Web Design and SEO News and Tips

Canonical Problems, Duplicate Content, & PageRank

• August 25th, 2007

Here’s a simple problem that can cause major ranking problems on Google and other search engines. I mean simple in the sense that it doesn’t take much effort on your part to fix.

Question: Can your web site be accessed using both the www and non-www versions of your site’s URL? In other words, if your web site address is http://www.example.com/, can it also be accessed at http://example.com/? If the answer is yes, then you need to fix it NOW! First of all, it’s entirely possible that Google could be indexing both versions of your site and imposing a ranking penalty on you for duplicate content, because everything at http://www.example.com/ and http://example.com/ is exactly the same, but they are different URLs (i.e. different sites). You will also be suffering a PageRank dilution because your PageRank is being divided between these two URLs.

A similar problem exists if your home page can be accessed at http://www.example.com/ and also at http://www.example.com/index.html (or index.php, etc.). Google could be seeing these as two separate pages and penalizing you for duplicate content as well as dividing up your PageRank between those two.

Those linking to your site could also be linking to these different URLs, thus dividing up your incoming link juice into several URLs instead of one. NOT GOOD!

If your site is hosted on Linux or Unix running Apache (if you don’t know, ask your host), you can fix all these problems by adding a few lines of code to your .htaccess file. (If your site is hosted on Windows, switch to Linux/Unix right away!).

Here’s the code that will fix almost all canonical problems (a fancy name for what we’ve been talking about) on your site (click here for a text version to copy and paste):

Make sure you replace every occurrence of “example.com” with your own domain name and if your home page is something different than index.html (index.php for instance), make sure you change that accordingly.

Your .htaccess file (if you have one) should be located in the root of your web server. Just open the file in any text editor (NotePad or equivalent on Windows, TextEdit or equivalent on Mac), add the code as described above, and save it back to your web server. If you do not have an .htaccess file at the root your web server, just create a blank text file in a text editor, add the code above, and then save it with the filename .htaccess and upload to your server.

Then watch your search engine rankings increase!

Plugin for Adding Videos to Your WordPress Blog

• August 11th, 2007

I just came across a WordPress plugin called My Video that makes it really easy to post YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, and MySpace videos to your WordPress blog. Just go to the My Video download page and download the plugin file to your computer and then upload it to the plugins folder of your WordPress installation. Next, activate the My Video plugin in your WordPress admin section and you’re pretty much done. If you want to change the size of the video, you can go to “Options” in your WordPress admin and easily change the size.

Now you can add any YouTube (or any format mentioned above) video to your blog! Just write a post as you normally would, and then add the following line of code where you want the YouTube video to show up:

[ youtube ] video reference [ /youtube ]

(without the spaces)

The video reference is the string of letters and numbers which YouTube assigns to each video and can be found in the URL of the YouTube page the video appears on as well as in the information box about the video on YouTube’s page (see image below). Have fun!