Snippet on Domain Canonicalization

Canonicalization – www vs. non-www, redirects, duplicate urls, 302 “hijacking,” etc.

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, many people would consider the below urls as
same:

* www.welcome.com
* welcome.com/
* www.welcome.com/index.html
* welcome.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://welcome.com/ and the other half go to http://www.welcome.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

Q: Is there anything else I can do?
A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.welcome.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://welcome.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.welcome.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

Q: If I want to get rid of domain.com but keep www.domain.com, should I use the url removal tool to remove domain.com?
A: No, definitely don’t do this. If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, it can end up removing your whole domain for six months. Definitely don’t do this. If you did use
the url removal tool to remove your entire domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain, do a reinclusion request and mention that you removed your entire domain by accident using the url removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded.

Q: So when you say www vs. non-www, you’re talking about a type of canonicalization. Are there other ways that urls get canonicalized?
A: Yes, there can be a lot, but most people never notice (or need to notice) them. Search engines can do things like keeping or removing trailing slashes, trying to convert urls with uppercase to lower case, or removing session IDs from bulletin board or other software (many bulletin board software packages will work fine if you omit the session ID).

Q: Let’s talk about the inurl: operator. Why does everyone think that if inurl:mydomain.com shows results that aren’t from mydomain.com, it must be hijacked?
A: Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. Yahoo handles 302 redirects by usually showing the destination url, and we are in the middle of transitioning to a similar set of heuristics. Note that Yahoo reserves the right to have exceptions on redirect handling, and Google does too.
Based on our analysis, we will show the source url for a 302 redirect less than half a percent of the time (basically, when we have strong reason to think the source url is correct).

Q: What are supplemental results?
A: Supplemental results usually only show up in the search index after the normal results. They are a way for Google to extend their search database while also preventing questionable pages from getting massive exposure.

Q: Okay, how about supplemental results. Do supplemental results cause a penalty in Google?
A: Nope.

Q: How to get out of Google Supplemental results?
A: If you were recently thrown into then the problem may be Google. You may just want to give it a wait, but also check to make sure you are not making errors like www vs non www, content management errors delivering the same content at multiple URLs (doing things like rotating product URLs), or too much duplicate content for other reasons (you may also want to check that nobody outside your domain is showing up in Google when you search for Site Saturation – site:mysite.com and you can also look for duplicate content with www.copyscape.com).

Share of Online Searches by Engine, January 2008

Managing Comments In Blogging

One of the most exciting features of blogging tools are the comments. This highly interactive feature allows users to comment upon article posts and link to your posts and comment ON and recommend them. These are known as trackbacks and pingbacks. We’ll also discuss how to moderate and manage comments and how to deal with the annoying trend in “COMMENT SPAM“, when unwanted comments are posted to your blog.

• Trackbacks
• Pingbacks
• Verifying Pingbacks and Trackbacks
• Comment Moderation
• Comment Spam

Trackbacks

In a nutshell Trackback – is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B.

A better explanation is this:
• Person A writes something on their blog.
• Person B wants to comment on Person A’s blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog
• Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A’s blog
• Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B’s post

The idea here is that more people are introduced to the conversation (both Person A’s and Person B’s readers can follow links to the other’s post), and that there is a level of authenticity to the trackback comments because they originated from another weblog. Unfortunately, there is no actual verification performed on the incoming trackback, and indeed they can even be faked.

Most trackbacks send to Person A only a small portion (called an “excerpt”) of what Person B had to say. This is meant to act as a “teaser”, letting Person A (and his readers) see some of what Person B had to say, and encouraging them all to click over to Person B’s site to read the rest (and possibly comment).

Person B’s trackback to Person A’s blog generally gets posted along with all the comments. This means that Person A can edit the contents of the trackback on his own server, which means that the whole idea of “authenticity” isn’t really solved. (Note: Person A can only edit the contents of the trackback on his own site. He cannot edit the post on Person B’s site that sent the trackback.)

Pingbacks

Pingbacks were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with trackbacks.

