts or take a look into the Google Webmaster Center.
Search the original Google algorithm and show side-by-side comparisons to Caffeine.
Last week Google announced a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search, called Caffeine.
They also kidnly asked users to contribute in the effort of benchmarking the new technology providing some feedback on their searches through this URL:
http://www2.sandbox.google.com/
Anyway, a few days ago a new service has been released which compares in real time results from both Google and Google Caffeine: GoogleCompare.
I’m not going to explain any more about the service since it’s pretty straightforward: the whole thing has a funny retro-style, kind of coffe adverts from the ’50s. It’s quite funny. Then you just type your keyword and click on brew and you get a quick comparison eventually showing how SERPs have changed due to the new algorithm.
So how did your ranking changed due to the update? I’ve have not experienced any major change in my rankings. However search speed has increased a lot… I guess that was the main effort behind the development of Caffeine.
I’ll keep an eye on Caffeine for the next few days if anything changes…
Page loading time is a crucial factor when it comes to estimate page’s usability as well as search engine’s rankings and Google’s Adwords quality score.
according to this statement, Google is going to update its assessment policy . Page load time it is soon due to become an important factor requiring specific assessment and optimization from webmasters and SEOs.
In order to calculate page loading time, you might try Pingdom. Pingdom is an online utility which calculates pages text, images and scripts, giving you also some interesting suggestions about improvement.
However, besides any Google statement about quality score or rankings, it’s always good to think about you user’s experience on your website: nobody likes websites taking too long to load.
Considering both usability and rankings, this should be some general guidelines to be followed one assessing and optimizing page’s loading time:
Text and page structure should load and be completely visible within the first 3 seconds
Any other element of the page must be visible within the first 8 seconds
These are only thumb rules of course. Always cehck your page weight and loading times. Working on this side of on-page optimization can lead to interesting discoveries sometimes.
It seems that search engine are digging through Twitter more and more
. In the past few days a came across a few episodes which made me think about how much search engine are considering Twitter content as valuable enough to be included into their own search results.
Let’s take a look at Bing first. Try looking for Al Gore this query on Bing: the very first result will be it’s Twitter page with is real time twits. This entry comes also before his personal website. This has been also confirmed by a public statement from Bing published on its community page.
Something interesting happens with Google as well. A few days ago I posted a link to one of my websites I found and I wanted to share with my Twitter followers. Analytics record show the following as the very first visit on the website right after the link was published on twitter:
216.200.55.83 invx.com [01/Jul/2009:02:49:01 +0200] “GET /a HTTP/1.1″ 404 136 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” “-”
Clearly the page was just being crawled by Google. The link has not apperead anywhere else and it is not a fronpage or entry page for search engines on the website.
This it’s just another proof on how important Twitter is becoming in terms on search value. It’s not going to take long before Google itself will either buy or create its own real time search tool.
It’s basically the Bing version of Google Webmaster tools. According to Microsoft, Bing Webmaster Toolbox development will aim toboost user engagement and traffic to websites and web-based application. The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community, plus links to Webmaster and Developer community blogs and forums.
Compared to competitors like Google and Yahoo, I guess the community its the real bonus of the toolbox. The collaborative and collective help of users is way more valuable than any webmaster toolbox, especially when it comes to SEO and content optimizacion, considering how recently Bing has been released.