Google Cracking Down on Web Spam

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Jim

In an unusual show of transparency, Google has announced a list of specific items that will cause your web site, or specific pages of your site, to be algorithmically removed from their search results. Read the full announcement here.

According to a Google representative, this more aggressive stance on web spam comes from over 14 months of testing and research that shows an 18.2% increase in more relevant sites in the search results when filtering out sites and pages that have the specific features listed.

Here are the items that will cause your site/pages to be removed from the search index:

• If your pages contain a significant amount* of duplicate content
• If a significant number* of your pages have duplicate title tags
• Pages that use a meta refresh or javascript redirects
• If a significant portion* of the links to your site are from blog or forum comments
• Pages that link out to more than 100 other pages
• Domains hosted in China
• Pages with more than 5 “no followed” links.

* Although no specific numbers are mentioned, the announcement does give details on how they determine what a significant number is.

View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Miscellaneous

Online Competitors Vs. Industry Competitors

Posted on February 23, 2010 by Christina Keffer

If you own a nail factory, your competitors are other people who make nails right?  They make nails to build buildings with and supply contractors who build houses. And they also sell five different shades of green metallic polish and have more sizes of acrylic applications than you. Oh, and how could I forget hoof nippers? How many hoof nippers for farriers do you have, Nail Factory Owner Guy(or Girl)?  Did that stop making sense to you? To clarify the issue, here’s the Google search result page for the key phrase “Nail Supplier”

Clearly, the owners of that nail factory had no idea what they were up against online. If they came to me and asked me to tell them why they weren’t ranking higher than their industry competitors even though their websites stunk, I would tell them that their competitor for that term is really EZNails Beauty Supply. After they finished laughing at me, I would try to explain that it’s true because — wait for it — online competitors are not always industry competitors!

But Beauty Supplies? Really?

Yes, really. Online competition transcends the boundaries of industry competition and falls messily into the world of words. Online, a nail factory is not competing against EZnails for market share… they’re not even competing with them for customers. A contractor looking for wholesale 10 penny nails is not going to spend his money buying 10 inch long acrylic claws instead. He’s going to take one look at that results page, sigh in resignation, and refine his search using industry specific terms. What that nail company is REALLY competing for is high rankings for the key phrase “Nail Supplier.” (Incidentally, here is the search results page for the keyphrse “10 penny nail supplier.” Way more reasonable.)

There are other less hilarious instances of industries competing with sites that do not belong to industry competitors. It happens in the medical industry all the time. In a search for “Pediatricians, PA” there is not a single actual pediatric practice until the very bottom of the page.

Pediatricians are competing with these directories for the attention of potential patients. Several of these directories have paid ads so they even make money off the leads.

Now that I know who my online competitors are, what do I do?

There are two options here.

1. Beat these sites at their own game. Now that you know what you’re up against, it might be the time for that redesign, or forking over the money for SEO.
2. The other, less costly, less time intensive solution is to redefine your online competitive space. Remember that contractor who sighed in disgust and searched for a more industry-specific term? Find those long-tail terms and optimize for them instead of bashing your head against a wall of acrylic nail-selling beauty supply stores.

Both of these solutions involve redefining your web presence to a certain extent. Look at it this way. If you were a mom and pop cake bakery in Pittsburgh and there was another cake bakery across the street, wouldn’t you constantly strive to outstrip them by making sure your window display was better, more artistic, and with more icing in hopes of catching that fickle bridezilla’s attention? Though you’re competing for (and with) words in the online arena, the idea is the same.

Polish your content the way you would polish the glass windows of your store front, since it’s through these portals that your potential customers see who you really are and what you have to offer.

View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Usability, Writing for the web

Using Bit.ly for Spying, Link Building and Happiness

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Jim

Bit.ly Education – Part 2

This is the second of a 2-part post on using bit.ly. Part 1 – Bit.ly for Beginners – explained the basics of Bit.ly.

