A Useful Fix for Duplicate Content Issues
I recently came across the concept of canonical URLs. It’s a useful fix for duplicate content issues within your site.
Say you have two different versions of the same web page, with very similar content. Maybe you use one of them is actually present in the navigation links in your website and the other is a landing page for your PPC ads. But obviously you wouldn’t want your page rankings and other metrics to be split between those two. An easy solution for this is to mark the “more important” page as a “canonical page” . According to the definition in Google Webmaster Tools Help , “a canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.”
So how do you mark a page as canonical?
It’s very simple, very similar to the concept of nofollow blogs. Lets consider the example I viagra for sale gave before. You have two similar pages in your website, one is an actual page in the website and another is a duplicate you use for PPC ads.
http://sample.com/website_page.php
http://sample.com/landing_ads.php
In this case, the more important page of the two is obviously “website_page.php”. So within the HTML code of “landing_ads.php”, all you have to do is add the following code in the <head> section:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.sample.com/website_page.php" />
When the search engine spider is crawling “landing_ads.php”, the canonical tag will instruct the spider that this page is simply a copy of “website_page.php”and that whatever backlinks or traffic metrics this page has should point back to the “preferred page”, or in our case, “website_page.php”.
Technically, this seems similar to a 301 redirect, though there are subtle differences in the way both work. A canonical tag is mainly for the benefit
of a search engine, as opposed to a redirect which is intended for end users. There’s a good SEOmoz article in that explains this concept very well.
Are there some more useful other on-page optimization practices that you follow for your site? Do let us know in the comments section!
Webinar Video: SEO for Business Owners, June 16th
Quite a few registrants who couldn’t make it to p2w2’s webinar on SEO for Business Owners on June 16th (and some others who did!) requested for the recorded video of the webinar. For the benefit of all readers of our
blog, here are the presentation slides and the recorded version of the webcast:
Here’s also a chance for you to order our ebook, which has complete information of all the information presented in the webinar, along with links to some useful tools and resources.
Our next webinar will be on July 14th, 2010. Register yourself now by sending an email to iswarya[AT]p2w2[DOT]com with the subject line “RSVP to p2w2 7/14 Webinar“. For more details check:
SEO for Business Owners Webinar
We look forward
to meeting you!
How to Improve Google AdWords Quality Score
A couple of weeks back, I attended a webinar on improving Quality Score of Google AdWords, hosted by WordStream, a search engine marketing software company. Quality Score is a numerical measure of how well your Google ads are performing, and is thereby used to determine your ad position as well as your cost per click. Quality Score could be broadly thought as a sum component of all these factors:
- Click Through Rate (Number of Clicks/Number of Impressions)
- Relevance of Ad to keywords
- Landing Page
- Other Factors
The next part of the webinar focused
on ways to achieve a better Quality Score. Some of the things you can do:
1. Showing ads only to targeted audience will bring down the number of times your ad is shown (impressions), and therefore improve your CTR. Some of the things you could do is filter out showing your ads by geography, day/night time (based on previous performance), making use of phrase/broad/exact search filters and implementing negative keywords for your campaign.
2. Write good quality ad text so that more people will click on your ads. For more information, check out this post on how to write good copywriting text.
3. Use targeted, long tail keywords and bind the keywords tightly to the ad text.
4.
Maintain a good keyword density within your landing page.
The slides of the presentation are available here. Do you think there are more ways to optimize your AdWords performance? Do let us know in the comments section!
P.S: For more information on link building, social media and SEO/SEM check out our link building and SEO services.
Faster, Higher, Stronger?
Website speed might not just be important for user experience, it is now apparently also a crucial factor in search rankings, as revealed in the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Site speed in this context refers to the response time of the website. According to the post, Google Research studies have shown that
visitors generally tend to spend lesser time on a page that responds slowly, and this is possibly the motivation behind Google making site speed an integral factor for search rankings.
The authors go on to list a few useful tools that will help in evaluating site speed.
- Page Speed: An open source add-on for Firefox/Firebug that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow: A free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed. Personally I really like the innovative name! 🙂
- WebPagetest: It shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance along with an optimization checklist.
- Google’s very own Webmaster Tools: You can go to Labs > Site Performance to see the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.
This revelation has come under a lot of criticism as seen in the post’s comments. A lot of the commentators do not seem agree with the fact that site speed should be a factor in determining site rankings, as site speed can vary based on a lot of variables – including Flash applications, content with high resolution images, blogs that have many widgets, etc.
The post has however clarified that relevance to search
terms still remains the top priority for ranking. Site speed is just going to be one of the additional parameters that Google will consider in its ranking algorithm.
All said and done it does seem like ‘light weight’ is the new buzzword. What are your thoughts about this? Do let us know in the comments section!