0:00
>> CUTTS: All right, Terry Cox, from Orlando
Florida asks, "In regards to the new canonicalization
0:05
tag, does it make sense for large corporations
to consider placing that tag on every page
0:11
due to marketing tracking codes and large
levels of duplicate URLs like faceted pages
0:15
and load balancing servers?" So, this is a
great question, should you put the canonical
0:19
tag on every single page? Well, there's a
short term answer and a long term answer.
0:24
The short term answer is I would probably
say, not right now. Take a little bit of time,
0:29
study your site architecture; think about
URL and normalization, beautification, whatever
0:33
you want to call it. Think about the structure
of URLs that you want to have and take, you
0:38
know, a few weeks, or even a few months, a
couple of months to sort of assess where you
0:42
want to go. I don't think you should just
throw the canonical tag on every single page
0:47
on your site immediately and just start wringing,
you know, moving around, because it is a powerful
0:51
tool and people do have the ability to sort
of shoot themselves in the foot. So, on the
0:56
plus side, we've seen a quarter of a million
pages show up within just a few days. Where
1:01
people are using this canonicalization tag,
which is fantastic. It's good to see the traction
1:05
and the adoption move very quickly. On the
downside, we have seen one company, a very
1:10
large company, a computer company, I won't
call them out by name, where they had a Homepage
1:15
and their Homepage was doing a redirect and
they also have the canonical tag and the canonical
1:18
tag pointed to a page that we hadn't crawled
at all. And so, you know, those sorts of cases
1:23
can be very difficult to try to do the right
thing and we do the right thing. But, you
1:29
know, it can take us a couple of days to sort
of sort it out, or go and find that URL and
1:32
crawl it. So, I wouldn't just jump in the
deep end of the pool without doing some planning.
1:36
The longer term answer is, it doesn't hurt
to have this on every single page of your
1:40
site. Ideally, you'd find other ways to solve
the canonicalization but, it doesn't hurt
1:45
to sort of say on every single page, this
page maps to this canonicalized, very pretty,
1:49
very preferred version of this URL. But what
you want to do is, you want to make sure that
1:54
it's absolute URLs; ideally it goes in one
hop. It's a logical system that you designed;
1:59
you haven't just jumped in and started to
play around with. I don't see any harm in
2:03
having that sort of thing, because we'll just
follow those, what we almost think of is mini
2:07
301 redirects within that site and we'll try
to canonicalize according to those suggestions.
2:12
We don't guarantee that we'll do it, but it
should work just fine with no problems. So,
2:18
feel free to do that, but, you know, take
some time, and plan it out a little bit.
No comments:
Post a Comment