All 2 entries tagged Canonical

Canonical Version of Duplicate Websites

Writing about web page http://ppcpromotion.co.uk/en

My links back to the old I-buy-Spy Microsoft CMS system are getting more removed as the MS-Office Live SB websites are shutting down tomorrow. They offered their Office 365 alternative at a reasonable rate but did not provide porting tools and SEO still required bodging.

So I re-hosted my website in Europe where my new provider’s free domain name offer included .eu domains so I claimed ppcpromotion.eu .

When selecting my main domain I also registered ppcpro.co.uk to have a shorter domain for the phone and email addresses.
Then I registered the ‘dash’ variants;

• ppc-pro.co.uk
• ppc-promotion.co.uk

This now adds up to 5 domains that instantly gets doubled when you add the www. variants which are treated as sub-domains likewrap.warwick.ac.uk the University of Warwick, Research Archive Portal.

With Microsoft I could use the three main ways to manage the DNS settings:

1. Donating the Domain names to the host’s Nameservers.
2. Directing the domain to the Host’s server’s IP address, using ‘A’ or Address Records.
3. Pointing one hostname to another using CNAME Records or Canonical name records.

My new host only allowed new domains to be added using A records.
I could still have used CNAME or simple redirection externally from the server but since I already had .eu and .co.uk that MUST be managed this way, already 4 domains I needed to solve the duplication problem.

I halved the problem by adding canonical links in the page headers but these cannot work across domains so this can only manage the www. duplication.
These links looked like this:
link rel=”canonical” href=”http://ppcpromotion.co.uk/”/
link rel=”canonical” href=”http://ppcpromotion.co.uk/adwords-audit”/
(You will need to add the < and > characters around these lines. I removed then so these will show on this Blog.)

Actually there is hope for the .eu and .co.uk duplication from Google’s Webmaster Tools help :

“In a situation like this, you can use the rel=”canonical” link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel=”canonical” link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible.”

I experimented with CNAME Records but I needed to be able to finish the job off on the server so the three minor domain names were simply used 301 Permanent redirection as the cleanest, safest solution.

Robert McGonigle : 29 Apr 2012 18:42 |  Tags: Canonical Canonical-Links Re-Hosting Websites |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Optional www expands Canonical confusion with MS Office Small Business Live & Google Pagemaker

Writing about web page http://tsfcoventry.co.uk

I have written about the problems of different aliases of a page such as to the WMCCM home page below.

http://www.wmccm.co.uk
http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/
http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx
http://www.wmccm.co.uk/WMCCM/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1

The http:// has always been optional and so has the www so the 4 aliases’ above becomes 16 or 32 if you have https secure variations too.

Two of the main free and inexpensive website hosting options Microsoft Office Live Basics and Google Page Creator both create websites without the www at the start but these still work if www is added. These links also have many aliases’.

TSF Coventry’s site is provided by MS and the main version does not use the www. so all links to the site should look like http://tsfcoventry.co.uk/structural.aspx for their structural steels page. Good practice should use the same URL convention for the internal links as those used for the inbound links.

Robert McGonigle : 04 Feb 2008 11:58 |  Tags: Canonical Canonicalization Ms Office Live Pagemaker |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem