canonicalization

May 8, 2014 by Bill Treloar 4 Comments

Why Did Your Nice, New Website Destroy Your Search Rankings?

On May 8, 2014 / canonicalization, domains/URLs, links, redirects, web design / 4 Comments

It’s sad to say, but we see this all too often. An old website gets a facelift, and the new site looks great. But it’s not long before the website owner notices that they’re no longer getting any business from people finding them on the web. What happened?

We’ve written before about why good SEO consultants make lousy web designers, and vice versa, and there are just some SEO techniques that great web designers don’t really think much about.

The two mistakes that kill your online visibility

There are two main factors that govern where you rank in the search engines

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There are two main factors that govern where you rank in the search engines: Relevance and Reputation. A significant problem with either one of them will cost you rankings in the search engines.

Relevance

During the website redesign, the text copy on your pages may be updated. Certainly the HTML code behind the pages is changed. It’s not at all uncommon for the new copy to fail to use some of your essential keyword phrases or for them not to be included appropriately in the code. This makes it difficult for search engines to recognize that your page is an appropriate match for those keyword phrases.

The solution to this is to go back to your original optimization recommendations and re-apply them to your webpages. (You do have optimization recommendations to reapply, don’t you?)

Reputation

This accounts for 40-50% of where you rank in Google. It’s important in other search engines as well, but Google weighs it more heavily than the rest of them. Your reputation (sometimes called “authority”) is measured by your link popularity:” the number and quality of other websites that link to yours. Over time, the pages on your website have earned significant link popularity, helping them to rank well in the search engines.

Unfortunately, most website redesign projects result in new URLs for the pages on your website. Without explicit action, all the link popularity earned by you or previous page URLs is simply lost. This is related to the issue of canonicalization we discuss in the SEO portion of our website, as well as in our blog.

The solution is to do the proper kind of “redirect” from the old URL to the new URL so that the new URL can inherit the link popularity and reputation earned by your previous version of the page. There are multiple kinds of redirects that will ensure that anyone who tries to go to your old page will be sent to the new one. But only one kind, the 301 permanent redirect, will also redirect the link popularity value from the old URL to the new one.

Only a 301 permanent redirect, will redirect link popularity from an old URL to the new one.

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Don’t Panic

Obviously, if this happens to you you need to jump on it as quickly as possible and get things fixed. Better still would be to anticipate this potential disaster and deal with it before your redesigned website even goes live.

If this has happened to you and you need help recovering from the loss of search rankings, Rank Magic can help.

Has this happened to you? Share your experience in the Comments below.

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November 8, 2010 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

That Pesky “www” in Web Addresses

On November 8, 2010 / canonicalization, domains/URLs, redirects / Leave a Comment

You may realize that if you enter a URL like rankmagic.com into your browser you get to the same page as when you enter www.rankmagic.com. It doesn’t seem to matter which way you do it. But for the search engines, it can make a difference.

Background of the WWW prefix

The WWW refers to the World Wide Web, which many people consider to be synonymous with the Internet. Technically, it’s not. The WWW runs on the internet like email, but is not the Internet itself. The “www” part of an Internet address isn’t usually required, though, so you normally can use it or not when typing a URL into the address bar of your browser.

Search Engine Implications of the WWW

Search engines see addresses with and without the “www” as separate addresses. Why should that matter? Because link authority is an essential factor in good ranking and use of the “www” can affect your link popularity. Here’s how:

Suppose you have 100 links pointing to http://example.com and another hundred links pointing to http://www.example.com. Search engines will see that each URL has 100 inbound links, and that’s all you’ll get credit for. However, if they all pointed to http://www.example.com you’d get credit for all 200 links.

That Pesky “www” in Web Addresses

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As I’ve written in the past, it can actually be worse than that, as it’s possible to have four different URLS for your home page like this:

example.com
www.example.com
example.com/index.html
www.example.com/index.html

This problem of multiple addresses for the same web page is called canonicalization. We have a full discussion of it on our web site.

What To Do?

You can’t control how other people link to your site and whether they use the “www” in the address or not. But you can set up a permanent redirect so that any time they don’t use the “www”, the link gets directed to the “www” version of your web address. We have instructions on how to fix your home page canonical issues on our web site.

Aside from redirecting external links to the “www” version of your address, you should also make sure your internal links pointing to your home page do the same. It’s very common for home page links from other pages on your site to include the actual page, as in www.example.com/l (there are several possible alternatives to index.html that your site may use). You should make sure that your own links to your home page don’t include that “index.html” part, and just point to www.example.com.

June 3, 2008 by Bill Treloar 1 Comment

3 Lines of Code Can Improve Your Rankings

On June 3, 2008 / canonicalization, domains/URLs, redirects / 1 Comment

Many webmasters and web site owners aren’t aware of this hidden killer of search engine rankings. The problem occurs when multiple URLs can access the same page on your site. And just 3 lines of code can fix it.

For example, all of the following are likely to point to the same page:

http://samplesite.com
http://www.samplesite.com
http://samplesite.com/index.html
http://www.samplesite.com/index.html

If other websites link to yours inconsistently (which will happen sooner or later), different versions of the same pages can get indexed in search engines. This forces the search engines to choose the best URL to rank. Your PageRank will be diluted by the fact that some links are going to different URLs for your page.

Do you have this problem? It’s easy to check. In your browser, navigate to www.yoursite.com (substituting your own domain, of course). Then go to yoursite.com (without the “www.”). If both go to the exact same URL (check the address box in your browser), then you’re in good shape. But if one displays your URL with the “www” and the other displays it without, then you have this problem.

3 Lines of Code Can Improve Your Search Visibility

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How to Fix This

First, choose which version you want to use — with or without the www. Then, have your webmaster insert the following at the beginning of your .htaccess file. (Don’t worry: your webmaster will know what that file is. Unfortunately, this only works if your site is hosted on a Unix or Linux server. If it’s hosted on a Windows server, your webmaster will have to check for the proper way to do this on your server.)

To use the with-www version of your site, use this code, substituting your domain as appropriate:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To use the without-www version of your site, use this (again substituting as appropriate):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yoursite.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That’s it! Just test to make sure it works.

Of course, you still need to make sure all the sites linking to yours are linking to the right version, and that if they’re linking to your home page they’re not including the actual page filename after the .com. But this little trick should take care of the worst of things.

[Update — Be sure to employ the same 3 lines of code when you migrate your site from an insecure “http://” prefix to a secure “https://” prefix.] [Read more…]

December 22, 2005 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

A Word About “WWW”

On December 22, 2005 / canonicalization, domains/URLs / Leave a Comment

You can often navigate to a site by using the prefix “www.” or by skipping it. For instance, https://www.VCSsoftware.com and VCSsoftware.com both point to the same place.

However depending on the server configuration, they could point to different locations, so search engines can’t assume they’re the same. The folks at Sitemaps have a helpful article on this, albeit a bit technical for some.

Matt Cutts, the “Google Guy has a simple suggestion on his Google Blog: “The only thing I’d add to that answer is one recommendation: check your internal links and to make sure that they’re consistent (either all to www or all to non-www). That will also help search engines pick the root page that you prefer.”

In other words, pick one or the other (I like using the www) and make sure all the internal links on your web site — and as many incoming links from other web sites as you can influence — all use the same version. That way your web site will get proper credit for all those links.

Why Did Your Nice, New Website Destroy Your Search Rankings?