“Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.”

SEO advice: url canonicalization

“In computer science, canonicalization (abbreviated c14n, where 14 represents the number of letters between the C and the N) is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation.”

wikipedia – Canonicalization

“In information technology, canonicalization (pronounced KA-nahn-nihk-uhl-ih-ZAY-shun and sometimes spelled canonicalisation) is the process of making something canonical — that is, in conformance with some specification.”

What is canonicalization

“If the search engines sees a page as being published at many separate URLs, the search engine may rank your pages lower than they would otherwise, or not rank them at all. Canonicalization issues can split link juice between pages if people link to variants of the URL.

URL Canonicalization: The Missing Manual

“The practice of consolidating all versions of a page under one URL is referred to as “canonicalization” (because you collapse all versions under the “canonical” or true version). By adhering to several best practices, you should be able to address 90% of common site-wide canonicalization issues on your site and consequently increase how your site ranks.”

Domain Canonicalization

“Your website can be accessed with www.domain.com and domain.com. Since Google penalizes this due to duplicated content reasons, you have to stick your domain to either www.domain.com or domain.com. But – since some links are outside of your website scope and the search engines already have indexed your website under both addresses, you can’t change that easily.”

.htaccess Redirect/Rewrite Tutorial

I noticed that some sites use the code below. What is this used for?

<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />

Answer:

First of all, this is a meta element. When used, it must be placed in the head of html documents. The meta element is used to provide meta information about a document. The meta element must have a property (name) and a value (content).

In this case, the value (content) is “noodp” – which stands for “No Open Directory Project”.

But what the hell does this mean?

Google automatically creates the title and description (or “snippet”) for each site – using the content of a page as well as references to the page that appear on other sites.

Google sometimes users descriptions within the Open Director Project to generate “snippets”. But what if you don’t like the snippet that is being used?

To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using information from the Open Directory Project for the page’s description, you can use the following:

HTML:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp">

XHTML:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />

To specifically prevent Google from using information from the Open Directory Project for a page’s description, you can use the following:

HTML:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp">

XHTML:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp" />

Further reading:

• How do I change my site’s title and description?
• More control over page snippets

So, do you use this on any of your sites? Do you find it necessary any more?

Presentation 1: “Findability: going beyond SEO”

Presenter: Radica Raeves

Search engine optimisation is usually the first subject that comes to mind when thinking about ways to improve the visibility of your organisation online. But it’s only a piece of the puzzle. In order to help the intended audience find, use and reuse your information, we need to look beyond SEO. Findability could help complete the puzzle. It’s a much broader concept, touching on almost every aspect of the web design and development process, where specialist fields intersect and overlap. We need to try and identify these elements of findability and “plug” them into the user-centred design workflow. It’s a big challenge… Can we connect the dots and bridge the gaps?”

Presentation 2: “One Web, No Go”

Presenter: Oliver Weidlich

With the improvements in mobile browsers and in the overall mobile user experience, what do we expect will change for mobile web users? Will we see a ‘one web’ approach? Oliver will talk about why the mobile and PC web experiences will increase in similarity, but still remain very different.

Presentation 3: “Building web apps for iPhones”

Presenters: Tim Lucas & Pete Ottery

Where to start when making a website targetted at iPhone users, including “Should you be?”. Frameworks…Javascript…Dev environments… and more. Tim Lucas & Pete Ottery share some experiences about creating iphone.news.com.au.

Details

Date:

Tuesday 19 August

Time:

6:30pm for 7:00pm start

Where:

Australian Museum – 6 College Street Sydney

Cost:

$10 per head (pay at the door)

RSVP:

Web Standards Group meeting page

Funnily enough, I will be moderating a panel at this years Search Summit where we will have our change to put a range of questions to the likes of:

• Adam Lasnik, Google Web-Spam Team (GooglePlex) Webspam & Search Quality Expert
• Maile Ohye, Google Webmaster Central (Kirkland Plex) – XML Site Maps Guru
• Dan Crow, Google Webmaster Central (NY Plex) Head of Crawl Systems & Google’s Web 2.0 expert on search bots
• Peeyush Ranjan, Google Webmaster Central (Kirkland Plex) Search Quality,CSS Guru

Here are some questions that Scott Gledhill and I’d like to ask:

CSS and hiding

1. Does Google read CSS files? More importantly, do they check for CSS properties that can be used to hide content such as “display: none”?
2. Are sites punished by Google for hiding content using CSS?
3. What about methods of hiding that are used to aid accessibility such as structural labels (descriptive headings that are useful for blind users but not for sighted), image replacement methods (images used to replace html content), drop-down menu navigation and tabbed components that display content in a smaller space more efficiently.
4. Are particular method of CSS hiding preferred from Google’s perspective?
5. If Google ever condones *correct* usage of hiding, is there still a possibility that the spiders will accidentally penalise me for hiding text if done in the correct context?

Valid code

1. Does Google pay any attention to valid code
2. Are sites given higher ranking if they use valid code.
3. Will Google ever actively reward (give a higher ranking) for accessibility?

Semantic structure

1. Are sites with good semantic structure (correct heading levels, paragraphs, lists etc) given better Google ranking than sites with poor semantic structure?
2. Does Google make decisions based on specific markup – such as <i> vs <em> and <b> vs <strong>?
3. Does Google look at heading level hierarchy (are heading levels present, are heading levels skipped, too many headings etc) and take this into account?
4. Do lists such as definition lists make a difference to the way content is indexed and ranked?

Industry Influence

1. Does Google ever feel a moral obligation to push accessibility and web standards (by improving rankings), seeing they influence the market on such a global scale?

So… what would you like to ask?

Tags: google, webstandards, seo

However, it is better to experiment rather than hypothesise. The four pages below have unique keywords, the same link value (there is currently only one link to these pages anywhere on the web), the same page title value, the same number of keywords mentioned on each page and the same character count on each page. Each of them uses a different method to display or hide content.

Will Google treat these pages differently (refusing to index them?) or is this just a crude and badly executed test?

1. zzaaddaallaaddaa – Raw content only
2. zzaaddaallaaddxx – Content replaced with images and hidden using off-left method
3. zzaaddaallaaddzz – Content replaced with images and hidden using “display: none” method
4. zzaaddaallaadd00 – Content hidden for evil reasons using “display: none” method

Let’s sit back for a while and wait to see the results…

Tags: search-engine, google-rank