Tech Monk » seo http://www.techmonk.com Guide To The Nth Dimension Of Computing And Internet Mon, 16 Jan 2012 03:13:11 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 What Is rel=”canonical” Element? What Are Its uses? http://www.techmonk.com/how-to-use-link-rel-canonical-what/637/ http://www.techmonk.com/how-to-use-link-rel-canonical-what/637/#comments Sun, 27 Dec 2009 03:28:49 +0000 Pramodh KP http://www.techmonk.com/?p=637 Recently, when WordPress 2.9 was released I saw it was supporting something called rel = “canonical”. I wondered what it was and googled for it and found this element was pretty much useful and interesting. So, I thought I would share this piece of information on my blog.

duplicate_content

You might have seen many URLs pointing to the same/similar page many times. For example,

  • www.example.com
  • example.com
  • www.example.com/index.html
  • example.com/home.aspx

These type of URLs may cause search engines to look at your content as duplicate and thus your search engine rankings may go down. In such cases, using canonical elements can reduce the problem.

So, What’s the deal with rel =”canonical”?

When many URLs point to the same or more exactly, similar page then that results in duplicate content. Bloggers, SEOs and website owners avoid this by using  301 redirects, which redirect the search engines to the new URL. This rel=”canonical” element has a similar functionality. While 301 redirection works across different domains, rel=”canonical” works only within a domain. However, canonical elements even work for sub-domains too.

How To Use The Canonical Element?

Using the canonical element is very simple. All you need to do is put a piece of tag/element at the top of your non-canonical page. For example, consider two URLs like “http://www.example.com” and “http://www.test.example.com”. Now, if both the URLs lead to the same page, search engines consider it as duplicate content. To avoid this, you can add the canonical element at the top of the non-canonical page (http://www.example.com).

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.test.example.com/>

Note: This should be added to the head section of the page. (i.e., after <head> tag.)

Imporant:

If you add the canonical tag to both the pages, this creates an infinite loop. In such cases, search engines have the rights to decide which is better.

Canonical elements do not direct the search engines to a different page, but instead just gives a suggestion to go to that page. To be short, canonical tags are not directive, they are just suggestions. If you have two URLs say, http://www.example.com and http://www.cartoon.example.com which are completely different and you try to add canonical element between them, search engines may not consider it. So, you can add canonical tags only to same or similar pages.

So, this canonical element can be of great help to bloggers who blog from blogger platform. Blogger users often suffer from duplicate content issues. Using canonical tags can reduce this. For more information about this, you can watch the video by Matt Cutts, Google engineer below.

]]> http://www.techmonk.com/how-to-use-link-rel-canonical-what/637/feed/ 1 Check How A Search Engine Sees Your Blog With SEO-Browser http://www.techmonk.com/check-how-a-search-engine-sees-your-blog-with-seo-browser/536/ http://www.techmonk.com/check-how-a-search-engine-sees-your-blog-with-seo-browser/536/#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:14:43 +0000 Pramodh KP http://www.techmonk.com/?p=536 Search Engine Optimization is one of the toughest concept I have seen while blogging. This is the reason why many blogs writing about SEO have emerged and get good traffic too! There are lots of tools to check out of how much “search engine friendly” you website is. Today I found a very interesting tool that you may like it.

SEO-Browser.com is a tool that helps you to check how search engines sees a particular website/blog. This is helpful for the bloggers to analyze and optimize their website with ease. To use this tool, you need to enter your blog URL and you are done.

There are two modes for analyzing your website. Simple mode and Advanced mode. Simple mode just shows you how a page is viewed by a search engine. Whereas in advanced mode, it helps you to analyze many internal aspects of a website/blog like metadata, external and internal links, CSS sheet, duplicate content and so on… These are the aspects which are very important to note while optimizing your website for search engine.

seo_browser_1

seo_browser_2

Overall, SEO-Browser is very helpful for website optimization. What do you think about this tool? Do you think it will really help in optimizing blogs? Share your thoughts through comments below. Every comment you make is of great value to me.

SEO I Did To This Post

SEO Title: Know How Search Engines See Your Blog/Website

“Blog/Website” again as in the previous post , you need to use double keywords in your title. This helps you to rank higher. Actually, “know” here is a noise, however it would not be nice to submit a title which contains only keywords. So I added that word. BTW, I have a doubt here. If you are reading this line, please be kind to answer my small doubt:

“What’s wrong in adding only keywords in the title instead of sentences?”

SEO Excerpt: Here is a tool that helps you to look at your blog/website in a way search engines look. This gives you a deeper understanding of SEO and make your blog more SEO-Friendly!

Some important keywords: “blog/website”, “SEO”, “SEO-Friendly”

SEO tags: seo for blogs, tool to seo, how search engine looks a website,


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