What is URL Canonicalization?
Posted by reviews on Mar 12, 2008
First of all, what is canonicalization? Canonicalization (abbreviated c14n) is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation.
Example:
[[Egg_salad]] [[egg salad]] [[ egg_salad ]]
As you will notice, each of these are slightly different from one another.
In terms of the URL it is the interpretation of variations of the same url, as seen below. The concern is that Google sees the different variants of the same url in the same way. It’s important to create consistency across your website URLs so you
From Matt Cutt’s Page
Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:
- www.example.com
- example.com/
- www.example.com/index.html
- example.com/home.asp
But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.
Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.Q: Is there anything else I can do?
A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).
Essentially, you would want to canonicalize the following situations:
- Canonicalize the domain (e.g. redirect non-www and IP address to www)
- Canonicalize my index pages (redirect “/index.html” to “/”)
- Remove spurious query strings (e.g. example.com/1234? to a static html page)
- Correct any typos in type-in URLs
- Correct outdated or otherwise incorrect query strings
- Correct invalid inbound links
- Suppress the fix-up redirect if the resulting URL does not resolve to an existing file
- Adjust capitalization of the URL to all lowercase. In some cases, this matters.
The BIGGEST Search Engine Optimization Mistakes
Posted by reviews on Nov 28, 2007
There are arguably many, many mistakes that could be made as far as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is concerned, however I am listing some of the biggest and most common mistakes.
- Poor website linking structure
- It is very important to have complete (or almost complete) internal linking between the pages within your site. They are almost as important as having relevant external backlinks.
- Wrong Keywords
- Try to avoid poorly chosen keywords for your pages. Especially ones that people would not use in their search.
- Wrong Page Title
- Not using a sitemap to direct the search engines to the preferred pages
- No ‘H Tags’
- No ‘Alt Tags’
- Poor URL Format
- Too long of a url
- Too many numbers
- Irrelevant keywords
- Canonical url’s
- Not enough original content
- Emphasis on original
- Lack of Content Keywords
- No Text Navigation
- No deep linking
- Wrong Meta Description
- Wrong Meta Keywords
The Power of Google
Posted by reviews on Oct 12, 2007
Google seems to be growing exponentially. During the month of August alone they were reported to have had 31 billion queries throughout the world. In total more than 37 billion searches were carried out across all Google sites. Second on the list was Yahoo!, which had a paltry 8.5 billion searches recorded during the month. Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN Search do not come anywhere near being as used or have the level of usage. Although there was a poll conducted recently showing that Yahoo! had a slight lead for users in terms of being a favored search engine. These users still seem to be using Google anyway.
The Asia-Pacific region, including China, Japan and India, contained the greatest number of unique searchers, with 258 million conducting over 20 billion searches during the month.
Since Google has such dominance, as far as search engines are go, they also can greatly influence the way websites are designed, how people market their sites, and to that end, which websites people visit. They can also pretty much dictate the cost of advertising as well. This level of control over something so pervasive, being the internet itself, makes one think that they have more influence now than Microsoft ever had during its hayday.
I believe they are bordering on monopoly control of the internet. I wonder if they will be eventually targeted for regulation or some sort of government instituted penalties, such as being broken up.
SERP Rank - The alternative to Page Rank
Posted by reviews on Oct 4, 2007
Most of us know or suspect that PageRank has little meaning these days.
Here’s my idea:
Someone (not necessarily Google) creates a toolbar and/or small site banners showing the current SERP for specific terms for that page.
1. Roll your mouse over the top of the banner and you then see the terms or key words (the banner could also show a numerical value, such as “page 1, pos 3″ or just “P1,p3″ for the page showing up on the first page at position 3 on the page.
2. The toolbar could show the search terms and the “SERP rank“.
3. There could be a site that could show graphs of SERP changes and notify the user when there are sudden drops or increases in the SERP. Perhaps this could be a paid for service to cover costs.
I want to know your thoughts on this. 
Improving Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rank
Posted by reviews on Oct 1, 2007
Wikopedia describes the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) as “the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.”
The SERPs are the single most important thing with respect to search engines and optimizing your website, and in particular, the individual pages. The SERPs are the “free” way of getting targetted traffic to your site. The usual alternative is paid advertising, which is anything but free. Search Engine Optimization is the science (or art) of optimizing a website for the best SERP results possible for range of potential search terms that the webmaster is trying to improve upon for the SERPs. The higher the position on the page, preferably the first page, of the SERP the better. Most search engine users only look at the top choices on the first page.
Each search term, such as “reviewer” or “reviewer of sites“, will have different results for the respective search engine. You will even notice that the results may change from day to day for the exact same search term on the specific search engine. There are many variables to consider when optimizing your site and pages, including how and what your competition is doing on their end for the given search terms. In my opinion, the best methods for improving your SERPs for the specific search terms is to do the following:
- Use the Firefox plugins SEOQuake and Niche Watch to analyze your (and your competition’s) keyword density for a specific page, determine the amount of backlinks (preferably from pages with related content), number of indexed pages, keyword occurrences on the page, page rank, all in anchor, all in title and all in text rank for both domain and webpage information.
- Continue to add original content on your site, especially articles relating to the specific keywords.
- Give descriptive titles to the content and web pages relating to the keywords.
- If possible, use search engine friendly url’s, such as “http://www.example.com/seo/all-about-seo.html”.
It does take time to work your way toward the top of the SERPs, especially if the keywords have a lot of competition, so you will need to be patient. The important thing is to not do anything that could get you penalized by Google, since it is usually the SERPs for your site that takes the hit.
The Best Free SEO, Marketing, PPC Tools
Posted by reviews on Sep 6, 2007
Below is a list of the best tools on the internet for SEO, internet marketing, PPC (pay-per-click) and webmaster related needs.
Backlinks (who is linking to you):
Domain Pop Backlink Checker - This is probably the best backlink tool out there. It sorts by site, so if you have sitewide backlinks, you won’t have to look at pages and pages of backlinks from the same site. Fantastic!
Key Words (helpful for PPC - Adsense, YPN, etc):
Google Key Word Tool - You can’t beat Google’s own keyword tool!
Assortment of Web-based Tools
SEOChat - On left side
Browser based tools:
–Firefox Plugins–
Smart Pages plugin - Very handy tool!
SEOQuake - shows nofollow links, along with much more
Niche Watch Tool - Excellent tool for studying keywords. As it states, “This wonderful SEO extension provides you the technical information required to beat your competitor websites in serps.”
SearchStatus - Also shows nofollow links, plus much more
Alexa Sparky - Official tool for Alexa. Displays a nice graph along your bottom task bar. Also, helps to boost your Alexa rank (not very relevant unless you sell blog posts)
Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Terms and Acronyms
Posted by reviews on Aug 31, 2007
302
Adsense
Algorithm
Anchor Text
Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. For example:
< a href=”http://www.reviewerofsites.com/” >This is the anchor text< /a >
ATW
- AlltheWeb (search engine)
Authority
A website that is considered by Google or other search engines to be trusted and usually given a high PageRank.
BackLink
A web page that has a hyperlink to one of your pages, usually the home page.
B2B
Business to Business
Blog
BOT
Abbreviation for robot (also called a spider). It refers to software programs that scan the web. Bots vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.
BOTW
Best Of The Web (Directory)
- Cache
- CAPTCHA
- Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart
Cloaking
Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Canonicalization
Click Fraud
Conversion
Conversion refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure conversion to judge the effectiveness (and ROI) of PPC and other advertising campaigns. Effective conversion tracking requires the use of some scripting/cookies to track visitors actions within a website. Log file analysis is not sufficient for this purpose.
- Content
- Context
- Relevance of one element of a web page’s content to other elements of web page’s content.
