You can learn more about Sitemaps on our Webmaster Help Center or read some additional FAQ's regarding Sitemaps for more information. And if you don’t have a Sitemap yet don’t forget to create one!
Remember, it’s all about making it easy for users to find and understand your content. Hope we helped!
Our last post to this series will be out soon so stay tuned. Let us know your thoughts in our Webmaster Help Group.
Posted by Search Quality Team
There's a pretty neat facility in Webmaster Tools where you can set your preferred version (www or non-www) to be crawled by Google. Once you pick your preferred destination URL, use 301 redirects to send traffic from other URL variants to your preferred URL, so that the valuable ranking factors are carried along with the redirect. It is also advisable to use the preferred version for internal linking and advertising. Let's talk about another important implication for canonicalization - Duplicate content. Most web hosts consider 'www' as a default submain to the main domain and automatically configure it to have the same content as the non-www versions. This can lead us to access the website more than necessary, perhaps slowing down the website load time for normal users and also confusing users by showing the same content in the search results twice. While Google is very good at automatically detecting the best version, webmasters can help improve our accuracy by making use of the rel=canonical link tag element as well as our URL parameter handling tool in Webmaster Tools.
In summary, here are some best practices to avoid having a canonicalization issue with your website:
We hope this article and those that will follow are going to be useful, not only for the discussed websites, but also for all webmasters who read this blog.
That's all! Until our next post…!
1) To participate, your site must be registered on our webmaster tools . This is to ensure that the submitter is the owner of the site and we have the owner's permission to use the site for our clinic. If you don't have a webmaster tools account yet, it's pretty simple to obtain. You can get one here.
2) Your website should meet our quality guidelines. This is because we will be using the same guidelines as criteria to select the websites for our analysis. You can review our webmaster guidelines for any clarification.
Please Note: Not all sites will make it to our analysis list. From those that do, a few representative websites will be chosen as examples for our follow-up posts to share best practices.
Posted by Search Quality Team.
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