I can't say I've analyzed this in detail, but I would believe since rel=canonical is meant to be used to denote extremely similar content or even content that is exactly the same, that the way it handles links on the B page shouldn't matter, since this should be essentially the exact same as the content on the A page.
Posts made by CodyWheeler
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RE: Effect of rel canonical on links
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RE: Does my overly dynamic website hurt my SEO?
Depends on how the URL is being written. URL names can get ugly with dynamic writing if they're not cleaned up with URL rewriting methods.
This is something that can have a fairly significant effect on your SEO. You may want to look into configuring a URL rewriting method to write pretty URLs.
Here are a couple of articles to get you started.
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/using-mod-rewrite-to-convert-dynamic-urls-to-seo-friendly-urls
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-the-best-practice-for-seo-is-still-clear
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RE: Crawl Errors and Duplicate Content
The thing is, in the eyes of a crawler, they are different pages, just like http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com are the same page, but the crawlers will see them as different pages.
Are you using URL rewriting to get rid of the extension? If so I could see where this might cause a canonicalization issue if you don't tell the search engines which page you want to be ranked by using rel=canonical or redirecting from pricing.aspx to pricing.
Try using OSE on pricing and then pricing.html and see if you get different statistics.
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RE: My WebSite has two sections with overlapping, or redundant articles on the same topics. Google is only listing one or the other article in Search Results. What should I do to have both pages (similiar but unique content ) to be listed?
You found the issue here with your question. They have similar content, so Google is showing only one. I would try to change the on-page SEO attributes of your articles to target different keywords.
It's not very often that Google is going to show the same site for the same search unless the articles are quite unique. They strive for diversity in their links.
You may be able to accomplish a little more uniqueness by changing the Title, H1, name of the article, subheadings, content, incoming links, etc.
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RE: 404 errors on a 301'd page
Run it through HTTP Live Headers in Firefox (it's an addon). Just search for HTTP Live Headers. That will give you some insights as to how the browser is reading your page.
It's very useful for when you need to diagnose issues like this.
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RE: IP address being indexed by Google in addition to canonical domain.
Gotta say I've never heard of this either, but I would say you're taking the correct course of action implementing a 301 to the correct URL. You may also want to throw a rel="canonical" tag on those pages if you haven't already - just for good measure.
That's certainly odd.
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RE: Facebook Like Button - XFBML or Iframe
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I would say this is something that's extremely low on the ranking factors totem pole.
Ref new 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors (love this report!!) - http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#overview
However, something that is high is the number of shares you get, likes you get, interactions with your facebook page that you get, so whichever method agrees more with the browsers your visitors are using, the software you are using to run your site, etc - would be my recommendation.
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RE: MozCon Seattle 2011
I'm really really hoping to get out there. Still up in the air depending on how projects are progressing in house. It would be a perfect time for for some deep SEO knowledge as we'll be doing a site launch shortly thereafter.
If so, I'll probably have a lot of orange and black on (company colors)
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RE: What is the best SEO Seminar/Training option in the US?
Well SEOMoz is having their MozCon in Seattle in July. That's a good start for you
Also, there are the Pro Training DVDs which teach advanced tactics. They're pretty reasonably priced, however I'm not sure how up to date they are. You may want to call SEOMoz to find out.
You may also want to check out the Distilled guys for their events and training. I hear really good things.
http://www.distilled.net/events/
I'm kind of in the same boat you are. I've really been digging deep into the SEOMoz blog lately, have been attending every webinar, have been trudging through the Q&A, have been reading Danny Dover's SEO Secrets, etc.
The best way I've found so far to become more educated about SEO is just to stay involved in this community and keep busy in the trenches. When I do more managing than actual SEO'ing I find myself getting behind sometimes.
Hope this helps!
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RE: Backlinks using Open Site Explorer
With OSE you're going to get truncated data if a given domain has more than 25 links from it. It does this to show better diversity with its results. I don't know if there is any way around it. If there is, someone please tell me
I always find that if I set it to - Show "All" links from "External Pages Only" to "All Pages on the Root Domain" then I can get some pretty good data. I think this would work for what you need it for.
Maybe you could use the SEOMoz API to gather the data you need.
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RE: Where to Put Content For Product Pages - How To Structure Website?
