While I was setting up this blog as well as it’s template, I came across the term “canonical URL”  while I was viewing the HTML source code. After much researching, I’ve found out it’s importance and how you can take advantage of it to help your search engine (SEO) position better or prevent any penalties that Google or other search engines will impose on duplicate content. SEO Philippines can help you address this issue with your website.

So what is this thing called Canonical URLs?

Let’s say our website SEO Philippines has the URL http://seo-philippines.com

In most cases, when you type either the following, you’ll have the same page result

• http://www.seo-philippines.com
• http://www.seo-philippines.com/index.php
• http://www.seo-philippines.com/index.htm

This becomes a problem because you are going to have 3 additional duplicate content for your site and most likely get penalized for it or split the popularity of your domain between these web addresses. As an SEO professional or even a site owner, make it a practice to have a standard URL for your site.

Now my default canonical URL is http://www.seo-philippines.com for all purposes even on my printed materials. This means even if you type the www prefix, it will return to the default URL of my site.

As of this writing, I got to the top 3 rank of Google search results page using the keyword SEO Philippines. Unfortunately the cataloged URL was http://www.seo-philippines.com so when I set it to http://seo-philippines.com, I disappeared. So lesson learn the hard way. I hope this post helped you in some way or at least my experience will help prevent you from doing the same mistake of submitting the wrong URL. I’m also updating all my internal links and links from other sites to conform to the new URL. I hope to get back on track again with the right URL this time.

What has the dog something to do with this article? Well, a lot.  Dofollow and nofollow has been awhile now but not a lot of people know the power of these link.

First off, what are dofollow and nofollow links? Ordinarily, all links are followed by search engine spiders. But this has been exploited and abused by BlackHat SEO practitioners to increase their page ranks and popularity. They do this by means of comment spamming and link flooding. As a result, most content on the Internet have been tainted by unrelated topics and links and information. (on a side note, I blame Google for announcing to the world that links help you rank higher) [my update: now Google rank sites higher without a ton of backlinks]. This is now what I believe is the separation of PR and SERP which I hopefully publish a new article on tomorrow if I’m not busy. Sad to say, this made the dofollow links as a BlackHat tool of choice.

Back to the Point

So to get back on point, nofollow links were created to stop, prevent, or minimize this practice. Because links are rendered useless to their ranking and search engines wont follow it, people that post comments on your blog have a greater chance of being related. Unfortunately, this hasn’t prevented people from posting unrelated links here. But fortunately, I can approve or decline comments before publishing it live. Right now, I have to approve almost a hundred comments that 90% are unrelated.

Putting Some White on the Black

In order to be considered a White Hat SEO practice, it must fall into these criteria:

1. Relevant - post on blog topics that are related to your links
2. Non-spammy – don’t flood comments.
3. Substantive - it also will look good to make it more like a sentence describing your target site than just posting a link.

So as a small plug and contribution to this wonderful world of SEO, nofollow, and dofollow, I’ve created a site to help spammers get off their itch to post their links on. It also has tons of articles ranging from art to travel to medical. So it is highly likely that your post will be on a related topic and the search engine will favor the quality of the article and your link will have more value when the spider crawls at it.

How does search engines get to those billions or trillions of web pages and websites? There are two ways they their data.

1. User Submitted – Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks or even months for a website to get crawled specially if it’s a new domain. This is because no links have been established to connect to these websites yet. So in order for search engines to get to your site, you can tell them about it through user submitted websites. Here are links of the submission pages of major search engines and why you need to submit to these top 5 site first.

Google (71.65%) – Google has always dominated the search engine market currently with a 71.65% share. In fact, if you get to the front page of google’s search results, you are set. One of the reasons why Google is on the top of the list is because of FireFox default search engine which also dominates the browser market.
[Submit to Google]

Yahoo (14.37%) – Yahoo with it’s second place ranking, can also help you get your site traffic up. Yahoo has implemented intrusive ways to get to your results such as through installing itself through Firefox by means of third party applications which is pretty annoying.
[Submit to Yahoo]

Bing (9.85%) – Bing’s strategy is good enough to move it as a major contender in the search engine market. First, it’s partnership with Facebook’s search result which is by far the best move Microsoft made. Second, it now serves Yahoo’s search result. This means less options for the end user.
[Submit to Bing]

Ask (2.19%) – 2% is still a good number and submitting to just another search engine wouldn’t hurt you as much as you’d want to or it might. Well, it’s technically easy to submit as long as you have your sitemaps up.

Submitting to Ask.com is as simple as adding your sitemap.xml

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://seo-philippines.com/sitemap.xml

Aol Search (1.15%) – Aol users are now going down however, they’re still out there and if you’re targeting the US market, it’s a good bet to submit to AoL.
search.aol.com/aol/add – Didn’t work the last time I visited it maybe they don’t want submissions anymore hehe.

Alternatively, you may also submit to multiple search engines through these sites. However, I do recommend that you do a manual submissions to the top 5 search engines.

• SubmitExpress
• FreeWebSubmission
• FastSubmit Pro
• AddPro
• AddMe

However, you can just do a search on them through Google using the keywords “Free Search Engine Submission”

Crawling
If you’re patient enough, you’ll see that getting the search engines to crawl to your pages quite rewarding. Focusing on your content would make it a far better investment if you don’t have the budget to submit it to the thousands of websites and directories out there.

On my next blog post, I will show you strategies to get your site crawled. Thanks for being here.

I will be starting a series of training courses to show you what SEO is all about. I will also share to you the SEO process trying to develop as I organize my thoughts, research and experiences in the world of Search Engine Optimization. I’ll be doing this on a daily basis until I am able to compile all the materials to deliver my first SEO e-book that will be published for FREE. But let’s just start at the beginning.

Tomorrow, I’ll be dealing with understanding how search engines work and actually defining what is SEO Philippines. So, stay tuned.

BTW, if you are going to join my live workshops, please subscribe to our updates so you will be on top of the lessons.