Canonicalization and when to use it

Search Engines like Google monitor the amount of links to your website, this helps them decide how important your page is for the keyword used. Therefore it is important not to share these valuable links over several versions of the same page.

The most common homepage issue on canonicalization is having in-bound links pointing to several versions of a homepage, for example: https://www.juicyseo.co.uk/jg and https://www.juicyseo.co.uk/jg. This is basically sharing the link juice between two different URLs therefore diluting the value of the homepage.
To fix this problem decide on the version you want to use, this could be decided by the commercial aspects of the website or maybe the most commonly used version in your in-bound links. You should then decide on one of the following options to combine the value of the in-bound links to the chosen version.

If you can we recommend using a 301 re-direct as this will not only combine the value of the two pages but removes any duplicate page issues. If it is necessary to have two versions of a page you can use the rel=”canonical” tag. This will inform the search engines robots which version is the most important and should receive the link value.

301 Permanent re-direct

Search engines will follow the re-direct to the new page and de-index the old website page over time and will pass existing value to new website page.

When to use?
Expired content
Moving domains
Multiple versions of homepage

Rel=”Canonical” Tag

As explained above this will keep the two website pages and inform the search engines which page is the one which should receive the value of the in-bound link. This however will NOT remove any duplicate page issues.

When to use?
Some e-commerce websites display the same content but have different URLs, for example: www.juicyseo.co.uk/bristol-seo/what-is-seo/ and www.juicyseo.co.uk/seo/bristol/what-is-seo/

How to Implement it

This is a HTML tag which needs to be located in the <head> section of your website page. You will see the <title> and <description> tags in this area too.

Using our example above you would add the following to the <head> section of www.juicyseo.co.uk/seo/bristol/what-is-seo/ as the main page is www.juicyseo.co.uk/bristol-seo/

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.juicyseo.co.uk/jg/bristol-seo/” />

Benefits of Google +1 button

Google have once again had another go at creating a social networking service to challenge Facebook. With Google+ (Google Plus) and they have done a good job. I think it is a little bit of a mix between Facebook and Linkedin and can be used for both personal and business.
As with Facebook Google+ have their version on the ‘like’ button, the G+ or +1 button. However they are looked at by Google completely different.
To explain how the +1 works. When you see a website page that you like you can press the +1 button on that page. If you have a Google account this page will come up on your wall and can be seen by your connections in your circles (friends, clients etc).

More importantly for a SEO view Google have said that they use the amount of +1 of a page as one of their many signals to decide where the page ranks. So the more people who have pressed your +1 the better your web page will rank. Time to ask your friends to press the button!

If you are a business owner Google have now opened up their Google+ service to allow businesses. We have all this information and how to open your Google+ business account here.

Google+ Plus add your Business

Google have in the past stopped businesses creating accounts in Google+. This has made people ‘try’ and register a personal account in the name of their business. Google have been deleting these accounts to keep in line with their guidelines.

However this has all changed, you can now create an account in Google+ for your business.

It is very easy to do, if you haven’t already got a Google+ account you will need to create a personal one first.

Follow the easy step by step guide.

Managing these accounts is very easy, we think a much better system than Facebook.

Whilst you are creating your account why not add us to one of your circles, the button is just up there in the top right of this page.

If you thought this article was useful we would be very grateful if you would ‘LIKE‘ us to share our wisdom! Thanks.

Google Analytics Hides Organic Keyword Information

Last week Google announced that Google Analytics will no longer always show which keyword searchers used to find your website. A strong statement indeed and sadly one that could make it harder to know where your traffic is coming from. This is not the case for all searches, I will explain:

Organic searches whilst logged into Google: When we mean organic we refer to the non-paid links in the main results section of Google. If the searcher is logged into Google and clicks on an organic search result Google Analytics will NOT show what keyword that searcher used to find your website. Instead is will say ‘Not Provided’ as the keyword.
Organic searches when not logged into Google: If the searcher is NOT logged into Google and clicks to your website from an organic result Google Analytics WILL show you the keyword(s) they used to find your website.
Adwords searches: These changes will NOT affect paid advertisement on Google using their Adwords system. It will not matter if the searcher is logged in or not you will have all the information on the keyword(s) they used to find your advert.

So why has Google made this change? The official statement from Google is that they have changed to use their SSL (https) website to ‘protect the privacy’ of the users. Using SSL Google will help with privacy so in that sense it is a good move by them. However there just might be another reason for this change.

