Very rarely we see the three big players in the search engine market, namely Google, Yahoo and Microsoft collaborate. Weeks ago, they jointly announced a new standard on the support that allows millions of site owners to remove duplicate pages from the search engine’s index so they can find and store more and more web pages, make search results more complete again.
Matt Cutts, Google employee who led the effort in combat spam Google says that “the web is very disorganized, and with this initiative, the website owner will be able to clean many things that are not useful. I believe this initiative will support people quickly.”
The problem is that many sites, especially sites such as e-commerce companies have a lot of URLs that refer to the same page, for example, is the third URL below that point on the same page:
- Http://www.example.com/index.html
- Http://www.somepage.com/index.html?lang=en
- Http://www.somepage.com/index.html?lang=en&sid=1234
The existence of multiple URLs for same page in disarray over the search engines work, often causing them to record the same page in several different URLs. According to estimates, almost as much as 20% of the URLs on the web can be considered as a duplicate.
Google has created a simple way for site owners to indicate whether a URL is a duplicate of another URL, and if true, the URL where you want to serve as the main URL. To do this is to give the tag “Canonical” page in the site URL to point to the main site.
- Example: <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/index.html”>.
Yahoo and Microsoft, search engine number 2 and number 3 of the world has agreed to support this standard. Nathan Buggia from Microsoft says that their “happy because all people will support the implementation of the same. This course is for the benefit of the site owners because they provide the opportunity to get more publications through search engines
Interesting Stuff
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