CPL
- Cost Per Lead
- CPM
- Cost Per Thousand
- CPS
- Cost Per Sale
- CPC
- Cost Per Click (Google’s PPC Program)
- CTA
- Content Targeted Adverstising - It refers to the placement of relevant PPC ads on content pages for non-search engine websites.
- CTR
- Click Through Rate
- CVC | CVC2
- Card Verification Code
Data Center
Dedicated Server
Deep Link
A hyperlink from another website that is pointing to one of your website pages, other than the home page.
Directory
A web directory lists web sites by category and subcategory.
- DMOZ
- Directory MOZilla (a directory)
- DNS
- Domain Name System
Domain Name Doorway Page
A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Duplicate Content
Dynamic IP
EPC
- Earnings Per Click
FFA
Free For All - FFA sites post large lists of unrelated links to anyone and everyone. FFA sites and the links they provide are basically useless. Humans do not use them and search engines minimize their importance in ranking formulas.
- GAP
- Google Advertising Professionals
- Google (a search engine)
- HTTP
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol
- HTTPS
- HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure
- IBL
- Inbound Link (see Back Link)
- KDA
- Keyword Density Analyzer
- KEI
- Keyword Effectiveness Index
- Keyword/Keyphrase
- Keywords are words or terms which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are phrases consisting of multiple words that are used in search engine queries.
- Keyword Stuffing
- Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding (many) keywords to a web page for the benefit of influencing how a search engine ‘perceives’ the page. This is not for the benefit of human visitors.
Link Building
The process of finding or acquiring backlinks to your website or sites.
Link Farm
A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity.
Link Juice
Link Popularity
Long Tail
LS
- LookSmart (a PPC Directory)
- LSA
- Latent Semantic Analysis
- LSI
- Latent Semantic Indexing
Matt Cutts
Google Employee in charge of preventing or limiting SPAM in the Google search engine results pages. His blog.
- Monetize
- Nofollow
- Noindex
- OBL
- Outbound Link
Organic Results
Page Rank (or PageRank)
PageRank is a numerical weighting (0 to 10, 10 being the highest) based upon the Google link analysis algorithm.
PFI
Pay For Inclusion
- PPC
- Pay Per Click
- PPR
- Pay Per Rank
- PPV
- Pay Per Visitor
- PR
- Google PageRank™ is a numerical weighting (0 to 10, 10 being the highest) based upon the Google link analysis algorithm.
- PR0
- PageRank Zero - the lowest actual PageRank given by Google.
Proxy
- PSA
- Public Service Ad
- PubCon
- Reciprocal Link
A two way hyperlink between websites.
Robots.txt
- Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.
- SEM
- Search Engine Marketeer
Search Engine Marketer
Search Engine Marketing - SEMPO
- Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization
- SEO
- Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimizer - SEP
- Search Engine Placement
Search Engine Positioning
Search Engine Promotion - SERPs
- Search Engine Results Pages
- SEs
- Search Engines
- SES
- Search Engine Strategies (a conference)
- SEU
- Search Engine Usability
- Sitemap
- Shared Server
- SMM
- Social Media Marketing
- SMO
- Social Media Optimization
Snap shot
SPAM
- Sites Positioned Above Me
Spamdexing
Spamdexing was describes the efforts to spam a search engine’s index.
- Spider
- Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that can scan the web, normally following hyperlinks (links) throughout a website (via internal links) and to other websites (via external links). They have many different purposes, including indexing web pages for search engines to finding e-mail addresses for email spammers.
- SSL
- Secure Socket Layer
Static IP
An IP address that does not change.
Subdomain
- Text Link
- TLD
- Top Level Domain
- TOS
- Terms of Service
URI
Uniform Resource Identifier
URL
Uniform Resource Locater
W3C
- World Wide Web Consortium
- Webmaster Tools
- Wikipedia
- A is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization. It is the largest, most extensive and fastest growing encyclopedia currently available on the Internet.
Y!
- Yahoo! (a directory)