SEO Myths Busted – One week on |  |
| SEO Myths Busted – One week on Posted: 11 Jun 2015 04:40 AM PDT Myths. They’re everywhere, and they range from those that crop up in everyday life (cracking your knuckles gives you arthritis) to the downright odd (Tom Jones insured his chest hair for $7 million). Try as we may we can’t escape these falsehoods, and unfortunately it’s no different in the world of digital marketing.
Last week we launched our new resource: ‘SEO Myths Busted by the Experts & You!‘, aimed at creating a space where we can collate all the industry myths we discover, and attempt to debunk them once and for all.
So, one week on, I wanted to explain the reasons behind the piece, as well as its hopefully exciting future! The inspirationWe had the idea of creating content around SEO myths a while ago, and the inspiration for the piece originated from the website uxmyths.com, which presents 34 myths, as well as explanations for why each of the statements are in fact just myths. The site does a great job of simply presenting these myths to the user, and I personally found them to be a great learning resource. This got me thinking. As the saying goes, “practice what you preach”, so instead of creating just another blog post, or putting together another ebook, we decided to approach the task of myth busting in a whole new format. Instead of just using our own knowledge, we decided to get in contact with a number of industry experts, and ask them for their own SEO myths – who better to ask than our peers with experienced minds! Inspiration for the design came from the posters that were designed and created for the UX Myths project. The main poster presented each myth in different sized boxes, and each myth has its own poster, that includes explanatory copy. So we took the inspiration of the core poster, and applied it to our design, in turn working in our own interactive features, such as the more popular myth being in the bigger box, as well as the added Twitter handle, image, and total share count. Of course, the overarching inspiration for this whole project is to share this curated expert knowledge with the rest of the industry, with the hope that we can start putting these myths to bed, or at least educate those just starting out in SEO. Future wise, we don’t want to give away too much, but we’re certain that you’ll be seeing more of our SEO myths project. We will also be releasing some more myths on the page soon and hopefully on a fairly regular basis, as well as the ability to download each myth as an awesome wallpaper for your computer, or even your office wall, so keep your eyes peeled! Fancy seeing your own myth on our board?
If you feel you have a myth that you want to share with the community, please don’t hesitate to drop me an email on bobby [at] white.net. As you may have seen from the piece, we’re looking for roughly 120 words to help put your myth to bed. We can’t guarantee that every myth will make it up to our board, but if we like it we’ll get in touch with you. Come and join the conversation over on Twitter with @whitedotnet, or myself, @bobbyjmcgill. Alternatively leave a comment in the box below; we’d love to hear what you think of our SEO myths project, or on a myth that grinds your gears! The post SEO Myths Busted – One week on appeared first on White.net. |
| 7 Ways You Might Have Botched Your Rel=Canonical Implementation Posted: 28 May 2015 08:13 AM PDT I confess: when I’m carrying out a technical audit on a website I basically act like I’m running a police investigation. I know that there will be mysteries to solve, and it’s my job to find the clues that will lead me in the right direction. And with the right tools in hand, I’ll usually sniff something out when I get to the strange occurrences of rel=canonical. What is rel=canonical?In a nutshell, rel=canonical is a way to clean up duplicate URLs on a website. I know what you’re thinking, it would be much easier if duplicate content just didn’t exist at all. This would make my job all sunshine, rainbows and flowers rather than the sweat and tears it generally involves, but this is the real world and duplicate content is sometimes unavoidable. This is especially true when it comes to ecommerce sites which pose some of the most complex mysteries for SEO forces all across the nation. The way that many of these sites present information or products to users means that some pretty wacky things can happen to the URL – all designed to provide the most relevant results to users through the use of parameters. Guides for beginnersMoz has a great guide on canonicalisation which I’d urge you to read if you’re new to the concept, as the purpose of this blog post is to guide you with proper implementation rather than a full explanation of what it is. Alternatively you could shimmy on over to the blog of Matt Cutts; he wrote a post in 2009 called “Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes” which is just as relevant today as it was back then. Make sure to revisit this post when you’re familiar with the topic as you’ll find it much more valuable then! Rel=canonical: The good, the bad and the uglyIf I’ve captured the attention of your inner geek, sit back as I share some of my recommendations for rel=canonical best practice. The reality is that I’ve seen lots of cases recently where issues have gone undetected for far too long, and I want you to be able to check that you’re not being taken for a ride by your own website. The source of duplicate contentThe first thing you’re going to need to do is