In the comments of the first post, Tim Wilson astutely observed the transparent nature of Bit.ly. Namely, you can get information (traffic, referrers, locations, conversations) about any Bit.ly link simply by taking the short URL and adding a “+” at the end (minus the quotes). For example – I shared yesterday’s post via Twitter using the shortened version of the URL – http://bit.ly/dwSQo4

Just for fun, you can see how many clicks that Bit.ly link received by going to http://bit.ly/dwSQo4+ (notice the plus sign at the end).

Are your wheels spinning yet?

Competitive Intelligence

You have a competitor that you keep tabs on, right? Maybe you have a Google Alert set up for their name, or maybe you follow them on Twitter (and monitor social media mentions of their name or product). Now you can track how effective they are at leveraging social media and see if specific campaigns they are running are having success. Or you can compare your own campaigns to theirs to see how you stack up.

There are two ways to do this. The first way is if you can find Bit.ly shortened links to your competitor’s pages. You might find these in their Twitter stream or on their Facebook fan page, or maybe you see someone else mention your competitor’s site with a Bit.ly link. Just take that Bit.ly URL and add the “+” (like mentioned above). Instant gratification! You can see how many clicks they’ve received, how many people have retweeted or shared the short URL and the conversations surrounding the link. If your competitor has a Twitter account, you can also go to Bit.ly Twitter search and do a search for from:twitterusername – here’s an example. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

If your competitor doesn’t Tweet or you can’t find any Bit.ly links to their pages, you just have to do some more reconnaissance. Find out which pages on your competitor’s site are the most popular. You can use a tool like Top Pages from SEOmoz (Pro Membership required) or search Google for site:yourcompetitor.com – along with the SEO for Firefox plugin (to quickly see the most linked to pages). Take the pages that are the most popular (i.e. most linked to) and shorten them yourself using Bit.ly. You’ll quickly see if anyone else has shortened that same URL, and if so, all the traffic information along with it.

Link Building

Let’s visit Bit.ly Twitter search again, this time with our link building hats on. This nice Bit.ly feature, although somewhat hidden, lets you search Twitter for Bit.ly links about anything and compare their click through and traffic data. For example you can do a search for a topic like Google Analytics and get a quick glimpse at what Google Analytics-related content has been popular recently.

Once you see what’s popular (I hate to use the term viral) you can decide on a similar topic for a future blog post. After you’ve written and published this post, finding people to spread the word is simple. All you have to do is go back to that Bit.ly search you did for Google Analytics, find a popular post (one that has received a lot of clicks) and click on “Info.”

click to enlarge

Now just scroll down a bit and look at the “Conversations.” You should find plenty of Twitterers who have shared a post on a similar topic as yours. Chances are, they’ll be willing to share yours too, if it’s good. All you have to do is let them know about it.

click to enlarge

Finding Influencers

Don’t believe the numbers you see on Twitter. Just because someone has 10,000 followers doesn’t mean that they’re popular or that anyone is listening to them. In a lot of cases, they’re just using shady techniques to get a lot of followers to make themselves look good. These are not the people you want to target to help spread the word about that awesome article you just wrote.

But how do you find those people with influence? These are people that, regardless of the number of Twitter followers they have, can get a lot of people to click on links that they tweet and retweet. I’d rather have someone with 500 followers tweet a link to my post (if 10% of their followers regularly click through and retweet) than someone with 5,000 followers, who can only get a 0.1% click through rate and no retweets. Here’s a good example – you’d think that with nearly 7,000 followers, this twitterer would be able to get more than a handful of people clicking on his links. C’est la vie!

So how do you find these influencers? There are some tools out there to guage a twitterer’s influence, like TweetStats and Twitalyzer, that arguably do a better job of this type of analysis. However, Bit.ly can give you a more detailed look at which posts/tweets a person was able to attract a lot of attention to.

