Gravy834 - Online Marketing, Advertising, & SEO Mumbo-Jumbo

Well it’s not strictly true, duplicate content will still be an issue for a lot of sites!

Anyway, last week at SMX West, Google, Yahoo and MSN announced that they now accept the rel=”canonical” variable.

What does this mean?

Let’s take a look at Majestic Wine. Their site uses a large database which displays wines based on your choices from the navigation on the left hand side.

Majestic Wines Canonical URLs - Example 1

In the above example I’ve selected Wine > France > Loire > White

This URL was generated:

http://www.majestic.co.uk/find/category-is-Wine/category-is-France/category-is-Loire/Colour-is-White+Wine

However if I then select them in a different order, i.e. Wine > White > France > Loire, I get this URL:

http://www.majestic.co.uk/find/category-is-Wine/Colour-is-White+Wine/category-is-France/category-is-Loire

Despite the 2 different URLs the page content is exactly the same. Until now search engines may have seen this as duplicate content but now that they’ve introduced rel=”canonical”, this will no longer be a problem for ecommerce sites.

So how do Canonical URL Links work?

Read more…

gravy834 Ecommerce, Online Retail, SEO canonical, google, msn, SEO, url, yahoo

Most people are now aware that here in the UK the VAT rates were reduced in December from 17.5% to 15% in 2008 to help consumers combat the credit crunch. However as a retailer you could be losing out on thousands of pounds in lost revenue this year if you’ve incorrectly set-up the reduction on your e-commerce site. Let me explain:

Some retailers are simply applying the reduced rate to the shopping basket by applying a 2.5% discount to the total value.  It seems right to do this, but many fail to realise that this is actually a reduction on the original VAT rate as well as the product value.

Wrong:
I go to buy an Apple iPod Touch (32GB) which retails at £269.98.  At the basket the 2.5% discount is applied and I only pay £263.23. I save £6.95, wahoo!

This is great for the consumer but bad for the retailer;

Right:
The same iPod Touch is worth £229.78 to the retailer + 15% VAT which means the actual RRP is £264.25.

Now that’s a difference of £1.02 in lost revenue! It may not seem like much but this VAT reduction is in place for the whole of 2009, so that lost revenue will quickly add up.

Times are hard enough as they are, don’t make it even harder than it needs to be!

gravy834 Ecommerce, Online Retail Online Retail, reduction, shopping, vat