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.

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 :

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