For example, let’s say I wanted to know if Danny Sullivan would be able to attract a lot of eyes to this post if he tweeted about it (hint-hint, nudge-nudge). I can see he has a lot of followers (about 30,613) but does anyone read his tweets or click through on his links? Let’s find out by going back into the Bit.ly Twitter search and doing the following search – from:dannysullivan. (You can do this for anyone by searching for from:twitterusername, remember?)

Here’s a few of his recent tweets that include Bit.ly links:

click to enlarge

This is good, but we can do better. If you click “info” on one of the results to get the details, you’ll see that Danny is a registered user of Bit.ly.

click to enlarge

If you click on the user name, you’ll get all of the Bit.ly shortening history. So we can see that Danny does have a lot of influence, which is no real surprise.

click to enlarge

Problems

All of the above information is great, but it’s limited to the people who use Bit.ly it to shorten their links. Although Bit.ly is on of the most used shorteners, there’s certainly no shortage of options – is.gd, kl.am, tinyurl, cli.gs, ow.ly, goo.gl, etc.

Also, just because someone uses Bit.ly to shorten their links, doesn’t mean that they’re a registered Bit.ly user. A lot of apps (TweetDeck, twitterfeed, etc.) integrate Bit.ly to shorten links. This means you won’t be able to determine a person’s influence as easily through Bit.ly, like we saw above with Danny Sullivan.

View Comments (9 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous

Bit.ly for Beginners

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Jim

Bit.ly Education – Part 1

This is the first of a 2-part post on using Bit.ly. Part 2 – Advanced Uses of Bit.ly – takes a deeper dive into this URL shortening service and shows how you can be Super Spy. Eat your heart out Bond.

I’ve talked previously about using Bit.ly to measure traffic from Twitter. Now let’s take a closer look at this URL shortening service. Bit.ly is an online service that allows you to take a long URL (http://www.example.com/blog/page/category/year/month/day/article/id=123456) and shorten it (to something like http://bit.ly/8FapX). Why would you want to do that? Simple. When you’re tweeting a link to your latest blog post, you have only 140 characters. Every character is precious, and if you can tweet a link that has 19 characters instead of 74 characters (like in the example URLs above) you have more space to craft a catchy line to get people to click through.

When someone clicks on the Bit.ly shortened version of your URL, they are then redirected to your original long URL. Bit.ly is kind enough to use a 301 redirect, which means that when search engines find links to the short URLs, they’ll credit those links to the long URL – your page. Don’t forget, links (quantity and quality) weigh heavily on how high your page and site rank in the search engines.

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to providing a short URL for your page, Bit.ly also gives some great information on traffic to that short URL (hence, your page). Here’s the rundown of what you can see:

1. Number of times your shortened URL was clicked on
2. Number of times other Bit.ly shortened versions of the same page were clicked on
3. Watch in (near) real time as people click on your Bit.ly link
4. Referring sites/applications from which your shortened URL was clicked
5. Location (country) of the person clicking on your shortened URL
6. Conversations – the tweets that include your Bit.ly link

(click to view larger)

When you create an account with Bit.ly (which takes about 30 seconds and only requires a user name, email and password) you also get access to these nice features:

History – Bit.ly keeps track of your shortened URLs and the data about them. They also show you how many clicks (across all shortened links) you’ve had in the past week and your most clicked Bit.ly links in the past hour.

Twitter Integration – You can tweet from straight from Bit.ly

Bit.ly Sidebar – A nice tool to quickly and easily shorten and share links from any web page

Stay tuned for Part 2 – Advanced Uses of Bit.ly – where I’ll show you how to use Bit.ly to spy on your competitors and find influential Twitterers.

