Canonical URL Links / Tags

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I have just been reading up on this new canonical link tag that the three top search engines have started implementing. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have just announced a new tag, which we can use to tell the search engines which URL it should have for the current page. – yoast.com

In short, this is a way for SEO’s to help prevent duplicate content from being cached in search engines. This tag can be used on pages where there is duplicate information on a number of pages and points the search engines to the page that you would prefer to have cached. A good example is were you may have a page with variables in the URL like session keys or variables used to sort data. The same content will appear on many pages, but you don’t want duplicate content penalties. Even example.com and www.example.com, which point to the same page (normally), will show up as duplicate content.

Sample URL that may have duplicate content:

  http://www.pagestrength.com/2009/03/canonical-url-links-tags/?source=firefox-search

Example canonical code that should be placed in the <head> tags:

  <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.pagestrength.com/2009/03/canonical-url-links-tags/" />

I intend to try it out on my referral system in my directories, so that any referrals that use ?ref=123 in the URL can rather “hint” to the search engines that I would prefer to use the home page… hmmm, I wonder if this will pass on PageRank at all. I hope so! I will test it and let you know… may take a few months I would say. :)

Matt Cutts explains it well, see below…

Box n’ Crate Hire’s Website

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Box n’ Crate Hire needed a small shopping cart for a great new product. I created a design for the website from the shape and colours of their logo.

Box n' Crate Hire Website

Box n' Crate Hire Website

Not only are all XHTML and the CSS codes W3C standards compliant, but this site has been optimised for to rank high on search engines and for listing high up in search results for terms like “crate hire” and “packing materials perth”.

Site: Box n’ Crate Hire

Firebug – Helpful Firefox Tool

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Firebug – web development evolved.

“Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.” – Firebug Site.

This is a great tool for all you web developers! It is great to be able to edit CSS, HTML, and JavaScript on the fly. This can potentially save some serious development time. I use it ll the time and it save me time.

Some of the more advanced tools that stand out include: monitor network activity, debug and profile JavaScript and explore the DOM. I give this Firefox add-on top marks; well worth having this one installed!

Ace Authentic’s Website

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Ace Authentic provides officially licensed tennis memorabilia, collectibles, posters, trading cards, photos and more.

Ace Authentic’s website is a shopping cart site that I built to integrate with their preexisting payment system. The admin area (CMS) allows Ace Authentic to manage all items and categories in their store.

Ace Authentic Website

Ace Authentic Website

The site’s code, both xhtml and css, are both all W3C standards compliant. I always make sure that the sites are compliant to ensure that they gain the full potential that they can, mainly with search engines.

Ace Authentic also have a newsletter system to keep their clients, and those interested, up to date with important news and hot items.

Site: Ace Authentic

Avoid Using Frames

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“Frames allow an author to display multiple documents in a single window that is divided into rectangular subspaces called frames. Visual browsers allow these frames to be scrolled independently of each other, and links can be loaded in a frame without changing the content of other frames.

The HTML 4 frames model has significant flaws that make frames hated by many users. Frames should only be used with great care;…” – WDG

Frames pose a number of issues and reason for you not to use them in your site’s design/layout. I always preach against using frames unless it is absolutely necessary for anyone to use them. If you are going to use frames, make use to set the doctype correctly:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">

This will declare the document to be HTML 4.01 Frameset.

Some of the main factors/reasons for not using frames are not all SEO related. The problems with frames are mostly related to accessibility and usability.

Any browsers that do not support frames will basically skip over the frame tags and the frames would not be displayed. There is a NOFRAMES element that allows the webmaster to specify content for these browsers that fail to show frames; this only means that he/she has to put in some extra effort.

On the search engine side, a cache version of the page that is in a frame does not store that fact that it was actually meant to be in a frame. When a visitor clicks on the link to the framed page, they go straight to the page and not to the parent page that includes the framed page. The visitor will them be viewing an incomplete version of the original page. There are scripts that can help to redirect the page to the parent page, but then again not all browsers will support the script.

Iframes are less complicated than using the above framesets, but they still suffer most of the same problems.

There are also CSS issues with frames. You cannot control the look and feel of a framed document with the CSS file of the main page. Some people have claimed that it is possible using JavaScript in the CSS, but I have not seen a working example yet. It just gets too complicated!

The bottom line is… avoid using frames! For company intranets there is no SEO concern and there will be cases where frames can be useful. Think carefully before using frames for websites; there is probably a better solution out there. Let us know if you have another solution…