Cirencester Website Design

SEO tips – duplicate data canonicalisation script

Duplicate data will result in diluted page rank and search results positions. Google is very good at identifying duplicate data. Do do not do it. The rules are clear, every web page must be unique and original, there is nowhere to hide so avoid it.

However, there are inadvertent ways to create the problem and this relates to URL duplication known as canonicalization.

This is where you can access your website by typing in http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk and by just by typing http://yourwebsite.co.uk.

Essentially search engines see these two methods of access as two independent website with duplicated content. This was declared an issue by Google in February 2009 but is common amongst most search engines.

The way to resolve this is to adopt one method of addressing i.e. always http://www…. or http://….. But this is not really practical.

The easiest way to overcome the problem is to use a .htaccess file (which works with most unix based servers). This redirects all access to your website to a one standard.

Use a simple text editor (not word processor) i.e. editpad lite which is a free download.

Here is the code:

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#htaccess courtesy of http://cirencester-website-design.co.uk/

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourwebsite\.co.uk$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

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Replace yourwebsite\.co.uk and http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk with your own website details.

You will then need to load the .htaccess file to your server using an FTP product. We recommend Filezilla which is free and very good.

See the Matt Cutts, of Google, video for a detailed canonical explanation and options

SEO tips – Sitemap and robots.txt

Adding a robots.txt file to your server is a way of telling search engines who to index and what not to index. It is a also a great idea to add your sitemap location as well.

To create a sitemap there are many freely available you can find them by searching for “sitemap generator” but a nice simple one can be found here enter your website address and download the XML version.  You will then need to load it to the server using FTP software.  We use filezilla which is free and easy to use.

If you want to invite a search bot to index your entire website here is the code:

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# robots.txt courtesy of http://www.cirencester-website-design.co.uk/index.html

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Disallow: /add the forward slash followed by the directory names you want to exclude (one per line) i.e. /customer_data

Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/sitemap.xml

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This simple code tells all search engine bots that nothing is disallowed and the location of our site map. Using a text editor (see resources) copy and paste the above and change our address to your own website