Structured data is code. It’s a piece of code that you can put on your website. It’s code in a specific format, written in such a way that search engines understand it. Search engines read the code and use it to display search results in a specific way.
Imagine you have a website with a lot of recipes. If you add structured data to a page with a recipe, your result in the search engines will change. It will be much “richer” regarding content that’s shown. That’s the reason we call these results rich snippets.
There are all kinds of structured data. Structured data is always a code format. There’s structured data for books, for reviews, for movies, and for products in your online store, for instance. In all cases, structured data adds more details to your snippet in the search results.
What is AdWords (PPC)? AdWords is Associate in advertising possibility that provides you full management over your ad campaigns. You may even have access to extra ad formats, settings, and options. Once somebody searches for your keywords on Google.com, Google Maps, and Google’s partner sites, your AdWords ad will seem on top of or below the search results. With AdWords, you’re liable for all aspects of your ad blitz. You select the keywords that may trigger your ads. You furthermore might confirm a daily budget, what proportion to pay on every click, and wherever your ads will seem. You’ll pay only if somebody clicks on your ad.
What is AdWords Express? AdWords Express is an advertising possibility for businesses that wish to induce started quickly. It is best for the business owners who don’t have much time to manage their campaigns. AdWords Express is used to advertise your website or Google+ page on Google Maps or Google. AdWords Express ad is shown when someone searches for phrases related to your business.
Explain how AdWords work? AdWords work on bidding system if the bidding price is higher your ad will appear on top of the Google page. AdWords works on “pay per click” that means you only pay the amount you have bid if someone taps on your ad as a result of a web search.
How many types of bidding strategies are there? Explain them? Based on our goals we’ve 3 bidding ways, like whether you wish to concentrate on obtaining clicks, impressions, or conversions.
Cost-per-Click (CPC): CPC is bid strategy where the advertiser pay only when someone click on the ad. If you want to drive traffic to your website we recommend CPC bidding method.
Cost-per-Thousand Viewable Impressions (vCPM): vCPM is a bid strategy where the advertiser pay only when ad show on the search page. If you want to increase awareness of your brand we recommend vCPM bidding.
Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA): Focus on conversions, or when people take a specific action on your website after clicking on one of your ads. This is known as a cost-per-acquisition, or CPA bid. We recommend the CPA bidding method for seasoned AdWords advertisers who are interested in conversions, like purchases or signups.How many ads should I have under each ad group? We can add 50 text ad copies under one ad group but I generally add 3 to 5 relevant Ad copies for every ad group and also add one keyword insertion ad for good relevant ad. It is difficult to analysis too many ad copies in an ad group. We can analyse and test 3 to 5 ad copies.
How many types of AdWords campaign are there? Explain how they work? The campaign types are choose based on advertising goals. Example:
for more visitors to your website on google.com, then choose a Search Network campaign.
for website branding on other websites, then choose a Display Network campaign.
Each advertising network has different types of campaigns to suit your goals. Campaign types: • Search Network with Display Select • Search Network only • Display Network only • Shopping • Video • Universal app
PPC Interview Questions
Explain how you can track conversions in Google AdWords? In Google AdWords, conversion tracking can be done in following ways • Tracking purchases by involving basic tracking code provided by AdWords and modifying it with additional code unique to your particular e-commerce platform • View-through conversion window options tracks when a person sees your ad but does not click it (impression) • By accessing search funnels inside tools and analysis, you can also know when customers clicked on your ad for the first time and how frequently they saw your ad before converting.
Mention what all things can be done using Google Ad API? With Google Ad API, you can build an application that can do following things • You can automatically generate keywords, ad text, custom reports and landing pages • Develop additional applications and tools to help you manage accounts • Synchronize AdWords data with your inventory system to manage campaigns based on stock
Explain what is Google Ad API? Google Ad API is designed for representing large, tech savvy advertisers and third parties. It allows developers build an application that directly interacts with Google AdWords server.
Mention what is the characters limit for AdWords text ad? Limit for AdWords Text Ad is • Headline line 1: 30 characters • Headline line 2: 30 characters • Description 1: 80 characters • Description 2: 80 characters • Destination URL: 1024 characters
Explain how you can improve conversion rates? By creating ads that match properly with keywords and create tightly themed ad groups, you can target users to the campaign that helps in conversions
Mention in google AdWords that options can’t be changed after creating an account? After creating account Currency and Time Zone, cannot be changed.
