Skip to content

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

While watching the good video content, you could come to the conclusion that SEO is not difficult at all. It's common sense if you think about it. Well, in a perfect world … yes, if there were no SEO spammers, no bastard black hats out there. And if programmers had more simplicity in mind…


Now enjoy the SEO video

Canonical Link Element
Matt Cutts, Google.com, 2009-02-21


The main topic Matt covers is the good old duplicate content issue and the the new canonical link element which which will be respectively is already supported by all major search engines.


Enable Canonical Link Information For Your Blog



This can be done easily by installing a plugin.

Wordpress
Canonical URL's -- Wordpress Plugin (↑)

Author: Joost de Valk

Adds rel="canonical" links to the head of your site, which help to prevent duplicate content issues on your blog.

Serendipity S9Y
HTML Link Metatags: serendipity_event_linktoolbar (↑)

Author: Garvin Hicking

Inserts link rel="start|up|prev|next|canonical" metatags into your frontend for better navigation.

Download the plugin directly: serendipity_event_linktoolbar



Wordpress SEO Guide



Additionally I want to recommend Joost de Valk and his award winning — Semmy 2009 — article The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog (↑), written especially for Wordpress users.

He doesn't share share my opinion about the blog post entry ID in the URL, but as I have pointed out this is an issue of much debate.


Okay, that's it.
Go and optimize your blogs now.

Yours
John W. Furst

Trackbacks

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

No comments

Comments are closed.
However, if you want to tell me something, drop me a line. Contact Us link in the footer.