Minnesota SEO Services | Brent Rangen

rel=”canonical”

The canonical tag is a way to tell the search engines “Hey, I’m a duplicate content page.”

When
Say you have four index pages. All are the same version of the one page. You would use the canonical tag on three of the four. This would tell the search engine which one it should index. Canonical is not a new tag, as “rel” has been around the block, and has been used for the highly disputed rel=”nofollow”.

Why
Search engines have nothing to benefit from indexing multiple copies of one page, and you can most definitely reap the benefits by using rel=”canonical”  on internal pages with duplicate content. We know for a fact that Google does penalize for duplicate content across your site, usually the cases I have seen where site has been penalized  is because it looks very spammy.

Because
You may not even realize that your site too may have duplicate content. There are many times your CMS (content management system) or blogging platform will spit out duplicate pages. Other pages used for tracking, gateways, e-commerce sites often have ascending and descending features that will have duplicate pages too.

• Was first introduced at SMX West early in 2009.
• Used by many sites.
• Can be used on multiple domains.

Multiple Domains – ** As of December, 17th, 2009 – Google is the only one of the big three search engines accepting the use of rel=”canonical” across multiple domains.

This is what the 10th spot on the first SERP looks like. Interstingly enough, it has been said that #10 gets more clicks that #9.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page: A keyword query into a search engine, in non-technical terms when you “Google something”  the results you see is known as a SERP, or Search Engine Results Page. The three big search engine’s always display 10 results per page. Page one would then hold positions (or rank) #1-10. Chances are you have seen the term SERP before.  I often send ranking reports and talk about keyword ranks and I’m always using the term SERP.

This is a broad term and the term SERP applies to every search engine – not just Google. The positions on the SERP one are the one’s that everyone desires. More eyes (and scripts) are viewing the results on page one.  Nobody really knows what the CTR (click-thru rate) of each position actually is.

The last time that data was captured was from AOL Time-Warner in 2006 and AOL was not happy about the data being released. The interesting thing about that study was that position #10 (the last on page one) gets more action than position #9. Captain obvious states it must be clicked more because it’s the last one on the page (Remember, there are 10 results per page). Apparently being last isn’t always the worst!

Each search engine displays results differently and are not limited to one type of results. You may be familiar with image, map, and video searches and also paid, contextual, orgranic results. These are just the tip of the ice berg. When someone mentions SERP on the fly usually they are talking about organic search results.