Content management systems are developed for a number of purposes, but the main reason we all use them is to simplify the process of adding new content and products to a website whilst retaining the existing look and feel. There are thousands of content management systems available, but unfortunately they don’t all take search engine optimisation into full consideration.
As designers, developers and optimisers will testify, no system is perfect, although some are better than others. Don’t worry, this blog isn’t for me to tell you yet again that Word Press is great (although it is), instead I’d like to talk about a strange use for the canonical tag I spotted in the CMS of a website I’ve been optimising.
I’ve been looking at a website which sells around 700 products and has around 800 pages. The CMS uses extremely ugly URLs, and each page is available at around ten or twenty variations of this same URL. The CMS also provides one short, SEO friendly address. For example, you may have an actual URL of:
http://www.example.com/scriptname.cgi?product=12345&variable=abcdef&variable2=something-yucky&ApparentlyRandomCharacters/theresmore/answer=yes&view=complicated
Whenever a page is linked within the site, the link uses an unfriendly URL such as the one above, or a variation with the same product number but different additional variables. So not only are we dealing with an ugly URL which isn’t particularly SEO friendly, any search engine looking at the site will see each variation of the URL as duplicate content.
The CMS tries to deal with this by also providing each page with a much better, much shorter URL. But this isn’t used in the navigation.
http://www.example.com/a-friendly-url/
Each of the duplicate pages use a canonical tag to say the friendly URL is the authoritative one. There are no other links pointing to the friendly address.
The canonical tag was developed so that if duplicate content is found, search engines will know which page is the source of the content, i.e. which it should show in the SERPs. The use here is slightly different; the CMS was using the canonical tag to state where the authoritative page exists, which is what you would expect, but it was relying on this to ensure the shorter URL displayed in the SERPs even though it isn’t actually linked to from any single place or used properly within the site.
Canonical tags are great. Their use is to tell Google and the other search engines which page is authoritative when duplicate content is found. They are not intended as a way to improve your search engine rankings or completely mask your real URL and place an SEO friendly variant within the SERPs.
Related posts:
