Search Concepts

Posted by Search Concepts on May 19th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in SEO |

Just recently, search engines like Google and Yahoo partnered with Live Search to introduce a breakthrough improvement in the search engine playing field: the Canonical Link Element. The Canonical Link Element enables web developers and search engines alike to eliminate the confusion in searches caused by different links that basically point to the same web site. Over the past few years, search engines have been focused on making significant progress in eliminating and completely removing duplicates in its algorithms that only cause confusion in search results and page rankings. The announcement of the Canonical Link Element is the solution that search engines came up after years of studying the process.

The Canonical Link is a new HTML link that has been created to reduce duplicate URLs by carefully documenting the preferred or main URL link to access pages in the Internet. Using the canonical link or the tag enables webmasters to indicate their preferred URLs for search crawlers to use for each of the website’s pages. In this case, the preferred URL is always associated with the page’s content no matter how it is retrieved by the search engine crawlers. This makes it easier for crawlers to direct users into the website no matter the id, parameter, and parameter order present in the web sites.

To do Canonical links for websites, developers must specify a tag and put this link in the head section of the web page. This tag will be the search crawlers’ indication that the link with the tag is the main link that should be represented in the search engine results. An example of this heading would look like this: This canonical link eliminates specified URLs with a little modification and directs viewers to the page specified by webmasters. This elimination of redundant URLs is important as most webmasters keep track of how their own pages are doing in search engine rankings. They also keep track as to where their customer traffic is coming from and other measures that determine the strategy they have to use to further improve the content of their websites. Clone URLs can seriously impede these monitoring efforts.

This new tag attribute makes it easier for web developers to track their website’s progress and for search engines to score and put relevance to certain web pages. Together with existing best practices in search engine optimization, canonical link elements will greatly boost search engine page rankings of websites and make them more efficient in their operations and web site development.

Tags: canonical links, SEO, url structure

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at 12:39 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.