SEO Tips For Internet Marketers

Posted by admin on September, 5th 2011

Lots of websites have different “copied” versions of their homepage which can hinder your SEO efforts.  Whether it is part of your internet marketing strategy or a mistake made within your website’s URL structure, multiple homepage URLs can water down your SEO campaign and have other potentially harmful effects.

Examples of this are:

- www.domain.com/

- www.domain.com/index.html

- www.domain.com/ref=XYZ123

- www.domain.com/visit?n=743835

All of these pages could be exactly the same homepage with the same content, yet but on separate URLS.

Then there are WWW. canonicalisation issues can also occur if you don’t have a 301 redirect in place. e.g.

- domain.com/

- domain.com/index.html

- domain.com/ref=XYZ123

- domain.com/visit?n=743835

The two examples above show that you could theoretically have 8 different versions of your homepage!

When people decide to link towards your website they may simply copy and paste the URL in the address bar.  If this is one of the ‘copies’ of the homepage and not the main version then that link won’t count towards your SEO; remember Google ranks web-pages and NOT web-sites.  Google could index the ‘wrong’ version of your homepage which could harm your sales statistics, but even worse, an affiliate could rank higher for your main brand keywords – taking commission for sales that should have been yours!

To get around this problem, there is a simple tag your web developer can add to your website’s code to instruct Google and other search engines to ignore any duplicate homepages you may have created, accidentally or otherwise.

As you can see, this is an incredibly simple bit of code you can add to your website. This bit of code tells search engines that the original page is located at the web address stated in the canonical tag and to ignore any copy it might find on slightly different URLs.

The canonical tag allows you to improve your email marketing campaigns as it allows you to create lots of different pages that you can use to target different groups of customers with content personalised to the customer’s prior purchasing habits.  Duplicate content isn’t an issue with Canonical tags and a NoIndex/NoFollow tag also on the page.

Creating almost duplicate pages can also be easily done by ordering products on your website by price, name or customer rating.  The same products will get re-ordered in different positions but effectively you will have an identical page than before.  Luckily the major search engines have systems to recognise this and generally do a good job in picking the original category page on an ecommerce site.

Forgetting to add canonical tags to your website can be a very costly mistake for your SEO but can be identified and fixed easily. Speak to your web developer to ensure that canonical tags are all in place and that they are all checked to avoid any SEO goofs.

To find out how a targeted SEO campaign can help improve your online sales, contact David Wiltshire or Jonathan Ellins on 0845 544 1765.

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Labels: Canonical, Common, Problems