I am implementing cs-cart for a web site. Which one is better for SEO if possible with a reason or reference. Site sells books stamps cds etc.
www.domain.com/book/Java.html (or) www.domain.com/book/programming/Java.html
or
www.domain.com/Java.html
Some says short URLs are good. But isnt it good that stating which category the product it is in. Thanks
You can go for both, via canonical URLs. For example, in the <head> of both /Java.html and /book/Java.html:
<link rel="canonical" href="/book/programming/Java.html" />
With that, Googlebot (and Yahoo/MS' spiders) will see the current page as a duplicate of the canonical link and ignore it, without the usual demerits that come with dupe content.
Long URLs are good for being descriptive, clear, & searchable, while short URLs are nice for people to send around to friends and whatever social network du jour - chances are you want both.
Maintaining the different URLs & dupes will add some server work though. If it's too much effort, I'd go with the long form for the users' sake & search-ability. "java.html" could just be some random page about coffee, it needs context.
What if it fits into two categories? That would be the case where I say that it's better to go with a short URL because you don't want duplicate content.
Try to get the right size for the content of the site. For example the word "book" is redundant in a URL of a bookshop.
Related
One of my client having website which is entirely based on API Content i.e. content coming from 3rd party website. He wants to do some seo on the data. I wonder if it is possible as there is data not available in his database and i think google crawler redirect to 3rd party website while crawling on such pages. We already asked for permission from that website owner to let us store API data on our end in order to do some SEO but he refused our request.
It will be highly appericited if you can suggest any other way that should not be against policies and guidelines.
Thank You
Vikas S.
Yes - with a huge BUT:
Google explains how parameters can be set within their Search Console (Google Webmaster) and how these can effect the crawler's behaviour.
#Nadeem Haddadeen is right with the canonical links between duplicates. There's also an issue if you don't have consistent content when calling up the same parameters. This essentially makes your page un-indexable as it's dynamic content. If you are dealing with dynamic content then you need to optimise a host page based around popular queries rather than trying to have your content rate itself.
It's not recommended to take the same content and post it on your website, its duplicate and Google will give you penalty.
If you still want to post it on your website, you have to make some changes on the original text and then post it on your website to look like its original.
Also if you want to keep it without any changes and to avoid any penalties from Google, you you have to add a link for the original article from your website or add a cross domain canonical link like the below example:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/original-article-url" />
I've developed a service that allows users to search for stores on www.mysite.com.
I also have partners that uses my service. To the user, it looks like they are on my partners web site, when in fact they are on my site. I have only replaced my own header and footer, with my partners header and footer.
For the user, it looks like they are on mysite.partner.com when in reality they are on partner.mysite.com.
If you understood what I tried to explain, my question is:
Will Google and other search engines consider this duplicate content?
Update - canonical page
If I understand canonical pages correctly, www.mysite.com is my canonical page.
So when my partner uses mysite.partner.com?store=wallmart&id=123 which "redirects" (CNAME) to partner.mysite.com?store=wallmart&id=123, my server recognize my sub-domain.
So what I need to do, is to dynamically add the following in my <HEAD> section:
<link rel="canonical" href="mysite.com?store=wallmart&id=123">
Is this correct?
It's duplicate content but there is no penalty as such.
The problem is, for a specific search Google will pick one version of a page and filter out the others from the results. If your partner is targeting the same region then you are in direct competition.
The canonical tag is a way to tell Google which is the official version. If you use it then only the canonical page will show up in search results. So if you canonicalise back to your domain then your partners will be excluded from search results. Only your domains pages will ever show up. Not good for your partners.
There is no win. The only way your partners will do well is if they have their own content or target a different region and you don't do the canonical tag.
So your partners have a chance, I would not add the canonical. Then it's down to the Google gods to decide which of your duplicate pages gets shown.
Definitely. You'll want to use canonical tagging to stop this happening.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Yes. It will be considered as duplicate content by Google. Cause you have replaced only footer and header. By recent Google algorithm, content should be unique for website or even blog. If content is not unique, your website will be penalized by Google.
For technical reasons on a site we may have two or more links that refer to the same product page. For example:
http://example.com/a-nice-product-no1234.html
and:
http://example.com/a-nice-foobar-product-no1234.html
Apparently the first one is the "correct" link. What is the right approach when the second link is opened?