Explain why to use Google Adwords? Google Adwords behave differently to traffic that comes from Google Adwords or “Pay Per Click”. The traffic that comes through surfing often visits the website for information, whereas the traffic via pay per click knows what they are clicking on and what they want to buy. So few visitors through Adwords might be more valuable than million visitors.
Explain what is Google Adwords Ad rank? Ad rank determines your ad position on Google page, and it is determined by your bid for that keyword and quality score.
Explain how does Google Adwords Ad rank impact CPC? Ad rank plays a huge role in defining the actual cost-per-click that your opponents pay, when someone clicks on their ads. Your CPC can be calculated by following way Your Price = The ad rank of the person below you/ your quality score + $0.01
Explain how does Adwords Google auction work? Each month auction gets run billion of times, and the result are such that users find ads that are relevant to what they are looking for. The search engine processes the request and runs the auction that determines the ad positions and each advertisers CPC.
Explain what gets entered into a Google Adwords Account? Once the advertisers determine the keywords that they want to bid on, Google will enter a keyword from your account which is most related into the auction with the maximum bid specified as well as the associated ad.
Explain what is Google Adwords Quality Score? Google’s quality score determines how beneficial and relevant your ad is to the user, based primarily on your ad’s CTR, quality of your landing page and keyword relevance. Higher quality score keywords will save your money and earn better ad ranking.
Explain what is an ad group in Google Adwords? Ad group is a container of your keywords, advertisements, and landing pages. Google rewards advertisers who prepare Adword campaigns with tightly structured ad groups. Its not advisable to include all your keywords into the single ad group, but to organize keywords into themes.
Explain what is conversion optimizer in Google Adwords? Conversion Optimizer is a tool used by Google Adwords for bid manipulation and decides which clicks on the ad will be valuable. It can help you to return maximum on your investment.
How many keywords should I have per ad group? This may be the most debated question out of all of these. The keywords that drive 80% of my conversions get one keyword per ad group, the keywords that get conversions but not very many go in ad groups of 3-5 keywords and the keywords that get very little impressions, clicks or conversions go in ad groups of 10-15 keywords. Using this method I have seen QS increase drastically over a 60-day period (27% of impressions coming from QS of 10 to 72% of impressions coming from QS of 10) and have found it incredible easy to manage accounts set up like this.
Should I have different match types in different ad groups, campaigns? I prefer to do different match types in different ad groups and name the ad groups as such, “productx (exact),” “productx (phrase),” “productx (broad).” I have found the greatest benefit from doing this is that the account is easier to manage.
How do I know if conversion tracking is working correctly? My favorite tool for this is Tag Assistant for Chrome. It’s not perfect but it does quickly alert you to issues that are worth digging in to further.
How often do you add negative keywords to an account? I typically monitor Search Query Reports on a weekly basis but typically add negative keywords less frequently. What I am looking for is trends/themes among keywords versus worrying about specific queries. Using those themes I then can add negatives at the campaign or even account level. This reduces the total number of negative keywords in an account making it easier to manage them thus insuring you don’t have negatives that are hurting performance.
What tools do you use for keyword research? I use Google keyword tool, WordStream’s Niche Finder, WordTracker and Search Query Reports.
Do Product Listing Ads work? Tremendously well. If you’re not utilizing these and you do ecommerce, you are missing out on a lot of revenue every single day.
Should I bid on competitor’s brand names? CTR and Quality Score will be low on these terms but they do typically convert pretty well, so my answer is yes. Make sure you don’t use dynamic keyword insertion in your ads on these campaigns or else you could violate trademark policies.
Should I bid on my own brand terms? The short answer is, always. Kayla Kurtz wrote a great post explaining why.
Does Quality Score matter? Sometimes. The best way to know is to see if there is a correlation between Quality Score and CPA in your account. You can do this by simply pulling a keyword report including the Quality Score, doing a pivot table with QS at the right and then a column for calculated CPA. Then do a graph with a trend line. That will show you if generally you see better CPA on keywords with better QS.
