When you use the
tag, you can indicate the canonical URL form for crawlers to use for each page of content, no matter how it was retrieved. This puts the preferred URL form with the content so that it is always available to the crawler, no matter which session id, link parameter, sort parameter, parameter order, or other source of variance is present in the URL form used to access the page.
To do this, specify a
tag in the
section of your page content:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.seous.com/services” />
The above tag indicates to the crawler that the URL it is present on should be represented canonically as http://www.seous.com/services. This would eliminate the following duplicates:
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.
Some of you know me for using advance SEO techniques, such as cloaking or deep directory submissions, and developing new ideas, such as experimenting with cascading style sheets and absolute positioning. Everyone is trying to get some sort of advantage in order to get those coveted high rankings, analyzing the search engines and the top pages trying to figure out what got them to the top.
I’ve been thinking that perhaps some SEO experts, including me, have been over-analyzing everything, trying to come up with some sort of technique, trick, or magic formula that will take them straight to the top of search engines. I’ve been thinking that maybe sticking to the basics might be the ticket to the top of the mountain.
You may not even need to optimize your Web site for search engines. You can still get good rankings by just creating good content. Analyzing the competition takes a lot of time and effort. If you Keep It Simple & Silly (KISS) — you can use that time to develop better content, a better overall Web site for your visitors, and take some time out to enjoy life. Who knows, perhaps using the KISS principle will even make your pages immune to the dreaded algorithm change!
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is targeting the fourth quarter of this year for the unveiling of an open-source search engine that he hopes could challenge the dominance of market-leaders Google and Yahoo.
The project is being run through Wikia Inc, a for-profit company founded by Wales that seeks to use a similar model to the Wikipedia community-written and edited encyclopedia. He hopes to provide the tools and technology to allow programmers across the internet to collaborate on the development and testing of a search engine and make the results freely available.
“The essential core principles are that I think search is now a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the internet and it’s really fundamental to society as a whole and therefore as citizens of the world we should be concerned about it being a secretive black box,” he said.
Efforts to create open search engines aren’t new but one of the stumbling blocks they face is a difficulty in running large-scale tests of the search algorithm, said Wales. The algorithm is the code that sits at the heart of the search engine and is responsible for its accuracy or lack thereof.
“To create a full-scale crawling spider of the Web actually requires a great deal of investment in hardware,” he said. Wikia is planning to provide resources to enable full-scale crawling of the World Wide Web so the software can be fully tested and tuned.
The project is still in the planning stages and Wales expects that the first test version due this year will help programmers spot bugs that occur with real-world usage and speed up the development process.
“Probably what we’ll do is launch something in the fourth quarter of this year with a really big warning ‘It sucks, we know it sucks, it’s experimental, don’t panic. This is just an experiment to show what could be and now we’re going to start working to see how we could make it better’,” he said.
Already the project is attracting attention, not just from engineers who want to lend a hand but from companies that are already offering search engines.
