New “canonical link” element for search engine optimization

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Les Jones

Matt Cutts has details on the new canonical link scheme for controlling your search engine listings. Here’s the problem. Depending on how people reach your site your URL might look like any or more of the following:

http://site.com

http://www.site.com

http://site.com/index.html

http://www.site.com/index.html

And those are the simple variations. If you have secure https pages the possibilities double. Or maybe a page on your e-commerce site lists a bunch of TVs alphabetically by brand, but you can click a hyperlink and go to another URL where they’re sorted by screen size. Or, worse, your URL for a page may be https://www.site.com/index.html?sessionid=123456 for one visitor and https://www.site.com/index.html?sessionid=123457 for the next. Are those two URLs the same page or different for the sake of the search engine?

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft developed a Web standard for specifying the canonical URL using the link element in the page header. It’s stone cold easy, too. I implemented it in about 15 minutes on a template-driven e-commerce system with over ten thousand products. There are already plug-ins available for WordPress, Drupal, and Magento.

P.S. By any chance is anyone using the Magento shopping cart? I’m seriously considering it for use at the day job.

This entry was posted in E-commerce. Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to New “canonical link” element for search engine optimization

  1. Will says:
    February 24, 2009 at 12:49 am

    The only e-commerce product I am familiar with is zencart. Our implementation was pretty straightforward and it worked well for that, but customization was a real bitch.

    If you haven’t tried zencart give it a go. I really think that open source solutions like zencart and magento give you a lot of flexibility – especially with cms/ecommerce. The only problem is finding good developers to support it.

  2. Les Jones says:
    February 24, 2009 at 12:58 am

    Thanks for the feedback. One concern I have in picking a new e-commerce platform is that I expect any number of e-commerce software companies to go out of business in the next few years. Open source might mitigate that somewhat.

    The fact that it’s pretty feature-complete right now and is programmed in PHP doesn’t hurt.