Last week, in a rare unified move, all three major search engines announced support for a new “canonical URL tag” designed to help search engines understand a website with multiple URLs displaying the same content. Basically, all a site owner needs to do is add this tag to the head section of all versions of a duplicated page. So, for example, this tag:
By adding the canonical tag to all these potential versions of the page, it tells search engines that all these URLs are essentially the same page and should be treated as such. This allows them to easily determine which page should be listed and at the same time ensure that all the linking value for these pages is preserved and combined under one URL.
The introduction of this new tag provides an alternate way for site owners to address duplicate content issues created by the way their site is designed. Up until now, the only solution that worked for all three search engines was to restrict the access of the robots to duplicate pages using instructions in the robots.txt file, robots meta tags or both. Any website owners that have been using the robots meta tag or robots.txt file to deal with this and who decide to switch to the tag will need to remove any instructions restricting access to duplicated pages from their robots.txt files and/or remove the robots meta tags so that search engines can find the new canonical URL tags.
Unfortunately, for some websites, using the robots meta tags and robots.txt file may continue to be the only viable solution to duplicate content, because although this new tag addresses the issue of which page should be indexed, it does not resolve the crawling problem associated with duplicate URLs. Since search engine robots do not realize that these pages are all the same until after they have been crawled and indexed, they may still waste valuable crawling time accessing the same content and potentially delaying the indexing of unique content. Furthermore, all three search engines have indicated that they will view the canonical URL tag as a “suggestion” and will still be using alternate means to determine which URL should be displayed in duplicate content situations. This is why the best course of action is not to give search engine duplicate URLs in the first place and using robots.txt, robots meta tags or the canonical URL tag should only be used if there is no way to program the site to be search engine friendly.
While most of us are primarily familiar with Google as a search engine, there are several products and services offered by the company that can help webmasters gain visibility into their websites. While Google Analytics is one of the better known of this suite of tools (we have an in-house Web Intelligence team as well as a web analytics blog which features articles on it), there is another very useful tool webmasters can use. Conveniently enough, it’s called Google Webmaster Central.
Just like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Central is offered as freeware. All you need to gain access to these services is a Google account. But, once you are in, what can you do? Well, more than you might realize. Once you verify that you are the website owner (by the addition of a slim-line authentication code in your site metadata or via upload of a validation HTML file), Google Webmaster Central offers a fairly robust selection of services, among which are:
Diagnostic information, such as the ability to identify “crawl errors”. Google Webmaster Central will show you the number of each type of crawl error the search engine has found on your website (with links to the individual URLs with errors).
Top search queries. You are able to view and research the top searches that bring visitors to your site from the Google search engine results pages (SERPs).
Visibility into what the GoogleBot sees. This is basically a detail of the words used most often in your website. As the search engine’s spiders are essentially “blind” (i.e. they can’t see the images used on your site), the way in which relevance to a particular search term is determined is from reading the words on the site’s pages. Knowing what the GoogleBot sees can help you with your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, as well as your web accessibility compliance efforts.
A listing of external links. This will show you a list of pages on your site with external links to them, along with the number of links to each page. With this listing you can also click through to see the list of external URLs.
A listing of internal links. This list is presented in an alphabetized format, showing links from your website to other pages within the site (this is also referred to as inter-linking).
Statistical information for RSS/ATOM feeds. With Google Webmaster Central you can obtain information on the number of subscribers to each feed on your website via the Google Reader and iGoogle. It’s important to note that, if your site offers feeds using a service like FeedBurner, the data in Google Webmaster Central may not match the data from FeedBurner. The reason is that there’s currently no way for site owners to upload a FeedBurner file to the domain or to put an authentication/verification meta tag on the home page. Without this authentication, feeds served up via FeedBurner can’t get added to Google Webmaster Central.
A listing of site links. This is the list of links and titles that Google has generated for the site and appears in the SERPs.
Identification of site issues. Your site may have content problems. If there are any issues with missing, duplicate, or short titles or meta descriptions, you can find this information as part of the webmaster toolset.
As Google has the lion’s share of Internet search traffic (with an active reach for 59.41%*), understanding how Google views your site, and diagnosing potential problems, is crucial to increasing your site’s visibility. Learning how Google’s robots crawl and index your website, learning what drives traffic to your site so you can refine your SEO efforts, and actually telling Google about your site by using Google Webmaster Central can help to improve your crawl-ability.
*Figure 1: Nielson Online – Top Online Web Brands in the U.S.
By using the Google Webmaster Central service and its various tools, you can obtain information on how Google, and, by extension Yahoo, MSN, and the other search engines, sees your website. Google Webmaster Central is an excellent way to obtain direct, expert support, diagnose any site errors, and improve your site’s search visibility.
As Mike Buczek pointed out in a recent post, the need for websites to be mobile ready is increasingly important. The advent of new mobile phone technology making the mobile web more accessible has big implications for how websites are targeted to position in natural search results. Users of the mobile web are increasing daily and besides using different technology, they are also likely to have different search behavior than those on the regular web. Someone surfing the web from their phone is likely looking not just for a website but a location and this means that the rise of number of users on the mobile web makes good rankings in local search results even more important. Having a local search marketing strategy now could make sure that your site is not left behind. So, what can you do? Well, start by making sure your site is listed in local search listings. Here are four top ways to help boost your local search rankings:
Make sure you are listed.
Look for your listing in the local search sections of Google, Yahoo, MSN and any other top search engines. If it’s not there, submit it.
Make sure the address and phone number on your site is complete and matches what the local directories like superpages.com and any other sites like www.alexa.com or www.aboutus.org are listing.
Match your listing to your site.
Make sure there is a link to your website in your listings. You don’t need a website to appear in local search but internet visitors will be more likely to visit your site and then visit you if they have easy access to your link.
Put your full address and phone number on your website in a prominent position – either on the homepage or at the very least, on your contact us page.
And any other regional or industry-specific directories that your customers might use to find you.
Encourage your happy customers to give you a good review. This may or may not get you a better ranking but visitors who see a good review are more likely to click on the link and visit your business.
February 20th, 2009 by 
Marjory Meechan
