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

Yes people you heard me,  Google are literally giving you money for nothing and your clicks for free (do you like what I did there - Dire Straits).

Ever clicked on the ‘More Sponsored Links’ link at the bottom of a SERP’s page underneath the other sponsored ads? Well it turns out that the ads featured here aren’t gonna cost you a penny. Any impression and click data will not reported on in AdWords and this is an area where Google will continue to display your ads even if;

• the daily budget has maxed out
• if you paused/deleted the ad
• if you paused/deleted the AdGroup
• If you paused/deleted the Campaign

This raises the question, could you create an AdWords account, pause it and drive free traffic to your site? Anybody willing to give it a try? No? Ok leave it up to me, I’ll keep you posted.

Sadly I’m not sure of the stats on have many people actually click on ‘More Sponsored Links’ but I’m sure there’ll be a few out there. Any ideas anyone?

Check out Google’s AdWords Help for more info!

gravy834 Google AdWords adwords, clicks, dire straits, free, google