I’m writing this post after a heated debate (let’s really call it tepid, tbh) between, Matt Cutts, Head of Google Search spam team and Michael Grey, re-knowned American blogger and Search Consultant, better known to many as Graywolf. The jist of the debate was around some hackers cracking into a considerable number of UK School websites and injecting porn links within the hacked websites copy : source.
Just a couple of days ago, I purchased the .com suffix of North South Media, after a 3 year chase it then dawned on me – how the heck do I proceed to build the .com domain into the continued growth of the company! We have a successful .co.uk suffix running that is entirely focussed on the UK market – but is weak in the competitive international market, mostly dominated by .com suffixes.
On Thursday, 12th of February, Google, Yahoo and MSN officialy announced the introduction of their canonical tag which will help webmasters stop their sites falling foul of the duplicate content filter. For the less-informed amongst you, Google and other search engines cache (store in their index) different url’s related to your website. So, for example, they might see a page within a site called :
http://www.yourdomain.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy
also accessed as
http://www.yourdomain.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678
By using the new canonical tag, you can present your preffered url like so :
Back in 2002 I read an intersting article, of which the main theme was the introducion of usability techniques on web sites to help enhance a persons web browsing experience. The article spoke of designing sites where the end-user could get to the most important information in the fewest clicks and without the website performing all sorts of weird tricks on the browser the user was using to surf the site with i.e. resizing the browser window, links that opened up in a new window and the fact that the majority of ecommerce sites sucked big time.
We all suffer from them from time to time, a series of unfortunate events that may not be massive or life-ending but you can do without them just the same. Google, the search giant, has had a few of their own unfortunate events over the last 48 hrs. First off, the news broke on Friday the 30th of January, that a Google Street View vehicle had hit a small deer and then recorded the whole thing on Google Maps. Like I said, nothing shattering, just an unfortunate event, that’s all, then this happened …