BONUS: As a sneak peak into the next post, try this: find a tweet that interests you that includes a Bit.ly link. Click on the Bit.ly link. Copy the page’s URL and go to Bit.ly. Shorten the long URL. See how many people have clicked on that other person’s Bit.ly link? We’re just getting started…

View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous

Tracking Google Sidewiki

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Jim

First of all, for those that can’t keep up with all the latest and greatest features that Google keeps rolling out, a brief explanation of Google Sidewiki is in order. Sidewiki is a new feature that lets users who have installed the latest version of the Google Toolbar add and view comments on any page on any website they visit. The comments show up right alongside the page. Here’s a quick look at what one of those cutting edge users will see if they visit the LunaMetrics Blog page:

A couple of things to note:

• anybody can leave a comment on your website (can we say reputation management nightmare?)
• the comments can include links (with the commenter’s choice of anchor text)

It’s that second point that piqued my curiosity – what would happen if someone clicked on a link in a Sidewiki comment to your website? Well, with some help from Analytics Ninja John Henson we dug deep to find out the details.

First of all, you’ll notice that links in the Sidewiki comments initially link to something like

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2007/08/08/regular-expressions-for-ga-bonus-iii-lookahead/&usd=1&usg=AFQjCNEJnC7BWykRg1GKn52tQTpdd0RmQw

I’m not sure what “usd” and “usg” represent exactly – bonus points to anyone in the audience with ideas on this in the comments.

So what happens when we click on the link and it takes us to that URL? Google is 302 redirecting to the actual page. “Interesting,” you say, “but how will it appear in my analytics?”

It appears that, along with the 302 redirect, Google is setting the referrer to

google.com/sidewiki/entry/106935257806183022682/id/65RQs-s3d9nGKlxKN-7XTSvgaHI

So, if you go into your Google Analytics, you can see visits from links within Sidewiki comments by digging into your Traffic Sources > Referring Sites, clicking on google.com and looking for /sidewiki/…

Bonus tip:

You can easily find out who left the comment with a link to your site. See that number after /sidewiki/entry/ (in the example above, it’s 106935257806183022682)? Take that number and add it to the end of www.google.com/profiles/[enter numbr here]

Here, I’ve made it easy for you – www.google.com/profiles/106935257806183022682

As you can see, the number is the ID for my Google Profile page (because I left the comment). In fact, if the person has created a “friendly URL” for their profile page (like www.google.com/profiles/jim.gianoglio) then instead of a number after /entry/ you’ll get their Google Profile page name. Pretty nifty, eh?

Other Observations

Google is indexing these Sidewiki pages. That’s right – when you leave a comment, it’s not just an addition to an already existing page – you’re actually creating a unique page. Need proof? Go to Google and do the following search: site:google.com/sidewiki/entry

So far, about 1,210 Sidewiki comments have been indexed. If you visit a sidewiki page with the Google Toolbar installed, you get redirected to the page on the actual website (with the Sidewiki comments opened up). But if you visit a Sidewiki page without the Google Toolbar installed, it takes you to the Sidewiki URL – you can still see the comment and the actual page, but you’re not on that website, you’re still on Google. They also prompt you to “Share your own insights as you browse the web. Download Google Toolbar with Sidewiki.”

What does this all mean?

How can this information be used (aside from impressing all your friends at the next party)? For starters, you can use this as part of your online reputation monitoring. Granted, you’ll only see anything if someone links to you in their Sidewiki comment, and if someone actually clicks on that link. Nonetheless, if enough people start using Sidewiki, this is something you’ll want to monitor.

If someone is linking to you in a Sidewiki comment, maybe they’ll also link to you on their blog/website (link building opportunities, anyone?). Being able to see who’s leaving the comments (by tracking them back to their Google profile page) is a good start.

We’re still looking at ways that this data might be useful. What are your thoughts? How would you use this information? (Please share your expert opinion in the comments!)

Of course, it’s easy to see how spammers might try to use this to litter the web with links for viagra, porn and poker. It will be interesting to see how Google deals with this.

View Comments (10 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Industry News, Miscellaneous, Web Analytics

Sitemaps – Do You Need Them?

Posted on July 29, 2009 by Jim

Do you have a sitemap on your website? More importantly, do you need one?