For example, Yvonne writes an interesting article on her Web log. Kathleen reads Yvonne’s article and comments about it, linking back to Yvonne’s original post. Using pingback, Kathleen’s software can automatically notify Yvonne that her post has been linked to, and Yvonne’s software can then include this information on her site.

There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.
1. Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).
2. Pingbacks support auto-discovery where the software automatically finds out the links in a post, and automatically tries to pingback those URLs, while trackbacks must be done manually by entering the trackback URL that the trackback should be sent to.
3. Pingbacks do not send any content.

The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:
• Person A posts something on his blog.
• Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.
• Person A’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

The pingback is generally displayed on Person A’s blog as simply a link to Person B’s post. In this way, all editorial control over posts rests exclusively with the individual authors (unlike the trackback excerpt, which can be edited by the trackback recipient). The automatic verification process introduces a level of authenticity, making it harder to fake a pingback.

Some feel that trackbacks are superior because readers of Person A’s blog can at least see some of what Person B has to say, and then decide if they want to read more (and therefore click over to Person B’s blog). Others feel that pingbacks are superior because they create a verifiable connection between posts.

Verifying Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Comments on blogs are often criticized as lacking authority, since anyone can post anything using any name they like: there’s no verification process to ensure that the person is who they claim to be. Trackbacks and Pingbacks both aim to provide some verification to blog commenting.

Comment Moderation
Comment Moderation is a feature which allows the website owner and author to monitor and control the comments on the different article posts, and can help in tackling comment spam. It lets you moderate comments, & you can delete unwanted comments, approve cool comments and make other decisions about the comments.

Comment Spam
Comment Spam refers to useless comments (or trackbacks, or pingbacks) to posts on a blog. These are often irrelevant to the context value of the post. They can contain one or more links to other websites or domains. Spammers use Comment Spam as a medium to get higher page rank for their domains in Google, so that they can sell those domains at a higher price sometime in future or to obtain a high ranking in search results for an existing website.
Spammers are relentless; because there can be substantial money involved, they work hard at their “job.” They even build automated tools (robots) to rapidly submit their spam to the same or multiple weblogs. Many webloggers, especially beginners, sometimes feel overwhelmed by Comment Spam.

There are solutions, though, to avoiding Comment Spam. WordPress includes many tools for combating Comment Spam. With a little up front effort, Comment Spam can be manageable, and certainly no reason to give up weblogging.

Microsites – For Leads, Traffic, Branding & Customer Retention

Microsites are focused, high impact sites useful for advertising an event, launching a campaign or in promoting a brand. Cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. If you are looking for a new way to acquire customers, a microsite is a solution. Typically 5 to 10 web pages – your product or service is featured, along with key features, description, your offer and a call to action. In many ways, it’s an electronic version of direct mail – except there’s no throwing this promotion away!With a lead-generating microsite like these, the goal is to acquire leads the way that third-party lead providers like Dealix and Cars.com get theirs. They create generic sites that give customers the ability to get a price quote from their member dealer in the area.

Advantages of Microsites:

* Actionable results – Microsites drive action. Lead generation, information requests or orders can be generated with a microsite.
* Continuous promotion – As content is still the king on web. Once you create online content, it takes on a life of its own. Sure it needs to be updated, but now you have a promotion that can generate a continuous stream of new business.
* Customized – A chance to promote your business with your own personalized design, choice.
* Optimized for Conversion
* Customer Focused
* Normally built around – One Campaign, One Brand or One Product Line.

Disadvantage of Microsite:

Sometime not able to generate Leads for which it is built – but still it helps in bringing Traffic, Branding & Customer Retention which is also very essential.

Keys to Success

* Telling your story quickly and succinctly. Many users arrive at a web site and look at one page. If the content is not relevant, they’re gone.
* Continuous improvements – Like exercise, an ongoing effort to maintain and improve your site is the best way to succeed
* Effective promotion – If you don’t promote it, you might as well not build it. Cost-effectively promoting your microsite can drive powerful results.

Thus we can say:

“A good microsite can be your most passionate sales rep, working 24 hours a day.”