identify the culprits that are causing duplicate content. My preferred sidekick for this job is the ever-dependable Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Once you have performed a crawl, you should be able to use the overview report on the right-hand side of the tool to give you a quick insight into where issues might be occurring. Is it showing results for duplicate page titles, URI or meta descriptions? If so, these may indicate where there are duplicate pages which all share the same content and meta data. Use this a starting point for deeper investigations by manually visiting each version and checking out the source code of each. Scroll down to the ‘Directives’ folder to see what is being acknowledged by the tool in terms of canonicalisation for more quick hints. Although it’s from the main ‘Directives’ tab in the top navigation where you can really start drilling down into individual issues. At this point you may start to spot strange occurrences that require a bit of manual investigation. Or a lot. But then it does help to know what you’re actually looking for. Here are the common causes for why multiple URLs can load the same content:
Example 1 – a product has dynamic URLs as a result of user search preference or user session
Example 2 – the blog automatically saves multiple URLs when you publish the same post in multiple sections
Example 3 – the server is configured to serve the same content for the www / non-www subdomain or the http/s protocol
Overcoming duplicate content issuesWhen these issues occur, it’s important to choose a preferred URL for indexation by search engines. This is where the rel=canonical link comes in. As a side note, there are other ways you can do this, including using 301 redirects, indicating how search engines should handle dynamic parameters, etc. but this is deserves a post of its own, something I’ll come back to in the near future. The Google Webmaster Central blog has a great summary of rel=canonical:
The whole purpose of indicating a preferred URL with the rel=canonical link element is so that search engines are more likely to show users your chosen URL structure as opposed to any duplicates. It is important to remember that rel=canonical elements can be ignored, especially when there are conflicting instructions, making accurate implementation all the more important. ImplementationCheck out this example from the Google Webmaster Central blog; it sums up correct implementation pretty well:
Have you got rel=canonical implementation right?Whilst the concept of rel=canonical is easy enough to understand, it’s the implementation that can cause strange occurrences that require investigation (and probably a headache or two along the way). There are some common mistakes that webmasters and SEOs make when it comes to rel=canonical, although there are some excellent blog posts and guides out there already which may prove immensely helpful for you. Start off with 5 common mistakes with rel=canonical from the Webmaster Central Blog, and then read through Yoast’s rel=canonical: what it is and how (not) to use it. To help you avoid the common mistakes, I’ve put together a helpful list of 7 things you should remember when implementing rel=canonical. You can refer back to this blog post, or grab the PDF version here: PDF of rel=canonical guide 7 Things To Remember When Implementing Rel=Canonical
Why are these considerations important?
When more than one is specified, all rel=canonicals will be ignored! This can occur with some SEO plugins that insert a default rel=canonical link, so be sure to understand what plugins you have installed and how they behave.
It’s possible to insert a relative URL into the <link> tag, but this almost certainly won’t do what you want it to. A relative URL includes a path that is “relative” to the current page. This means you need to add in the lot, including http:// (or https://).
You will risk some content not being indexed if you specify that page-one is the preference. Put it this way, are the other pages duplicates of page one? It’s highly unlikely.
Rel=canonical designations in the <body> are disregarded, so it’s best to include the tag as early as possible in the <head>.
If your site can load on both http and https versions, check that you don’t have an automatically generated self-referencing rel=canonical. This could mean that both https://www.example.com/red-dresses and http://www.example.com/red-dresses are denoted as the preference.
It’s fairly obvious that you want the search engines to index URLs that provide actual value and a positive experience to users…
It helps if you pick a preference for use across the site to minimise the chances of referencing a URL in this way; ensure it is included in all internal links and within the rel=canonical tag element.
This is something I learned from the Yoast blog post referenced above. He has put it quite eloquently, so I’ve included it here for your reference:
Now it’s your turn to get on the case and investigate whether your own site has any of these issues with rel=canonical. I’d love to hear if you uncover any hidden culprits, and I’m also happy to put on my investigator hat to answer any questions you may have on the topic too – please leave me a comment below or get in touch through Twitter. Hopefully we can then utter a collective “case closed”, and move our focus to other technical issues instead! The post 7 Ways You Might Have Botched Your Rel=Canonical Implementation appeared first on White.net. |
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