Search Engines Joining Forces
It is a rare sight to see the larger search engines joining up in order to solve a problem, but it seems the world of SEO has gotten out of hand and they all feel something needs to be done. At a SMX conference this week Google, MSN, and Yahoo announced that they are all going to start working towards solving canonicalisation problems. This might seem a bit confusing because really, what is canonicalisation really referring to?
In the world of SEO canonicalisation is a process for converting data, which has more than one “standard.” Let’s look at an example regarding websites and SEO. When you create a website you have a URL and link for every page on the search engine. This way your website has many chances of getting into the search engine results depending on what the consumer is looking for. When you have a website www.domain.com/webpage1 and then www.domain.com/webpage1/?utm_source=campaign1 both point to the same page. Search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo programmes all see the URL’s are different. As such they are shown in the results as having two pages instead of one. This can create a couple of problems. First though from your point of view you do not want the search engines to see the URL’s as different. In SEO this is bad news.
Typically if a page is seen as different, even though it is actually the same page the search engine will call it duplicate content and penalise one of the URL links. The only difference in the two URL’s is that the second one has analytics tracking on the end. The only way to avoid your problems with SEO and therefore website success is to fix the canonicalisation error. The major search engines are working to get rid of the problem, but for now there are things you can do.
One of the URL paths is considered absolute while the other is relative. You want to have only absolute URL paths, because this will avoid any errors with calling a page different when it is the same page.
A link tag will only point to a canonical URL form. What we mean here is that www.test.example.com and www.example.com can appear as the same URL, but it is not linked across domains. So while it may appear wrong on one, on other domain search engines it will be logged correctly.