Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all came together early this year to support the use of canonical tags. But what are canonical tags and what’s the use to us?

Canonical tags were created to help address the problem of duplicate content. We already know that there are already existing ways to address this problem such as 301 redirects and the use of sitemaps, however, in many instances these solutions are not enough. To make life easier for webmasters canonical tags were created. The tags help with duplicate content by telling search engines what URL you want them to index in place of a page’s uglier URL version. The syntax is also very simple and makes use of only one line that needs to be typed into the HEAD part of the page document. For example if you have a page with a URL like http://www.somepage.com/ example.html?sid=54321 you of course would prefer the search engine not to index that URL, especially if you have a nicer duplicate URL like http://www.somepage.com/example.html. So what do you do? All you need to do is type in:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.somepage.com/example.html"/>

And search engines will automatically honor your wishes. No sweat. Duplicate issues resolved. Now that’s one less problem you won’t need to worry about.

You can also watch Matt Cutts’ interview with WebProNews last February to learn more about canonical tags.

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One of the most indispensable tools for any webmaster who wants to rank in Google is obviously Google’s Webmaster Tools, after all no one knows better what tools you need to keep track of your site’s statistics. Besides Webmaster Tools allows us to tweak settings so as to ensure that Google takes note of our indexing preferences. Webmaster Tools also allows us to do so many other things. Anyway Google has recently redesigned and released a new user interface for the Webmaster Tools.

For me the best feature of the new UI is the new one-stop shop dashboard. It makes it much easier to view relevant data. If you haven’t switched to the new UI you can check out the new functionalities without logging into your account by simply watching the YouTube video embedded below. You’d better start getting used to the new UI though because the final switch to the new look is coming pretty soon. No need to worry about the learning curve though because the new UI is really much more easy to use than the old one.

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We all know that stale content is not really good for your SEO efforts. An old domain is good but the content should be current. Fresh content is even more important nowadays thanks to Google’s new search options.

Search users can now filter results even better and opt to see only the most recently updated websites. Users can choose to show results from the past 24 hours, past week, and past year. Because of this you can bet that even with great content and a very high ranking site your site will NOT appear among the results if you do not have any new content that was put up within the time frame specified by the user. Of course unless you are maintaining a blog or has a website whose nature provides constant new posting material (e.g. new sites). In cases like that you will need to find a solution. The usual solutions, since they are the easiest to implement, are posting feeds and/or creating a blog. Even then it is near impossible in most cases to make sure that you have new content every 24 hours. What you need to keep in mind though is that if the reason for your site does not really require daily updates then you can be pretty sure that your target audience wouldn’t be using this new search feature to filter results. However, that doesn’t excuse having dated content on your site. Make sure you go over your site’s content from time to time and still update your content as much as possible.

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