What is Quality Score in Google AdWords? Ans: Google’s quality score determines the value and relevancy of your ad to the user on the basis of keyword relevancy, quality of your landing, and your ad’s CTR. Higher quality score keywords will save your money and get better ad ranking.
How do I increase my Quality Score? Increase your CTR by writing better ads, keep the number of keywords per ad group down to the ranges mentioned earlier in this post, ensure that the ad has the keywords you are bidding on in it (I am not recommending keyword stuffing, but it has to be in there somewhere to be seen as relevant),
The CPC on my best keywords continues to go up. Why? This is typically caused by an increase in competition, reduction in search volume or decreasing Quality Scores. To determine if it is competition compare the Auction Insights results to a when CPC’s were lower and see if new competitors are on the list or if your metrics there have dropped. Use Google Trends to see if search volume has dropped and do a Quality Score analysis to see if that is the issue.
What’s the best way to decide what ad wins in a test? (What’s the best metric to use?) I wrote on PPC Hero a few months ago about my favorite metric and it is still the one I use. It is impressions until conversions. To calculate you simply divide the number of impressions by the number of conversions. You’ll end up with some like 627. The lower the number the better the combined CTR and CR of that ad is.
What is meant by Campaign Management? Campaign management is a process of creating and managing an advertising campaign for a company on Google AdWords. In this we have to divide the campaign based on ad groups and select relevant keywords for each ad groups. Manage the ad formats and bidding for keywords etc. Campaign manager overall responsibility is to manage the campaign and provide a Positive ROI.
What is DFA? Double Click for Advertisers. DFA is an ad server which is used to track impressions and clicks for your creatives on various networks. You can’t buy inventory through DFA. You can only track the performance of your campaigns. Main functions of DFA is ad trafficking and reporting.
What is DFP? DFP stands for Double Click for Publishers. If the publisher prefers to manage themselves the ads which will be broadcasted on their websites, they use DFP. For example most of the public sites like way2sms.com, w3schools.com etc. use DFP for ads.
What is DBM? DBM (DoubleClick Bid Manager) is a demand-side platform (DSP) from Google. This helps in buying display media ads using programmatic strategy.
What is Ad Trafficking? Ad trafficking is a process of setting up an ad campaign from a technical aspect. Which means setting up the campaign, tracking links, the creatives etc.… It is usually performed using an ad server or an advertising platform. For example Ad Trafficking is used in DFA/DFP.
Do you think DFA is an ad exchange? No DFA is a not an ad exchange. The purpose of DFA is to track and analyse the impressions/clicks received on the ad creatives.
What is Click Tag? Click tags are used to track the number of clicks on the link from different sources.
What is Google Publisher Tags? GPT is an ad tagging library to dynamically build ad requests. GPT takes key details from you such as ad unit code, ad size, and key-values, builds the request, and displays the ad on web pages or mobile apps. It is used for tracking purpose.
What is difference between direct marketing and branding? In a direct marketing campaign the advertiser is interested to target the audience who are most relevant to the business. The major metric to consider in this type is conversion rate, which explains about ROI. Most common campaign types are Search Network Only, Shopping Campaigns, and Dynamic Search Ads etc. In Branding campaign an advertiser needs exposure of his brand on major sites and applications. The most popular methods are Display Ads, Remarketing, YouTube Ads and custom ads target.
What is Google AdWords Double Serving policy? It means that an advertiser cannot advertise for same keywords/websites from multiple accounts. The purpose of this policy is to avoid showing ads of same companies or companies with common ownership. So the users can see the ads from different providers. Read more about this here
What is the impact of Quality score on CPC and Ad Position? Quality Score is inversely proportional to CPC and directly proportional to Ad Position. That means higher QS means lower cost and higher position.
What Kind of Quality Score you can achieve for keywords? In my past campaigns I achieved the QS of 7 – 10. I can improve the quality score by using optimization techniques in campaign.