Before I answer that question, let me point out that there are two types of sitemaps – HTML and XML. The first is an actual page on your website that lists all the other pages of your website – often broken into sections. For an example, check out LunaMetrics’ sitemap. This type of sitemap is intended primarily for human visitors (not robots) to your site. The second type – XML – is only seen by the search engines robots. It too is a listing of all the pages of your site, with some additional information.

HTML Sitemaps

So, what’s the point of a sitemap page? Do visitors to your site even look at it? To answer these questions, I took a quick look at the analytics for about a dozen sites (that range from 5,000 visits a month to over 100 million). What I found from this (less than scientific) analysis is that the number of pageviews of the sitemaps pages ranged from less than .01% of total pageviews to 1.24% (with the average being .26%). See the screenshots below for a better idea of the actual numbers:

Even if only a quarter of one percent of your pageviews are to the sitemap page, depending on the amount of traffic to your site, that could be a substantial number.

(As a side note, if you’re getting a significant amount of pageviews on your sitemap page, that’s a good indicator that people can’t find what they’re looking for. Perhaps you should rethink your navigation or how you present your content.)

Aside from helping that small percentage of people who actually use it, a sitemap page has other benefits. If you have pages that are buried deep within your site, a sitemap can keep them a minimum number of clicks away from the homepage. Why is that important? It helps those pages receive link juice from the home page, as well as helping the search engines find pages that they otherwise might not see.

XML Sitemaps

So what about XML sitemaps? Basically, they can be used to let the search engines know about all of your pages. Google has some helpful information about when XML sitemaps are useful, including:

• if your site has dynamic content
• if your site is new and/or has very few links pointing to it
• if you have a lot of content pages that are not well linked from other pages on your site

Additionally, XML sitemaps let you specify information about your pages that help guide the search engines, including how frequently the pages are updated, the date each page was last modified, and the relative importance of each page. This information will help the search engines decide how frequently to crawl your pages.

Additional Resources

XML-Sitemaps.com – this online tool lets you create XML and HTML sitemaps for free (up to 500 pages)

XML Sitemap format – explains the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol

Google Study Shows Use of XML Sitemaps Helps Index Fresh Content Quicker – Bill Slawski dissects a whitepaper from Google about the effectiveness of XML sitemaps

Increasing Search Indexing Coverage With an XML Sitemap – an XML sitemap Q&A from former Googler Vanessa Fox

View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Usability

Back to Basics: Optimizing Your Title Tag

Posted on June 17, 2009 by Jim

This post is a look back at the basics for those who may just be joining us (sorry analytics ninjas – you’ll have to wait for the next advanced, brain-swelling post on GA from John or Jonathan).

I am always surprised when I see a website that has the same title tag for every single page. Unfortunately, it’s more common than you may think. It seems to affect small businesses more frequently, but no website is immune.

What do I mean by the title tag, you ask? Simply put, it’s a title for the page that describes that page’s content. The title tag goes in the head section of the page’s HTML, and looks something like this:

<head>
<title>Increase Your Site’s Conversion Rate with Web Conversion Consulting</title>
</head>

OK, I see your eyes glazing over – that means you want real world examples, right? People see your title tag everyday in two main places – their web browser and in the search engine results:

So what’s the big deal with the title tag? Of all of the things you can change on your website, changing the title tag will have the most impact on how high you rank for the keywords you’re targeting. It’s also what searchers look at when deciding which result to click on.

For sites that suffer from this affliction of title tag duplication, this is the easiest, quickest way to increase traffic to your site. We have a client (I won’t shame them in public) that had this problem, and after changing their titles on each page they saw a 60% increase in traffic from people searching for products and services related to their industry. Previously, the only traffic from search engines came when someone searched for their company name. That would be like Nike only showing up if someone searches for “Nike” and then after changing their title tags they suddenly start showing up for the search term “shoes.”

Believe it or not, there’s even a Google Analytics tie-in here. The title tag shows up in your GA in the “Content by Title” report.

