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.

Caffeine is Near Here

Google’s new Algorithm, Caffeine, a new uber-beefy infrastructure that includes a new rewrite of their data storage technology, that means while compiling SERPs Google will have more speed and flexibility, and is said to be on at least one of the seven Google data centers as of this very morning.

Beanstalkseo gets most of the credit for having the first full length post on the topic. As BSS states,

As of this morning we were starting to see Caffeine results off at least one Google Datacenter. Last week we reported that we’d let you know as soon as we started seeing Caffeine results and where that location is. Interestingly – it is out of a location that contains one of our servers – Seattle. The IP is 74.125.67.100.

Now the interesting thing is that on SE Roundtable they’re reporting (and confirmed by users there) that the IP is 66.102.7.18.

Caffeine is just one of the many new features now being implemented by Google. You may have already noticed certain keyword-related Twitter profile tweets being displayed on the SERPs and breadcrumbs replacing URLs on certain sites. Google’s superhero Matt Cutts confirmed Caffeine on one data center at least 50% of the time.

Real-time results trump organic rankings.

If you are one of the lucky ones who has their tweets showing up in Google’s new real time results, then kudos to you. If your not, welcome to the majority. Perhaps you’re not quite sure what I’m talking about. Here is a picture of the new “real-time search results”

Branding vs. Personal Name has Big Benefits w/ this new feature.

Click on the image to see more.

As always, there is no concrete information on which accounts will be featured, or guidelines to qualify as one who will be featured. So far, this author can only find MattCutts and SEOmoz’s tweets featured. Google has confirmed using Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter.

Once the roll out is complete we will have a better understanding of which accounts are featured and how it really works between the search engine and social media sites. It will be very interesting to see how the SEO community reacts to this. What are your takes on how this will change organic traffic and conversion rates?

Official Google blog post.