 |
|
08.29.07
Three Lines Of Code To Boost Your Search Engine Traffic
By Yuri Filimonov
In the world of Web building, an opportunity to develop/code something quickly is a rare occasion. Mostly, you need to spend hours on research, planning and implementation (unless you code with CSS ;) ).
Here's yet another thing you can do in a couple of minutes to help search engines index your site better, so you could get more traffic within a week or two by 5-15%.
Canonicaluzation Issues
- "What?"
- "Ca-no-ni-ca-lization/canon-ica-lization/canonic-a-liz-ation issues."
It is when your website can be accessed with www and without www in front of it (such as improvetheweb.com and www.improvetheweb.com) and you, the visitors and the search engines are not redirected to only one version.
To the visitors, this doesn't matter a lot, unless they prefer to identify website addresses with 'www' or without (there are pros and cons of either approach).
The issue is that for the search engines, both versions are two different versions of the website, because the search engines index URLs, not websites as a whole.
Why is it a problem?
As the search engines see two websites, the number of pages with the same content doubles. As your visitors link to either of the versions randomly, both of them will have average amount of links.
Of course, the search engines will show one of the versions, but they will only count links that point to one of the versions, to which a specific page belongs to.
For example, if the page is http://improvetheweb.com/overdeliver, the search engines will count links that point to this page - most likely from the http://improvetheweb.com domain and sites that linked to that URL.
For the search engines to take into account all the links that point to your website (such as http://www.improvetheweb.com and http://improvetheweb.com), you need to redirect visitors and the search engines from one version to another.
Thus, the search engines won't be taking into account all your naturally acquired links and won't be showing your pages high in the SERPs as they rightfully deserve.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Yuri Filimonov is a freelance website optimization and usability consultant, who writes about improving websites to gain more visitors,
customers and profit at his blog, http://www.ImproveTheWeb.com.
|