If all of your titles are the same, you’ll not have much use for this report, because it will just show you all of the pageviews for your site lumped together under the same page title. But when your pages each have different titles, you can see the pageviews segmented by each page (by title, of course). You can basically get the same data by looking at the “Top Content” report, but that shows you the pages’ URLs instead of page titles, which isn’t nearly as pretty.

View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Miscellaneous

I'm an Analytics Ninja.

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Robbin

Do you know what the definition of an Analytics Ninja is? By rights, I should link to the blogpost of the person who coined the term, but he gets so much link love already. Plus, I think the definition should be changed:  “Analytics Ninjas have cool Ninja t-shirts.”  The sleeves are just the best, they are wide and then banded.  (You can tell that I am writing a fashion column and not an analytics or conversion blog.)  While I am at it, let me show you where to get your own.  Jeremy Hutton did all the work.  I think Jeremy or Caleb Whitmore bought this Analytics Ninja shirt for me, and I know that I have to figure out how to thank one or both of them.

Continuing on the topic of late-Friday superfluous blog posts, I have to tell you about the case of beer John Henson of LunaMetrics Fame received this week. I got an email last week with the  title, “Regarding John Henson.”  I was wondering what kind of trouble he had gotten himself into…. Anyway, the email went like this, edited a little to disguise the writer:

“I called today to ask about getting some technical support from your team on a GA Subdomain tracking issue. I spoke with John about the issue and he said shoot him over the info and he would take a look. My jaw dropped when he offered to take a look and see if there was a quick fix.

“John got back to me within 10 minutes with the catch. I have to tell you that with all the companies I have worked with this was one of the most impressive examples of customer service I have experienced. I work with many startups, have consulted for numerous clients, and have called on dozens of vendors. Never once have I seen something this gracious. [Comment from Robbin: He is talking about JOHN? Who insults me every day?]

“I am sending John a case of beer as a personal thanks. Know that any opportunity I have to recommend your company and services I will do so ….”

We didn’t really believe the beer was coming (because it is hard to get beer from another country into this one, much less into Pennsylvania), but you can see the picture here of the case John received earlier this week.

OK, enjoy your weekend; next week Jonathan will write about site overlay, part II, and I’ll tell everyone to hold June 2 for GA Training in NYC.

Robbin

View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous

Hashing it Out: Referral Tracking

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Jim

Using the hash mark (#) instead of the question mark (?)

Have you ever wanted to track the visits to your site from a specific link, but worried about the negative implications of using query parameters in the URL? (I know, it’s kept me up late at night too.) We recently talked with Mike Plummer, a Seattle-based web analyst at POP, about this topic and he gave us some ideas to chew on – thanks Mike!

Using tracking parameters in the URL is a great way to track visits from links on other sites, but it raises a couple of thorny issues: duplicate content and (possibly) devaluing the links to your site if they are perceived to be paid links. Let’s look at the first issue – duplicate content.

Duplicate Content (Duplicate Content)

Here’s a hypothetical example: Let’s say LunaMetrics is running a special promotion of giving away a lifetime supply of ice cream to all new clients. In fact, this (hypothetical) promotion is such a big hit, web analyst guru and all-around great guy Avinash Kaushik decides to blog about it and post links to our homepage.

Of course, being the analysts we are, we want to track the visits from those links, so we ask Avinash to add the following tracking parameters to the links:

http://www.lunametrics.com/?utm_source=avinash&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=icecream

Things are going great – we are able to segment the traffic to just the visits from those specific links, and see that visits from Avinash have an 87% conversion rate! In fact, readers of Avinash’s blog are so excited about our promotion (and they love ice cream so much) they all start bookmarking our homepage and linking to it on their own blogs and websites. The only problem is that they bookmark and link to the URL with the tracking parameters (who can blame them – they just copy and paste the address from the browser).

The problem is that the search engines view the URL with the tracking parameters as a different page than our homepage URL without the parameters. So the value of all the links to the URL with the parameters doesn’t count toward our homepage at all. (And we all know how important links are when it comes to ranking higher in the search results, right?)

What are we to do?

