Having started off as a web developer myself, I can totally empathise with a lot of issues that affect search engine optimisation on existing sites. A web developer has the complex task of building a website based on the materials they are provided. I always use the analogy that a web developer is like a builder of houses. Once they finish the house they are building they move off onto the next one and are not really concerned with what happens after. This is often the case, particularly in high turn around environments that many smaller companies and agencies find themselves in. Unfortunately, this leaves the occupant of the house standing in the doorway looking around and waiting for the traffic.
Multiple Versions of the Homepage
There should only ever be one version of the home page, e.g. http://www.safaripetworld.com and this should be the only one used throughout the site when linking internally and externally. It may come as a surprise to many people but even adding a forward slash (“/”) to the end of a URL is different to its equivalent without!Here are some examples of common home page duplicates:
Non-www – http://safaripetworld.comHTTPS – https://www.safaripetworld.com
File names – http://www.safaripetworld.com/index.php
Worst Case Scenario
In the worst case scenario we could have 8 versions of the home page:
http://www.safaripetworld.com
http://safaripetworld.com
http://www.safaripetworld.com/index.php
https://www.safaripetworld.com
http://safaripetworld.com/index.php
https://safaripetworld.com
http://safaripetworld.com/index.php
https://www.safaripetworld.com/index.php
Solutions =>
The quickest and easiest is to implement the canonical tag in the <head> section of the page. This would look like:<link href=”http://www.safaripetworld.com” rel=”canonical”/>
This would let search engines know which is the one and only canonical version.
Get Smart SEO Tips
This is a very nice blog. Some tips regarding URL has been explained here.
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