Kryptronic Software Support Forum

You are viewing this forum as a guest. Login to an existing account, or create a new account, to reply to topics and to create new topics.

#1 02-13-2009 13:35:04

magwa
Member
Registered: 09-22-2007
Posts: 321

New Canonical Tag supported by major search engines

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all declared that they will support the new Web standard "Canonical Tag" to help deal with the problem of duplicate content.

To implement Canonical URL form on website, you have to add the following link tag at head section of the site's HTML.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/products” />

The above tag indicates to the crawler that the URL it is present on should be represented canonically as http://www.example.com/products. This would eliminate the following duplicates:

http://www.example.com/products?trackingid=feed
http://www.example.com/products?sessionid=hgjkeor2
http://www.example.com/products?printab … gid=footer

The Google Webmaster Blog is at this url...
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. … nical.html

How do we globally introduce this to CCP?

Offline

 

#2 02-16-2009 07:17:45

Tim1
Member
Registered: 10-15-2008
Posts: 85

Re: New Canonical Tag supported by major search engines

Stick it in the <head> of any skin.php your site uses.

*EDIT. I realise I probably misunderstood what you were asking - would first need to find out what pages have duplicates, if any.

Last edited by Tim1 (02-16-2009 07:22:04)

Offline

 

#3 02-16-2009 07:38:47

Dave
Member
Registered: 07-05-2003
Posts: 11233

Re: New Canonical Tag supported by major search engines

If I read the blog entry correctly this isn't something that should be needed with CCP especially with the SiteMap XMOD installed and SEO enabled.

Offline

 

#4 02-16-2009 08:12:49

magwa
Member
Registered: 09-22-2007
Posts: 321

Re: New Canonical Tag supported by major search engines

I suspect the SE's will reward those sites that implement the new tag and that makes it vital to CCP in my opinion.

Offline

 

#5 02-16-2009 08:33:14

Dave
Member
Registered: 07-05-2003
Posts: 11233

Re: New Canonical Tag supported by major search engines

As the blog you linked to says, the tag is a "hint".  Nobody but the search engine folks themselves knows the inner workings of what they do with pages and their contents so even hinting that they might "reward" sites using the tag is simply incorrect. 

I just read the blog entry again and I really don't see what value it would provide to a correctly built CCP site with SEO enabled and the SiteMap XMOD.  With those 2 options being used you tell all of the major search engines exactly what they should be looking for and indexing on your site.

It  have some value if you are migrating a site from 5.1 to 6 and have a large number of indexed pages and want to avoid using redirects from .htaccess though that method will still work perfectly fine (for all SEs not just Google).

Offline

 

#6 02-16-2009 11:56:08

Blitzen
Member
From: USA
Registered: 01-01-2005
Posts: 936

Re: New Canonical Tag supported by major search engines

Dave wrote:

If I read the blog entry correctly this isn't something that should be needed with CCP especially with the SiteMap XMOD installed and SEO enabled.

RE SEO: First time visitors to the website will see the long non-SEO links. After they enter the site or browse to another page, the SEO links appear.
Thus, duplicate pages are presented to SE's.

I circumvented this by disallowing SE's to index the cgi-bin pages as well as the raw php CCP6 pages in robots.txt. (There's nothing in cgi-bin that I need them to index. I just care about the products and categories.).

RE: Sitemap. I believe [opinion, as all SEO is] that SE's will weigh links found in the website more than an external sitemap. Many other sites neither upkeep a sitemap nor have a dynamic one. Sitemaps, dynamic or static, may not always rate pages appropriately.

The links found on the website itself are more current and tell a better story of importance than a sitemap would. The links found first in the website itself would be perceived as more important.

New tags go through a shaking out and tweaking phase before they become important to indexing and rating pages ("beta" phases). I don't trust them [opinion] when they first come out. I got burned with Big Daddy, G's overhauled algorithm that they launched a while ago that dropped numerous websites for a while, even the big ones like Mercedes.

Offline

 

#7 02-16-2009 12:03:15

wyattea
Member
Registered: 01-07-2006
Posts: 1650

Re: New Canonical Tag supported by major search engines

According to Dave, in a previous post, if i remember correctly, only humans visitors see the non-SEO links. Spiders see SEO links from the start...but I never understood why this needs to be, since no other sites do this and I don't care for the reasons why, it shouldn't do it for anyone period.

Offline

 

#8 02-16-2009 12:52:23

Blitzen
Member
From: USA
Registered: 01-01-2005
Posts: 936

Re: New Canonical Tag supported by major search engines

wyattea wrote:

According to Dave, in a previous post, if i remember correctly, only humans visitors see the non-SEO links. Spiders see SEO links from the start...but I never understood why this needs to be, since no other sites do this and I don't care for the reasons why, it shouldn't do it for anyone period.

Interesting. That's called "cloaking", where you present something different to SE's than humans.
However, if this is true, then the SE's will eventually see a page that browsers see.
It's probably not a problem because SE's are trying to demote cloakers presenting spammed pages that have different content rather than links.

Offline

 

#9 02-16-2009 13:04:25

Dave
Member
Registered: 07-05-2003
Posts: 11233

Re: New Canonical Tag supported by major search engines

It's not cloaking at all.  CCP presents the SEs with links that don't carry user specific information in them if SEO isn't enabled.  Otherwise all they see are SEO style links which is what everyone wants them to see.

Offline

 

#10 02-17-2009 05:17:21

magwa
Member
Registered: 09-22-2007
Posts: 321

Re: New Canonical Tag supported by major search engines

**"If I read the blog entry correctly this isn't something that should be needed with CCP especially with the SiteMap XMOD installed and SEO enabled."**

I don't have the mod.

Offline

 

#11 05-06-2011 07:46:43

Lisaweb
Member
From: CA
Registered: 04-21-2003
Posts: 417

Re: New Canonical Tag supported by major search engines

I would like to implement this in my page headers:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/http://www.precisionfiberproducts.com/ccp0-catshow/category.html” />

- where CCP automatically creates the SEO generated URL of the page

I imagine it would look something like this:

Code:

<link rel="canonical" href="
<?php
  echo curSEOPagenameURL();
?>
"/>

Do any of you PHP Gurus know if this is even possible?

Offline

 

Board footer