There are many companies out there that have websites in very good positions in Googles search results who also sell adverts, I guess the competition to Googles Adwords. By making this change Google has made is very hard for those companies and the companies that advertise with them identify which keywords searchers are used. This will make Googles Adwords more appealing to the advertiser than using the competition.

Our thoughts: It’s a real shame Google have chosen to go down this route, we agree with changing to SSL however if they can provide stats for paid results what’s the difference if the traffic comes from organic results? It does have the smell of Google using their power to push out the competitors. With the ever growing number of users of Google+ it will be soon that more people will be logged into Google than not.

Mobile Searches Increases

Search engine optimisation for mobile devices is getting more and more important. Figures released this week show that in April 2010 they counted for 0.5% of all searches, the figure has now gone up a huge amount to 4.2%. If you think it’s only 4.2% that’s nothing, we think by this time next year it could be 20%! Optimising your website for mobile devices could make a lot of difference to your business. Find out what you can do now and be ready for the explosion of Mobile Search Engine Optimisation.

Google Analytics Real Time

Google analytics have added a great new feature call ‘Real Time’. This new function allows you to see who is on your website at any one time. This type of service has been around for a while now from sites like Woopra.com, however their free service is limited. Apart from the obvious fun side of watching people use your website, it can also be useful to see the routes people take to get to the content they are looking for. You can then streamline your site to make it quicker for them.
Not everyone can use this service at the moment, Google are rolling it out bit by bit. If however you can not wait and would like to be put on their priority list click on the following link and sign up.

Googles Panda 2.5 update

Have you noticed that your website isn’t as high up the ranking on Google as it used to be?

This week we have seen and had it confirmed by Google their latest update called Panda 2.5 has been released. It came live on Wed/Thurs (28th/29th Sept) but Google will (obviously) not say what they have changed. It’s been a couple of months now since Panda 2.4 came out so we would think quite a few things have changed.

If your ranking changed around this time it could be because of this new Panda update. One of the main reasons could be that your website is not updated regularly. Google is focusing more on how much new content is on your website.

Our guess for one other factor that has changed is the quality of links to your site, we think the value of better quality links are getting more and more important.

Could this be the turning point of directory listing links? Getting quality links does take more time but in the end they should provide you with better results.

Juicy SEO is launching a brand new service in the next few days that might just help you out, contact us and we will keep you informed when we launch this new service or follow us on Twitter: @juicyseo.

Facebook and Twitter data merge

It has been reported that Facebook will allow user to sync their Twitter with their Facebook accounts. This ‘tie up’ will not go down well with Google.

We are not sure when this will be allowed but keep checking Facebooks page.

Yahoo creates new search engine

This week Yahoo announced that they will be improving their search engine by making the search cleaner with better filters. Search share hasn’t changed much recently with the top 5 in the US as follows:

	July 2011	August 2011	Difference
Google Sites	65.1%	64.8%	-0.3%
Yahoo Sites	16.1%	16.3%	0.2%
Microsoft Sites	14.4%	14.7%	0.3%
Ask Network	2.9%	3.0%	0.1%
AOL	1.5%	1.3%	-0.2%

Talk of a sale of some or all of Yahoo still continues to rumble on.

On the first page of Google in less than 1 hour

I know the title sounds a bit hard to believe, I was quite shocked. While it can sometimes takes an age for Google to crawl your new page I created a quick page with not a huge amount on it and a single image and the subject wasn’t really related to the site (I’ll explain in a minute).
So a little more meat on the bone for this little tale. I had been working on a tour operator website who specialise in Winter sports and wrote a little article about fake currency and how innocently you could get into big trouble. Also explained how to identify fake notes as explained from a bank. I thought useful info for the traveller to know but not really anything about skiing or snowboarding.
In under an hour I saw (live) visitors on the site who had searched for information on fake notes. So a quick scan on Google and found we were ranking at number 9!

** UPDATE **

We have replicated this now many many times, if you would like further information please get in contact.

Bing challenges Google in the War of Maps

Bing is now starting to show it’s results of street mapping in the UK.
Earlier this year Bing announced they were going to send out cameras in the UK to map out the road for their Streetside application. Bing are basically following Googles lead on their Streetview app by sending out cars with 360 degree cameras on the roofs. Over the last few days these images have started to come online.

So now there is two places you can see your home on the Net.

Online advertising to increase

Interactive marketing is reported to increase to $77b a year by 2016. It will also over take TV advertising and will be the most important forms of advertising for the future.
If you are not looking into online advertising we suggest you should, you don’t need to spend millions. You can start with a very modest amount, contact us and we can explain how little you would need to spend using SEO (search engine optimisation) and PPC (pay per click) options.