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Canonical URL

Posted on February 22, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO Consultant 5 Comments

The Canonical URL issue that is talked about a lot lately since even Google itself it has a huge impact on the search engine ranking of your web page is all about defining one page and one URL of your web site to help the search engines define what the real Home of your web site is, and pass on all the links to any other pages to this one Home page.

Matt wrote about it even back in 2006 here: SEO advice: url canonicalization

Some people got it, some did not. Some people take advantage of it and some do not. IT’s a bit like saying:

Some companies care about their ranking in Google and some not.

Canonical URLThere is one domain (company) that actually took the canonical URL issue to the whole new level. What they have done is they have created two completely different web sites that show in the two versions of their URL. When the domain is accessed with a domain name that contains the ‘www’ part in it –one site shows up, and the same domain name without the ‘www’ part of the address shows a completely different web site.

At first it looked like a mistake made on the web server configuration, but contacting the company in question revealed that that was actually done intentionally.

An interesting and original approach to URL canonicalization. I do not remember anyone ever trying anything similar jet. Could they be on to something? It is clear that both versions of the web site will dilute the value the Google assigns. The Google Page Rank (PR) will be lower on both sites than it would be if one site would have been redirected to the other. The search engine ranking of both versions will again be lower than if the redirection was in place. Also by having the completely different content and the code on the two versions of the site, Google will have to index and therefore rank them completely independently.

There are no obvious benefits of doing splitting your web site into the two different versions. On the other implementing the two versions of the web site will definitely hurt your Google rankings.

The user / visitor of the site will also get extremely surprised with the two so different versions on the web site. Different company name, address, email, phone, fax number and everything really. It does really look like another company. It is only the call to their IT department that assured of their intentional ‘splitting’ of the domain name, and creation of the canonical URL.


First Page Results on Google

Posted on February 15, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Search Engine Optimisation, SEO 1 Comment

Anyone who ever had a web site wanted his web site to appear on the first page in Google for the important keywords. People just assume that since they invested into the development of their web site, that they ‘deserve’ to be listed, and listed high in the search engine results pages (SERP) What people do not consider is the size of the competition. Google itself for many, many years shows exactly that – The size of the competition, besides every search result it produces. Check the image below showing the number of pages that Google has indexed that contain the word ‘SEO’.

Results 1 – 10 of about 165,000,000 for seo.

Google: Results 1 - 10 of about 165,000,000 for seo.

What Google is telling us is that there is about 165 millions of pages of the web pages that contain the word SEO that Google has found and included in the search engine results. By default Google shows 10 pages per page, so the first page only shows the top 10 of the 165 millions of pages. Jet every site owner wants to get listed there. Unfortunately there is space for the top ten web sites only.

To display more relevant and local search results Google does not display the same results to everyone. Based on your location (your IP actually) Google will display the results that are ‘more relative’ to your location that the overall top 10 highest ranked pages.

Google even allows limiting the search results to just the pages it has indexed from your country. For our sample search for the word ‘SEO’ if the option ’pages from Ireland’ is checked, note that the result actually contains a much smaller sumo of pages, just 274 000 pages as opposed of the 165 000 000 pages on the whole web that Google has in it’s index.

Google: search for the word ‘SEO’ if the option ’pages from Ireland’ is checked

Note that the search results page with the ’pages in Ireland’ option selected contains far more local web sites, the majority of them the Irish domains ending with the ‘ie’ or ‘,com’s’ hosted on the servers in Ireland.

Knowing that there is about 274 000 pages in Ireland and 165 000 000 pages on the web that all compete for the same keyword ‘SEO’, how likely is that this new web site SEO Consultant will ever get listed on the first page as specified in the SEO Speed Test?


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