The rel=”canonical” link duplicate content panacea

As many readers probably know, Google and other search engines recently announced support for a rel=”canonical” link attribute value. The new attribute value canonical (not a tag mind you, link is the html tag) can be used by website developers to specify which of essentially similar web pages is the definitive version.

A SEO problem known as duplicate content arises when websites use different URLs, generally through parameters, to provide slightly different versions of a page, such as a printer friendly version, or to support web analytics campaign tracking. In order to give search users unique choices, search engines tend to choose the “best” URL for a page, filtering out similar versions.

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15 questions, 5 weeks and 5 books: almost 700 people took the 2008 SEO quiz challenge.

Note to the reader: this article was originally posted on our Italian blog on December 2^nd. The quiz targeted an Italian audience; we’ve published this translation in order to allow a wider audience to follow search marketing developments in Italy.

Why a SEO quiz

The idea of the quiz came from reflections on the state of SEO knowledge and usage in Italy, observed from the perspective of a SEO practitioner.

Search engines, with Google in particular (question 1), are the gate keepers between us and the net. We use search engines not only to search for information that we imagine is out there somewhere, but also to navigate to a specific site, such as Fiat, or to perform a task, such as buy a ticket for a Tiziano Ferro concert (question 15).

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Note to the reader: this article was originally posted on our Italian blog on October 28^th. The quiz targeted an Italian audience; we’ve published this translation in order to allow a wider audience to follow search marketing developments in Italy.

It seems that the summer fun is now over, but not so fast: it’s time to check, just for fun, your SEO knowledge! We’ve prepared 15 multiple choice questions on topics which appear frequently in SEO projects.

Only for a limited time

The quiz will be available for just 5 weeks, from 28 October to 1 December 2008. Once the quiz is over, the correct answers and the overall results will be published here. Participants will receive an e-mail with their results and a certificate of participation.

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An important consideration for Google AdWords advertisers is to understand just where their contextual ads might appear. Google notes that AdWords ads can appear on the:

1. Google search engine
2. Partner search engines (e.g. Aol, Ask.com, Libero / Arianna, Virgilio / Alice)
3. Google owned web content sites (e.g. Gmail, Google Groups)
4. Third party web content sites (practically any site wishing to display Google ads)

The following slide, extracted from my PPC with AdWords Course, provides a visual overview of where AdWords can appear¹.

Figure 1: Where Google AdWords Ads may Appear – Italian market focus (click to enlarge)

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The traditional August break in Italy is a wonderful time to work on projects which linger on the back burner during the rest of the year. Last August led to the release of a free keyword selection guide (in Italian); this year’s focus is a Course on using the AdWords PPC paid search marketing program.

While capturing some updated screen shots for the PPC Course, I came across an interesting example of a search marketing phenomena known as PPC or AdSense arbitrage.

Search for Milan – Rome Flights

Consider this search for Milan – Rome Flights:
Figure 1: Search in Google for Flights between Milan and Rome

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A new search engine, Cuil, has launched, in an attempt to become the next Google. Cuil was founded by people with experience from Google, AltaVista and IBM – sufficient enough to get the mass media’s attention in the dog days of summer.

Rather unfortunately Cuil decided to tout it’s index size as a primary feature. As seasoned search engine professionals know, there are many other issues which also impact quality search results. Are the indexed web documents fresh, up to date? Google is indexing some sites in just minutes:

On it’s home page, Cuil says “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages”. This number hasn’t changed in days; it seems that their index is more static than Google’s.

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Many search engine optimization professionals have long hoped that Ask.com, the scrappy search engine underdog, would give the big three (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) a run for their money.

In July 2006, we saluted Ask.com by documenting their little known Ask.com API data interface. Unfortunately, Ask shut off external access to this interface in March 2007.

Ask’s future became doubtful earlier this year as key management and staff were fired. Danny Sullivan even wrote Ask.com’s obituary, a bit in jest – or maybe not.

While analyzing web analytics log files, I noticed that

the Ask.com bot, Ask Jeeves/Teoma, stopped crawling my Antezeta web sites on February 22/23, 2008. Yet I see a post from early May in the Ask.com search results.

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A frequent Search Engine Optimization question is “how do search engines such as Google handle JavaScript and CSS?“

Historically, search engines processed web pages much like an old text video browser such as lynx. A search engine only “saw” what the simplest browser could display – simple html.

Much for this reason, search engine optimization consultants have long advocated that site developers keep site coding simple, avoid hiding navigation systems in JavaScript menus and the like.

Today the situation is more complex. Google and the other search engines will try to extract links from anything they can – from PDF files to JavaScript embedded in a web page. This process is not foolproof, however – a site should still avoid relying solely on a JavaScript based navigation system, especially when CSS is a better choice.

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Expats in Italy need to stay on top of professional and daily happenings locally while still engaging in the wider world. This task is made difficult by the vast quantity and quality of resources available in English (my native language), as exemplified by the BBC. Unfortunately, their Italian equivalents, such as the ad-infested public broadcaster RAI, just can’t compete for my attention.

It doesn’t get much easier on the web marketing front. The primary search engines in Italy are the US based Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Ask, sometimes found in their rebranded skins: Arianna (enhanced by Google) and Virgilio (listed by Google as a customer). Inevitably, most of my web marketing reading is English language centric.

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While it may seem paradoxical, there are many occasions where you may want to exclude a website or portion of a site from search engine crawling and indexing. One typical need is to keep duplicate content, such as printer friendly versions, out of a search engine’s index. The same is true for pages available both in HTML and PDF or word processor formats. Other examples include site “service pages” such as user friendly error message and activity confirmation pages. Special considerations apply for ad campaign landing pages.

There are several ways to prevent Google, Yahoo!, Bing or Ask from indexing a site’s pages. In this article, we look at the different search engine blocking methods, considering each method’s pros and cons.

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One issue many international Webmasters face is how to properly manage documents written in languages containing accented and other special, non-English, characters. Does it matter how the special characters are written? Do HTML documents need to contain both accented and non-accented words to be found in search engines?

Continuing our series on website internationalization for search engine visibility, we’ll take a look at how special characters can be specified in a document and how these characters are managed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask and Microsoft’s MSN.

In the early days of computing, engineers mapped each of the letters of the latin alphabet used by the English language to a specific numeric code. This mapping became known as the ASCII character set. Unfortunately, no provision was made for accented and other special characters found in the many languages which share the roman alphabet.

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In part one of this article, we set out to document the little known Ask web search API by providing background information. In this continuation, we’ll look at the actual API details.

Update: Ask disabled access to their API on 6 March 2007. We are working on obtaining additional information. Write us if you would like to be notified of further developments.

The following information was determined by observation and conjecture. Write us if you want to be notified when we update this page with more complete information. We are assuming the reader has already worked with REST queries and is familiar with parsing XML data.

Request URL

The request URL is formed by adding query parameter and their values to a base URL using the format query parameter=values. Successive parameters are added using a & before each parameter.

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In this article, we set out to document the little known Ask web search API available at xml.teoma.com.

One of the many aspects of successful search engine optimization (SEO) is the periodic measurement of how well a site is performing in a particular search engine. Dimensions to measure include the number of pages in the engine’s index, the number of other web properties citing the site and the site’s performance for the strategic keywords linked to business objectives. Once raw data is collected, each of these data points is compared with other data to evaluate aspects such as page freshness.

Update: Ask disabled access to their API on 6 March 2007. We are working on obtaining additional information. Write us if you would like to be notified of further developments.

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