DIYDating > Canonical Link Elements

bojangles

Mar 15 2009, 03:38 PM

Canonical link elements - Reduce Duplication, Increase Relevancy

Canonical link elements have been introduced to assist search engines (namely Google, Yahoo, and MSN) to find the difference between relevant and non-relevant content within the same content. Our websites can be accessed by typing any of the following into an internet browser: yoursite.com, www.yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, and www.yoursite.com/index.php To begin, when other websites are linking to your website, the goal is to have the majority of sites linking to the same version of your website. Since accessing our website through http://www.yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com/index.php will bring you to the same website, we would like search engines to recognize http://www.yoursite.com as the main page so in order to avoid confusion you could add the canonical link element to your index.php page under the head portion of the html.

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

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all addressed the new canonical link element and their browsers will all be fully supporting them:

I am not sure where DIY stands on this because of the complex nature of their system could you please let us all know.

Bojangles

VinceH

Mar 16 2009, 04:30 PM

I've always understood that differently, Google say:

QUOTE

If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results

Which I took to mean that if, for example, you have a shop and the same product is available under several different catogories/search results and therefore different URLs you could specify a single URL for the SEs to link it and not class it as duplicated content.

Also, they say:

QUOTE

..inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs

However, we can only edit the logged out or logged in <head> tags and not individual pages, so if we used your example wouldn't we would be telling Google that all our logged out pages are the same and that we want them to class it as "http://www.yoursite.com"

...or am I way off here?

If your site is registered at DIYD as "www.mysite.com" then the URLs always resolve to the www version, if it is registered as "mysite.com" then both versions will work.
If you ask Rob nicely he might change this for you ;-)

There is a way with Apache to have the index page resolve to the same URL however it is typed into the address bar but that's up to DIYD to sort out (nudges Rob to ask devs to look at this)

You can also tell Google how you would like it to see any links to your site, go to Google Webmasters, open an account and under Settings you can specify www or not.

QUOTE

The preferred domain is the one that you would like used to index your site's pages. If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com , we'll treat that link as if it was http://www.example.com . In addition, we'll take your preference into account when displaying URLs in our search results.

What I would like to see change most is "www.mysite.com/showprofile.php?id=[user number]" to "www.mysite.com/[user name].php" which is possible but I'm not sure if they have any plans to do this.
I'd also like to have dynamic titles so that the profile pages have the users name in, as the SEs are seeing all member profiles using the same title, e.g. <title>Member Profile</title>

Vince

bojangles

Mar 16 2009, 05:11 PM

Hi Vince

All very valid points but as we know Google is always a law unto itself. If you really want to get into the whole seo side of things then the man to look up in Google itself is a guy called Matt Cutts seems he is the god of google. Thats not to say that every webmaster should look him up and try to apply all his logic to the sites because you all have to remember we only have a certain amount of control over what we can do once the ns1 and ns2 are set to DIY datings ns1 and ns2 so certain things may not be within a lot of webmasters reach.

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