Anchors Away!

Instead of using a question mark (?) in the query parameter, set it off with the hash mark (#). Of course, you’ll want to modify your Google Analytics Tracking Code with pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true); to track the parameters after the hash mark. Google’s documentation on this feature is a little confusing, so we’ll be covering the proper usage in a short follow-up post later in the week. (Update: As promised, here’s the follow-up post – “Campaign Tracking with _setAllowAnchor“)

The great thing about this method is that when Google sees a URL with a hash mark, it ignores everything after the hash. So…

www.lunametrics.com/#this

and

www.lunametrics.com/#that

and

www.lunametrics.com/

are all the same page in the eyes of Google. That means that when someone links to www.lunametrics.com/#utm_source=avinash&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=icecream it will be the same as linking to www.lunametrics.com as far as Google is concerned.

The Issue of Paid Links

Here’s what Google says about paid links:

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

They go on to say that some SEOs and webmasters have participated in buying and selling links that pass PageRank in an effort to rank higher. That is in direct violation of their webmaster guidelines, and they have been getting more aggressive in detecting these paid links and devaluing them. (It’s only fair to include that Google isn’t against all paid links – as long as they are designated as being paid.)

In the last paragraph, they say “Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such as excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank.”

Let me put on my aluminum-foil hat for all you conspiracy theorists out there. There are some that believe that if Google sees campaign parameters in a URL that it’s a signal for a paid link. If that’s the case, then links to your site that include campaign parameters may not pass any PageRank to your page.

But there are certainly cases (like our ice cream promotion example) where we aren’t paying for the link, but want to be able to track it. Again, using the hash mark (#) instead of the question mark (?) should accomplish this.

There you have it. Now, who wants ice cream?

View Comments (15 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Miscellaneous

Domain Canonicalization – Part 1

Posted on October 10, 2008 by Jim

Canonicalization is a fancy word to describe the process of choosing the best URL to display for a given page when there are several choices. The most common scenario is www vs. non-www URLs. For example, most people would consider the following URLs to be the same:

• www.example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/
• example.com/index.html

The problem is that even though each of these example URLs could all point to the exact same page, they are still different URLs, and are treated as such by search engines. The reasoning for this stems from the fact that technically, a web server could return completely different content for all the above URLs.

So why does it matter?
There are many negative effects of serving both the www and non-www versions of your site. It can result in duplicate content (having the exact same content at more than one URL) and can also lead to “dirty” data in your Google Analytics. First, we’ll discuss the problems from an SEO perspective – serving duplicate content and splitting your links to different URLs. Our next post will dissect the problem from a Google Analytics perspective.

Canonicalization from an SEO perspective
Having the same content at “different” URLs presents duplicate content. Now, let me dispell a common myth: there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty by Google or the other major search engines. In other words, if you have duplicate content on more than one page, the search engines will not actively lower your rankings.

The problem with duplicate content is that it splits up the links you have pointing to your pages. We all know (hopefully) that links to your website from other websites (inbound links) play a vital role in increasing your rankings in the search engines. When you have one page with two or more URLs, there is a chance that not everyone will link to the same URL.

For example, if you have 1,000 inbound links to www.yoursite.com/ and 1,000 inbound links to yoursite.com/ (without the www), then the search engines will only count half of the total links to your homepage. If the search engines saw that all 2,000 links were in fact pointing to the same page, however, then your homepage would certainly rank higher than if the search engines only counted 1,000. So that begs the question: “How do I consolidate those links to one canonical URL?”

URL Rewriting Tools
The easiest way to fix this very common problem is by using mod_rewrite and adding URL rewriting rules to your .htaccess file. This requires being on an Apache server, however, which some of us are not fortunate enough to be on. If your website is on a Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), then you can accomplish the same task by installing ISAPI_Rewrite. The basic idea is that when someone requests http://yourpage.com/, your server would do a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.yourpage.com/.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which will discuss domain canonicalization and how it affects your Google Analytics.

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