Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Cody -

Is the URL ending in /productname the individual product page? If so, what we are saying will work to canonicalize your product page. You're simply telling Google not to pass pagerank to the /productname?=productspecs page. You're telling them to ignore the specs part of the page as a separate page and to instead pass the link juice to the main page.

Once again, please correct any misunderstandings we may have of what you are trying to do.

Also, you incorporate the canonical tag on a page level. Hopefully you can set this through the CMS (I use Yoast SEO to do this with Wordpress).

Marcus -

I was going to suggest this as well, but did not know if it would be relevant. Good suggestion.

Question though. Will he need to specify somewhere on the page to link to the named anchor (i.e. an index on the actual page?) for the named anchors to work, or is this not an issue? This is why I did not suggest it, because I did not know the answer to my question.

Roger, I do not think it is necessary, but from a branding perspective, to stand out from the crowd of normal bit.ly users (I'm one of them, btw), it could be a good idea. It may be for my site.

I'd say it depends on the site and the niche.

I know that you put the canonical tag in the of your page, so it looks like:

rel="canonical" href="(originalpageURL)" />

Since you are linking a dynamic part of that page, the rel=canonical that you have specified there will hold for the page. It will be a dynamic page, but it is a subset of the page, so you should be fine.

Someone PLEASE correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks. This is great info.

The actual URL takes up too much space. Also, you rarely see people using full URLs in tweets. From a "we know what we're doing here" perspective, the full URL might not be a great idea. Do you disagree?

Matt Cutts said (in the video linked to above) that any decent shortener will 301 redirect the shortened URL and thus pass link juice. I guess I am more concerned about it from a branding/tracking perspective now.

This sounds like a good idea. What service do you recommend for creating a custom short URL? Would bit.ly PRO work fine for this?

Hi everyone -

The site I am working on is going to start giving users the option to tweet that they completed an action. It reads, for example, "I just took the first step to (    ) with (site): (shortened link) via (Twitter name)"

Here's my question:

Should I worry about the fact that the shortened URL (we're possibly going to use Twitter's shortener T.Co, but I'm not dedicated to it) changes each time? Should we instead have a permanent short URL for the homepage (where we are going to direct people who click the link in the tweet)?

Thanks!

Thanks Wissam. I was thinking this was the way to go, and I appreciate your input.

I do use the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress on another site, but the blog in question is through BlogEngine. I will do what you have suggested.

Cheers!

If I have a subdomain (a blog) that is having tags and categories indexed when they should not be, because they are creating duplicate content. Can I block them using a robots.txt file? Can I/do I need to have a separate robots file for my subdomain?

If so, how would I format it? Do I need to specify that it is a subdomain robots file, or will the search engines automatically pick this up?

Thanks!