Good decision on the CMS. You'll love it. Be sure to use it to give your product pages relevant URLs, Titles, and other good on-page SEO attributes. This will very much increase their likelihood of getting picked up. Also, if it has canonicalization features built in, these are often good for e-commerce sites. You'll have a lot of dynamically generated duplicate content across categories.
My advice to you would be to build your site to give your user's the best possible experience first, then worry about search engine rankings second.
Think to yourself - "If I were a user on this site, would additional content on what this page is about be helpful on this page?" If Yes, go ahead and do it. If No, you might want to leave it out.
If it were me, I don't know how much useful content you can put on a category page alone. It might even be distracting. At this point your goal is to get your users to clickthrough to the next step in the buying process. This usually doesn't mean reading something. It usually means clicking a picture or link, right? I might just leave that one alone, but that's totally your call. It depends on the situation.
Keep in mind that the further down in your hierarchy you put your product pages the lesser their importance is in the eyes of Google.
For example, if I have a tennis racket I am selling, the second of the examples below is going to appear more important, because it is closer to my root domain. The flatter you can make your site architecture while still providing a good user experience, the better results you are likely to see in the search engines.
example.com/products/sports/tennis/tennisracket.html
vs.
example.com/tennis/tennisracket.html
Hope this helps get your wheels turning.
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RE: Can someone tell me the significance of the following items under my Competitive Domain Analysis?
I believe I can help.
Total Links - As the name suggests, this is the total number of links you have coming to your site. This includes followed and nofollowed links. Why is this significant? SEO research has shown a high correlation between total links to your site and rankings statistics. For example, the more authoritative links I have, the higher my domain authority is going to be, and the higher the likelihood will be for my pages to rank well.
Followed Links - There has been some debate about this, but essentially followed links are links which pass link juice on through to the linked to site. The number of followed links, much like total links, is shown to have a high correlation with rankings as well.
Linking Root Domains - This is the number of different root domains you have linking to your site. If this shows up as a 1, that means you only have 1 site (your own) that links to your site. If this shows up as 500, that means you have a large number of sites linking to yours, which search engines see as a positive signal that your site is being recommended and is worth reading by many different sources. This contributes highly to your domain authority.
Followed Linking Root Domains - Same explanation as above essentially.
Linking C-Blocks - This is another diversity type statistic. If you have a whole boatload of links from a few C-blocks (a subnet containing 256 IP addresses), that means that you don't have a lot of diversity across your link profile. However if you have these links spread across many many C-blocks, that means you have a lot of diversity and thus appear more trustworthy to search engines.
Determining Backlinks - I use Opensiteexplorer.org (awesome SEOMoz tool) and just set it to
-- Show "All" Links from "External Pages Only" to "All Pages on the Root Domain"
If you have a Pro account this will get you data for up to 10,000 links, which works for most small to medium sized sites.
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RE: Is there a way to know what rank my site is listed on google ?
I'd highly recommend the campaign manager with SEOMoz. It takes a few days to crawl everything, but you can very easily identify some low hanging fruit really quickly.
It makes you look really good!
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RE: Are backlinks to a domain that redirects useless?
It will direct the link juice from the redirected URL to your page, as long as you use a 301 (permanently moved) redirect. This will pass 90-99% of link juice from the linking URL.
To squeeze out everything you can get (pardon the pun) ideally you want a direct link, but a redirect will pass most of your juice along in the case you would have to get people to change hundreds / thousands of links.
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RE: Is the server or host a metric for SERPs? Amazon Webstore a plus?
Ditto - I sell on Amazon too, but use my own site to sell as well. Amazon opens up a whole new market that I wouldn't otherwise have, so I deal with their fees, but you have to have multiple distribution points.
Going back to what i said earlier. Be sure you read all of the terms and conditions of using their Webstore. I love Amazon, but they have tricky lawyers just like anyone else
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RE: Competitor Ranking High has 2 Domains, But Duplicate Website ?
Your competitors obviously knew what they were doing. This is what many would call Black Hat SEO, and while it can provide some good results in the short term, it's shady activity.
SEO should never be about gaming the SERPs. It should be about providing useful signals to search engines to tell them how to rank your pages.
Companies that do this type of stuff are only hurting themselves in the long run. I firmly believe if you continue to use solid white hat SEO techniques you'll come out on top of all of the gamers out there in the end.