Approach 1)
Redirect 301 to the first link
Approach 2)
Status 200 and
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/a-nice-product-no1234.html">
in the HTML head? Is approach 2) applicable for other search engines than Google? Other suggestions?
Thank you!
If
http://example.com/a-nice-foobar-product-no1234.html
Is in any way invalid or you have the intention of removing it a 301 Moved Permanently is the way to go.
A technical discussion from google of rel="canonical" shows it should be used to indicate original content, as opposed to say, the same content ordered differently, using different formatting and so on.
This will also have the benefit of users not bookmarking and using links to these "slightly invalid" pages. Making their use lessen over time.
I am using JBoss Seam on a Jetty web server and am having some issues with the query parameters breaking links when they appear in google searches.
The first parameter is one JBoss Seam uses to track conversations, cid or conversationId. This is a minor issue as Google is complaining I am submitting different urls with the same information.
Secondly, would it make sense to publish/remove urls via the Google Webmaster API instead of publishing/removing via the sitemap?
Walter
Hey Walter, I would recommend that you use the rel=canonical tag to tell the search engines to ignore certain parameters in your URL strings. The canonical tag is a common standard that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have committed to supporting.
For example, if JBoss is creating URLs that look like this: mysite.com?cid=FOO&conversationId=BAR, then you can create a canonical tag in the section of your website like this:
<html>
<head>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://mysite.com" />
</head>
</html>
The search engines will use this information to normalize the URLs on your website to the canonical (or shortest & most authoritative) version. Specifically, they will treat this as a 301 redirect from the URL of the HTTP request to the URL specified in the canonical tag (as long as you haven't done anything silly, like make it an infinite loop, or pointed to a URL that doesn't exist).
While the canonical tag is pretty fricken cool, it is only a 90% solution, in that you can still run into issues with metrics tracking with all the extra parameters on your website. The best solution would be to update your infrastructure to trap these tracking parameters, create a cookie, and then use a 301 redirect to redirect the URL to the canonical version. However, this can be a prohibitive amount of work for that extra 10% gain, so many people prefer to start with the canonical tag.
As for your second question, generally you don't want to remove these URLs from Google if people are linking to them. By using the canonical tag, you achieve the same goal, but don't loose any value of the inbound links to your website.
For more information about the canonical tag, and the specific issues & solutions, check out this article I wrote on it here: http://janeandrobot.com/library/url-referrer-tracking.
Google Webmaster Tools will tell you about duplicate titles and other issues that Google see that are being caused by "duplicates" that are really the same page being served up with two different URL versions. I suggest trying to make sure the number of errors listed in Webmaster Tools account under duplicate titles is as close to zero as possible.
I have recently started using Google Webmaster Tools.
I was quite surprised to see just how many links google is trying to index.
http://www.example.com/?c=123
http://www.example.com/?c=82
http://www.example.com/?c=234
http://www.example.com/?c=991
These are all campaigns that exist as links from partner sites.
For right now they're all being denied by my robots file until the site is complete - as is EVERY page on the site.
I'm wondering what is the best approach to deal with links like this is - before I make my robots.txt file less restrictive.
I'm concerned that they will be treated as different URLS and start appearing in google's search results. They all correspond to the same page - give or take. I dont want people finding them as they are and clicking on them.
By best idea so far is to render a page that contains a query string as follows :
// DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. See edit below
<% if (Request.QueryString != "") { %>
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
<% } %>
Do I need to do this? Is this the best approach?
Edit: This turns out NOT TO BE A GOOD APPROACH. It turns out that Google is seeing NOINDEX on a page that has the same content as another page that does not have NOINDEX. Apparently it figures they're the same thing and the NOINDEX takes precedence. My site completely disappeared from Google as a result. Caveat: it could have been something else i did at the same time, but i wouldn't risk this approach.
This is the sort of thing that rel="canonical" was designed for. Google posted a blog article about it.
Yes, Google would interprete them as different URLs.
Depending on your webserver you could use a rewrite filter to remove the parameter for search engines, eg url rewrite filter for Tomcat, or mod rewrite for Apache.
Personally I'd just redirect to the same page with the tracking parameter removed.
That seems like the best approach unless the page exists in it's own folder in which case you can modify the robots.txt file just to ignore that folder.
For resources that should not be indexed I prefer to do a simple return in the page load:
if (IsBot(Request.UserAgent)
return;