Month: December 2013

5 common mistakes with rel=canonical

December 31, 2013

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced Including a rel=canonical link in your webpage is a strong hint to search engines your about preferred version to index among duplicate pages on the web. It’s supported by several search engines, including Yahoo!, Bing, and Google. The rel=canonical link consolidates indexing properties from the duplicates, like their inbound links, as well as specifies which URL you’d like displayed in search results. However, rel=canonical can be a bit tricky because it’s not very obvious when there’s a misconfiguration. While the webmaster sees the “red velvet” page on the left in their browser, search engines notice on the webmaster’s unintended “blue velvet” rel=canonical on the right. read_more We recommend the following best practices for using rel=canonical : A large portion of the duplicate page’s content should be present on the canonical version. One test is to imagine you don’t understand the language of the content—if you placed the duplicate side-by-side with the canonical, does a very large percentage of the words of the duplicate page appear on the canonical page? If you need to speak the language to understand that the pages are similar; for example, if they’re only topically similar but not extremely close in exact words, the canonical designation might be disregarded by search engines. Double-check that your rel=canonical target exists (it’s not an error or “soft 404”) Verify the rel=canonical target doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag Make sure you’d prefer the rel=canonical URL to be displayed in search results (rather than the duplicate URL) Include the rel=canonical link in either theof the page or the HTTP header Specify no more than one rel=canonical for a page. When more than one is specified, all rel=canonicals will be ignored. Mistake 1: rel=canonical to the first page of a paginated series Imagine that you have an article that spans several pages: example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1 example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2 and so on Specifying a rel=canonical from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1 is not correct use of rel=canonical, as these are not duplicate pages. Using rel=canonical in this instance would result in the content on pages 2 and beyond not being indexed at all. Good content (e.g.,...

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Google’s Matt Cutts: repeat offenders get bigger penalties

December 19, 2013

SEO Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Matt Cutts, the big cheese of Google's anti-spam team, has published another seo-insider video on YouTube. In this video, he answers the question why Interflora's penalty was lifted after just 11 days. Does Google have different penalties for different websites ? How was Interflora's website penalized? Earlier in 2013, the website of Interflora (a popular UK flower website) was penalized because the company had bought many backlinks from various newspaper websites. After only 11 days, their website was back in Google's index. Typically most websites need several months to recover from Google penalties. In the YouTube video, Mr. Cutts was asked by another website operator to explain the penalty process applied to the Interflora website : read_more Matt Cutt's generalized explanation Dubiously, Matt Cutts didn't want to talk about specific penalties or companies. In the video, he said that repeat offenders get hit with a stronger penalty than websites that have used spam tools or carpet-backlinking for the first time : "Google tends to look at buying and selling links that pass PageRank as a violation of our guidelines and if we see that happening multiple times, repeated times, then the actions that we take get more and more severe. So we're more willing to take stronger action whenever we see repeated violations." It appears that Interflora was actually a first time offender and that they were not fully aware that the paid links from newspaper websites could cause problems. When Interflora removed the newly purchased links, Google restored the previous rankings of the website. And so what does this mean for your website? If you have received a spam warning message from Google, you should remove all spam elements from your pages and you should try to remove all spammy links that point to your web pages. Interflora's high rankings have been restored because the company already had high rankings before they acquired the paid links. If your website received high rankings because of the paid links before Google detected them, it's likely that your web pages still won't get high rankings when Google lifts the penalty. So if you want your rankings back, Google expects you to take...

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Backlinks : a virtual facelift for your website

December 14, 2013

SEO Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

If you think it is difficult for your website to get backlinks, because your business is in an industry that's not that popular. Then there is no reason to worry, because if your site has many blog posts written on the topic that you are associated with, then it is much easier to get backlinks. Your website can get backlinks even if your business or product is uncommon. Step 1: Create a list of related topics Always keep your business at the top of the list and start expanding the list. • Start analyzing the topics that are essential to your business • Now, analyze which topics are related to your businesses • Find out your business vertical • Find the business verticals that are related to your business • See, which parent category is similar to your business • Find, whether there are any related parent categories read_more • Check, if there are broader or loosely related topics. If you are into paper manufacturing, you may consider, “art”, “newspaper”, “office supplies, etc. • Find who your vendors are • Check if there are any hot topics or industry trends • List out your competitors • List out as many topics as possible Step 2: Prepare a list of related people and communities Once you find relevant topics, find relevant people: • Go through your business associations and then prepare a list of association members • Check online communities that are similar to your business • Also find communities that are broadly relevant to your business • Check who blogs about your topics and other things • Find out the enthusiasts and experts in your industry Step 3: Examine and filter your lists Once you are done with the lists, separate the good ones from the scrap: • Check the social media profiles and blogs of the people that you have collected from the above list. • Check if they are active in social media, see their communities. • Check the relevancy of the communities to your business. • See, the big influencers. • Find out the small influencers. • When you are checking the influencers and communities there is...

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