Crime only pays until you get caught.
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RE: How to Educate my Company About SEO
Very cool. I'll check this out. Definitely can use some presentation skills!
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RE: How to Educate my Company About SEO
I agree with all of this.
However on top of just educating them about the value of SEO, I want at least some of them to know the ins and outs, such as how changing the Title of a page can completely change your rank in the SERPs (had an old boss that changed nearly every Title tag on our website in the CMS not knowing what it was that just killed our rankings.
I do think that showing them the value of SEO might help them start thinking about how SEO plays into things before making decisions however.
Thanks for the suggestion.
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RE: Reciprocal link finder tool - not looking to do reciprocal links.
Use open site explorer to find all of the incoming links to your site. It's one of my favorite tools of the SEOMoz toolbox
You'll have to set the filter to Show "All" links from "External Pages Only" to "All Pages on the Root Domain"
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
You can export a report or just go through page by page and identify the URLs in question.
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RE: Dealing with indexable Ajax
Hoping someone can answer these questions. We've got some AJAX coding on our site too and I'm concerned it's going to cause a lot of indexing problems.
The obvious answer is to see if you can find another way to build your site where it will be viewable, but often times (and in my case too) that isn't possible from a development standpoint.
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RE: How to setup tumblr blog.site.com to give juice to site.com
You don't have control over the domain, so you're not going to be able to do any domain pointing. You'll inherit the juice from the links you get from that subdomain only, but you're not going to get anything from the main tumblr domain. You're also not going to capitalize on all of the incoming links to your blog if you host it on tumblr, since it's not actually on your site.
You'd be far better off hosting your blog in a subfolder on your own domian. This way you have total control over it and your domain gets all of the link juice when someone links to one of your articles. It will also count as a hit to your website, not tumblr.
I could go on with other reasons, but I don't want to go too far out of the scope of your question.
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RE: Is the server or host a metric for SERPs? Amazon Webstore a plus?
I highly doubt search engines offer any kind of favoritism based on your host. If so, it would be an extremely small factor.
Where you would see an indirect benefit is with your user experience. Using a trusted, tried, and true checkout provider with a proven excellent level of user experience like Amazon will have inherent SEO benefits such as returning visitors, higher engagement, cross selling with your other items, higher revenue, etc.
Since you're using it on your domain you're not going to inherit any of their domain authority.
The drawbacks in my eyes would be the lack of complete customization and ownership that you have over the webstore. It's your stuff, but it's Amazon's service. You are bound by their rules. I'm not familiar enough with the platform to know if they have any SEO functionality built into the webstore such as custom URL rewriting and canonicalization tools, but I would imagine you are going to be limited to doing some of this type of advanced SEO stuff if you cannot access the web controls.
If anyone knows a definitive answer to this please chime in.
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RE: Wrong Title Tag & No Meta Description showing up in Google SERP's
It looks ilke your developers are setting up canonicals too. I didn't go too far into your site, but I would recommend doing an SEO audit to make sure things like redirects, canonicalizations, robots, and following / nofollowing are being handled properly on other pages of your site as well.
And I agree - Good catch Steven. Source code FTW.
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RE: How to Educate my Company About SEO
Thanks guys for the replies. We're still in the process of setting up all of our web tracking as well. Like I said there are only a few younger generation folks here with the capabilities and understanding of web technologies to be effective at things like this. My plan is to develop those talents within all of us.
As far as everyone else goes - we've even got some late Gen X and dare I say it - baby boomers - developing content for the web. It's pretty scary the things they put out sometimes. From an SEO standpoint, I'm definitely finding that I really have to deeply explain things. I've even on a number of occasions had to explain what the acronym SEO itself means - yikes!
I suppose there is a good side to this situation because we are currently building a new site. They brought me on about 6 months too late in my opinion, and there is a lot of catching up to do, but even since I've been here I have fixed many SEO nightmares we were heading towards, and am finding more all the time. It's going to be night and day to what it was before.
Good suggestion about educating people - whoever said that. I think I am going to try to convince HR to let me hold basic SEO classes for those folks involved in web development and marketing. I could never in a million years teach them everything they need to know, but I think I can at least get it in their minds enough that they can at least be thinking about how SEO factors into things they do before they do them.
Any additional thoughts and comments are appreciated!
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How to Educate my Company About SEO
Hey Mozzers,
I'm currently faced with a situation that I believe is probably quite common in the SEO industry. I'd like to get the input of the SEOMoz community to see how others have handled this situation and how I can use that to help my company and of course myself in this process
Here's the dealio.
I recently obtained a position at a fairly large company ($500 million annually) with the task of being our Lead SEO, which I am loving, but am finding one thing to be a big hurdle to our success.
Essentially no one here has any pre-existing knowledge about what SEO and inbound marketing are. There are a few younger folks who understand some of it, and a few of those who I work with on a daily basis are starting to get it, but I fear that many of the folks on our webteam and even higher up do not understand the value of SEO, the implications of certain things the webteam does to our website, and moreso the value of me being here as the sole SEO expert.
I'm wondering if anyone else out there has been in a similar situation and how I might be able to effectively instill a culture of SEO within my company to get people to think about SEO before they do things.
My first goal is to ensure people think about SEO before making changes to our site. My second goal is for them to see the power of proper SEO, thus proving how valuable I am to the company.
Thoughts anyone?
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RE: Will opening in a New Window pass all link juice?
Does anyone else have anything to add to this? I figured it wasn't a big deal. Just wanted to check. Am I missing anything before we go ahead and implement this feature into our site?
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RE: Is SEO affected when hosting service is changed?
On a short term basis, I suppose it's possible if your site is down while your domain propogates to the new host, but on a long term basis this shouldn't be an issue, especially if your site performance is improved due to the change.
If your new host is known to have poor performance or is at risk of frequent outages it could negatively affect your SEO. Page load times do factor into your rankings.
Did your friend give you any kind of specific reasoning why he/she believes that changing your webhost will negatively affect your SEO?
The question to ask even if a slight drop in rankings may occur is - Why are you thinking about changing hosts in the first place, and will the small chance of a potential drop in rankings trump your reasoning for switching hosts?
I don't think you have anything to worry about, but if you do, think of the long term positive effects, not the short term (potential) negative effects.
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Will opening in a New Window pass all link juice?
Hey guys,
We're in the middle of designing our core navigation for our new site, which will feature a blog. I want to make sure the blog is linked to from the main navigation to pass all of the link juice to it, but since it isn't the core feature of the site we want people to view, I don't want it to take attention away from other things.
Due to this I am thinking about giving it a main navigation link that opens in a new window. It would still be reachable from every page on the site, but it would allow users to view the blog in a new window rather than leaving the main site.
The blog will still be on the same domain in a domain.com/blog subfolder.
My question is... is this good practice? Will this pass the necessary link juice from our root domain to our blog, or will opening it in a new window detract from the value of the link?
Any other comments / issues with designing the navigation like this that I'm not thinking of would be appreciated!
Thanks
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RE: Rel="canonical"
Tried a couple of times and these pages aren't loading for me in a couple of different browsers. Not sure if you've changed something since the posting of this question, but if you're still subscribed to this thread you may want to look into this.
As someone said already I would just like to reinforce that rel=canonical only has to be used on the target page, however since these pages you're referencing aren't exactly the same you DON'T want to use a 301 redirect. Your rel=canonical tag will simply signal the search engines to pass all ranking to your main page, which is actually a better implementation than using 301, albeit it won't make a huge difference on a small scale.
If this is a Wordpress blog, which I can't really tell if it is or not since the pages aren't loading, you may want to try the WP canonical plugin. It will semi-automate all of your canonical tags so you're not having to modify code all the time.
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RE: Deep Page Link - url no longer exists
Keep in mind here that just because you use a 301 redirect to point to your new page you won't lose the opportunity for your new page to rank. A 301 redirect will pass 95% of the link juice from the redirected page, which is great. Your new page will most likely rank once it starts getting links to it through people finding it through the old redirect and your site getting re-crawled.
301s are a great tool to keep in your SEO utility belt. Don't rely on them, but always use them when you need to move something.
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RE: Why should your title and H1 tag be different?
If we look at a site like a human would, which is what search engines are evolving to do, then always matching exactly your Title and H1 tags is going to be pretty silly in my opinion.
Good practice is to use a few targeted keywords in the Title tag that describe your page well and the content within up to 70 characters. Of course not all pages will use the full 70 characters. That might cause stuffing penalties.
