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Canonical URLs Explained By Matt Cutts of Google

Matt Cutts on Canonical URLs

This shall be a very quick update and summary with my final SEO advice for some time. It seems that my chronological report about the evolution of SEO configuration on this blog confused many readers.

I apologize and make it good with this post.

It was not so much the fact that most of you live and breath in a Wordpress world. It was more about my deep dive into the abyss of Apache's URL redirection, .htaccess configuration, and the ever changing schemes of URLs used here on this blog. That's where I lost many of you.

It's too easy to get carried away while being intensively involved with fixing a problem.

Yesterday I already have emailed a short summary with Top 10 SEO Tips for Blogs (↑) to my newsletter subscribers. It lists the major points and adds you should make use of sitemaps and Google's free webmaster tools.

Now, in order to conclude this short, unplanned series of articles about SEO I have for you:
  • A 20 minute long video presentation of Google's Matt Cutts talking about duplicate content and how to use the new canonical URL parameters properly.

  • Plugins for

    • Wordpress and
    • Serendipity S9Y weblog software.


  • And I also found a comprehensive SEO guide for Wordpress users.

Let me start introducing the video with a catchy quote.
We reserve the right to do what we think is best.
--Matt Cutts, Google.com

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New SEO Lessons learned already!

John W. Furst

Finally following up my previous blog post about the SEO improvements on this, my E-Biz Booster Blog. I promise I'll keep this post as short as possible and to the point. And I must warn you. This post might be a bit straight forward and advanced. If you have questions leave a comment and I'll be happy to explain what needs to be explained in further detail. At the end of this blog post I refer to other bloggers who are going a similar route. Kind of social proof that I have moved in the right direction with the latest changes in the inner workings here.

I originally stated, “I don't care about rewriting the short versions of the URL.” That means if someone typed for example, http://blogdev1.fcon21.biz/230/ for an article about email marketing tips, into the browser or clicked a corresponding link the navigation bar of his browser showed exactly that URL. Not anymore.

I argued it does not matter as long as the content is what the user is looking for and the search engines can use the meta information for the canonical URL from the HTML Head section.

Well, that was theory.


Rewrite non-canonical versions of your post URL



Not all search engines and other types of robots are taking advantage of the meta information for the canonical URL at this point.

I noticed problems with Google Adsense when requesting a particular page with using the shortcut URL. The AdSense bot did not know what the page is about and served no or totally off-topic ads in many cases. I knew this is not very good. So I needed to fix this problem.

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"RSS Gone Wild" is a SEO side effect. Sorry!

RSS hiccups happen

I implemented a couple of SEO related (search engine optimization) changes on this blog. But I did not stop there. I introduced some new features for my readers as well.

As a result and the side-effect of it, the 10 or 15 latest blog posts have been re-published on the RSS feed with ever slightly changing URLs. I had the RSS feed turned off today to minimize the effect this had on Feedburner, and your RSS blog subscriptions.

I hope you can forgive me that faux pax. I wrote about those side-effects in the original article where I go in detail over the background for the SEO changes.


The main SEO changes revisited


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SEO Friendly Permalink Structure

John W. Furst

I must admit when I first setup my E-biz Booster Blog I did not know much about search engine optimization (SEO).

Finally I have changed and improved my permalink structure. It is not only more SEO friendly but in fact has increased usability, too. Whenever you change URLs it should be your goal to redirect your old URLs to the new ones because you
  • cannot change all links to your site that exists out on the Web
  • don't really want to spend the time to change internal links manually.

It is best to make sure the old and the new link structures work in parallel. That's exactly what I have done. Luckily Google has introduced a new feature in March 2009 that made that change more easy for me. You can read about that in a minute.

Bottom line, you don't have to be a SEO specialist from Stompernet.


However, let me start with the full story



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Why .COM Is The Best Of All Generic Top Level Domains (gTLD)

Generic Top Level Domains There is a huge debate about which domain extension to use. Internet marketers usually have a different opinion than registrars who want to sell the most exotic domain extensions like .BIZ .TV .ME .NAME and so forth for a nice profit. Here is my answer to to that discussion.

The short answer: .COM is recognizable as Internet domain by the largest group of people when compared to the wide-spread of other generic top level domain extensions (gTLD) like: .NET .ORG .EDU or .GOV

When you say, MyBrand.COM, almost everybody will know instantly that you are talking about your Internet domain and they will associate it with a website as well.

.COM is definitely the strongest brand among all top level domains

As the domain name space has filled up rather quickly new gTLD were invented for use by businesses worldwide: .BIZ .INFO

And as I have read today the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN.org, which is the governing body of the Internet, plans to introduce hundreds of new top level domains.

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Email Marketing Tips - History

Update on Feb. 8, 2013: Deleted all entries with outdated tips or broken links.

I just got word that we are discontinuing the Email Marketing Tips Blog Carnival. The email marketing tips 16th edition has been the last edition so far.

Update: The carnival is continuing. Read edition 18 of email marketing tips next.
John W. Furst
2009-06-08




Why?

The reasons are twofold.

(1) The top dogs are not contributing their blog posts anymore.

(2) If we have to scan the Web for good content ourselves, what is a blog carnival good for then?

As the quality of carnivals has declined over the last couple of month so has the effectiveness and resulting traffic.


What's next?

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