November 11, 2008

The Simplest SEO Mistake

by Brian Turner

SEO is a specialist field of internet market that covers a range of issues from relatively basic, to complex.

However, the most common SEO error I see if that of canonical issues.

Remarkably, I’ve seen this happened under a lot of quite experienced SEO.

Which suggests that sometimes its the basics that trip us up more than the complexities.

Canonical Errors

What is a canonical error?

Simply put, search engines do not index pages – they index URLs.

This means that where multiple URLs all point to the same page, it creates duplicate content – ie, Google & co just see many copies of the same page because of the different URLs, and try to filter them out accordingly.

This causes problems for webmasters because every website is carrying a certain amount of “ranking juice” which is sloshing around through different pages, and any pages with potential juice that are getting filtered out can just act as leaks for that juice.

And when you waste your ranking juice, you limit your site’s potential.

Basic Canonical Issues

The most common canonical issue is the link to the index page.

This is where a website does not link to its root domain, but instead to a specific file that represents the homepage.

Simply put, instead of linking to:

http://www.mydomain.co.uk/

they link to

http://www.mydomain.co.uk/index.php

The result is to immediately create two URLs to the same homepage, which invites search engines to filter out one of the URLs.

For established sites, this effectively means that link juice your site holds is being send to a file-specific URL which invites being filtered out – acting as a major leak, and reducing the potential benefits of linking to your homepage anyway.

Correcting such an issue is usually simple to implement.

More complicated canonical issues

While the homepage is a simple example of a canonical issue, it can get even more complicated with more complex sites, especially when using Content Management Software of some form.

A particular example is forum software such as vbulletin, which uses a variety of different database modifiers which are appended to URLs unnecessarily, such as:

– showthread (normal)
– archive
– printthread
– &mode=threaded
– &mode=linear
– mode=hybrid&t=
– &mode=threaded
– &goto=nextoldest
– &goto=nextnewest
– goto=newpost&t=
– goto=lastpost&t=

That’s no less than eleven different URLs for the same forum thread page.

Luckily, there are simply rewrite solutions which can counter this, such as vbseo – a plugin for vbulletin which aims to make the overall vbulletin software package much more search engine friendly.

However, things can get pretty hairy when dealing with custom ecommerce software, and this is where a custom mod_rewrite solution can often be required to change URLs.

Even still, mod_rewrite solutions come with their own challenges and are not to be taken lightly, and great care must be taken when implementing site-wide solutions to ensure durability under conditions of normal site use.

Canonical issues: The Simplest SEO Mistake

Canonical issues still remain the simplest SEO mistake to make, but where such issues affect the entire website operations, care needs to be taken in approaching a solution.

In the meantime, the simplest approach is to simply ensure developers and designers for a site are aware that having two URLs for the same page is not a good thing.

After all, more than one URL to a homepage at least is such a basic and easy to correct error, and there’s no real justification for leaving it unchecked.

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Story link: The Simplest SEO Mistake

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