For H1 you might match some of what you list in the Title, but not exactly. You're going to have commas, pipe characters, other kinds of descriptions, brands, etc. Matching all of this would be crazy and would make a site appear very spammy.
Since the search engines are striving to be more and more human every day a good long term strategy is to build sites for humans first, and search engines a close second.
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RE: Will this internal linking feature cause canonicalization issues?
We'll be using IIS, but I suppose it works the same way. It's my hope to get this done with one small change and not have to update an entire database of thousands of pages.
Can that not be done?
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RE: Will this internal linking feature cause canonicalization issues?
Makes sense.
Let me make sure I understand.
So, basically on that parameter page in the I need to have my programmers code the rel=canonical to pass in the URL of the page in the form of "www.exampledomain.com/productpage" - and that will take care of pointing all of the duplicate content generated by those query strings back to each individual product page, and will also ensure each product page is still indexed with its full SEO value?
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RE: Will this internal linking feature cause canonicalization issues?
Yes this is what I want to do. I want Google to ignore the duplicate pages that would be created by the additional parameters and pass SEO value back to the product page.
What I'm confused about is how to code the tag and how to implement it. Each page, which there are thousands of, is generated dynamically - so I only have that one container page that I can update.
How do I take care of all of the product pages with one tag? Is this something that is done in the database?
Unfortunately we don't have a CMS in place, however it's something we're highly considering.
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RE: Will this internal linking feature cause canonicalization issues?
Hey guys. Thanks for all of the responses. The query string actually comes from part of a search tool, so I don't know if it can be output as a named anchor. If so it would require reprogramming the search tool. It's possible, but I believe at this point it would probably be easier to use the rel=canonical tag.
What I'm not getting is this:
All of our product pages are dynamically generated. So they are loaded into a page at:
www.exampledomain.com/products/productname
If I put the rel=canonical tag on that host page that is populated with data wouldn't I be throwing out any possibility for my individual product pages to rank? Wouldn't it all point back to that one product?
How do I use the rel=canonical tag so that each individual product page gets all of the ranking. Is there a way to do this?
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Will this internal linking feature cause canonicalization issues?
This is a canonicalization type question, so I believe it should be a pretty straightforward answer. I just haven't had much experience with using the canonical tag so I felt I should ask so I don't blow up my site
Ok, let's say I have a product page that is at:
- www.exampledomain.com/products/nameofproduct
Now on that page I have an option to see all of the specs of the product in a collapsible tab which I want to link to from other pages - So the URL to this tab ends from other pages ends up being:
- www.exampledomain.com/products/nameofproduct?=productspecs
This will link to the tab and default it to open when someone clicks that link on another page.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I understand canonicalization correctly I believe creating this link is going to cause a duplicate page that has the opportunity to be indexed and detract from our SEO to the main product page.
My question is... where do I put the "rel=canonical" tag to point the SEO value back to the main page since the page is dynamically generated and doesn't have its own file on the server? - or do even need to be concerned with this?
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any of the above. Like I said - this is something I am fairly familiar with how it works, but I haven't had much experience with using.
Thanks!
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RE: Wordpress blog integration with full website effect on SEO
Steve, Loganshark, thanks for sharing your experiences. I figured that this would be the case. Just wanted to get confirmation from people who have done this successfully.
Any additional advice from anyone would be appreciated. This project is a big step in our SEO initiative.
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Wordpress blog integration with full website effect on SEO
I have searched and searched for the answer to this question and can't find it.
We are going to be launching a Wordpress blog on our domain shortly, however we have a much larger site that is mixed with static and dynamic pages full of custom programming tied to databases, etc. that we are running around the blog and can't integrate that into Wordpress due to its complexity.
What this means is we have to install Wordpress on our servers somehow separate from the pages of our website.
What I am wondering is if we run Wordpress in the /blog directory of our site as a separate installation if it will inherit the domain authority of our domain (currently around 60) or if it will be viewed as a separate site and get no ranking. Also, will our main site inherit the additional link juice from the inbound links that we get from the blog with it being separate from the main site?
How does this need to be setup on our webservers to ensure the blog gets authority of the domain, and the blog contributes maximum SEO value to the domain?
Any help would be appreciated.