What are the Factors which affect Quality Score? Quality Score depends on the following metrics • CTR of the Keyword • Relevance of Keywords and Ads • Landing Page Quality • Historic Account Data • Is PPC Advertisement effect ranking of websites on search engines? • Never, Search Engine don’t mix them. Google and other search engines rank both organic and ppc results separately
What is Invalid Click and How Google determines the invalid clicks? Invalid clicks are the fake clicks, unintentional and malicious software clicks. Google has a sophisticated mechanism and algorithms to automatically detect and filter the invalid clicks from user account. Invalid clicks in AdWords
What are PLA Ads? PLA stands for product listing ads. This ad strategy is used to advertise products ads on Google search and partners. This campaign is also called as shopping campaign mostly used by E-commerce websites.
What is meant by Converted Clicks? Converted clicks is a metric which tracks the total no of clicks which resulted in conversions. This metric is deprecated by Google.
What is Remarketing Audience and how to generate this list? Remarketing audience are the users who visited our website. Using Google Remarketing tag in our website, we can add the users as our audience list.
When will be CPV charged for an in-stream ad for a video of 60 secs length? If the user watches 30 secs of the video. CPV will be charged in the account.
What is meant by Search Queries? Search queries are exact keywords for which your ads were triggered.
What is meant by Price Extensions? Price extensions is a now format of extension, to display the price of the relevant products.
One of the most common misconceptions about conversion tracking is that it only works for purchases made online. In reality, a conversion is any meaningful action completed by a visitor on your website. Something as simple as subscribing to your company blog, downloading a whitepaper, or even viewing an important webpage on your site can be tracked as a conversion.
So first, define what actions are meaningful to your business. Perhaps you own a sports camp and visitors who explore your interactive activities map on one of your web page’s tend to be valuable to the growth of your business. Even though these visitors are not directly increasing revenue they’re converting by expressing an interest to learn more about the services and activities you offer (making them an attractive lead).
Why do I need to track conversions?
Do you want to find out what’s working and what’s not?
If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, you absolutely MUST track conversions!
The point is conversions are important, which makes tracking them even more important. I was deeply saddened to hear that less than 50% of active AdWords accounts have conversion tracking implemented. Not tracking conversions is essentially like driving down a windy road, in the dark, without your glasses. There is no clarity as to whether your marketing efforts are actually working. You could be wasting your dime and time on PPC due to a lack of conversions. According to Dan Norris, co-founder of Informly, “Blogs that don’t employ conversion strategies generally convert at less than 1%. Ones that do convert at 5% or higher.”
Certain clients of mine who are following my advice and tracking conversions have found that they are getting a heaping pile of ad impressions and even clicks to their sites, but those visitors aren’t converting. How frustrating! But at least they now have a clear path to focus on – for example by improving their site relevancy and optimizing their landing pages, conversions are likely to follow! But without this tracking set up, we would be stumbling down a crooked path with a blindfold on.
One of our Paid Search Strategists here at WordStream, Jason Gannon, conducted a case study in July of 2013 on one of Google’s newer features at the time, enhanced sitelinks applied at the ad group level. Jason looked at a shoe retailer in Canada focusing on CTR, conversion rate (1-per click) and conversion rate (many-per-click) to see how upgraded sitelinks affected the account. Jason found a significant impact on clicks and conversions, which helped the retailer gain more conversions and a better ROI.
“Improving conversion rate just the slightest amount is going to have a significant impact,” wrote Jason. “If all else stays equal and you can improve conversion rate by .5%, that could almost double your business!”
There is no way to make these crucial improvements without implementing conversion tracking to be aware of what changes are working or hurting your business.
How do I set up conversion tracking?
In order to track conversions from PPC, you need to create a code to insert into the thank-you or confirmation page a visitor lands on after converting. So if you have multiple conversions you’re going to need a landing page, confirmation page, and code for each one. You likely already have two of these three components in place. To address the latter, follow the below steps to get coding in Google AdWords:
NOTE: WordStream customers can easily generate Google AdWords conversion codes through the “Show me more tab” under the Manage PPC section of the software. Reach out to your Customer Success Rep if additional guidance is needed.
Click on the “Tools and Analysis” tab, and select “Conversions” from the drop-down menu.
This will bring you to the “All conversions” page. To create a new conversion make sure you are in the conversion tab, and then click the green +Conversion button. Here you will need to name your conversion and select the source to generate the tracking code.
Choosing a source: A conversion source is where the user completed the conversion. It is important to select the right source to generate the correct tracking code for either a conversion made on your webpage, through a phone call, or by downloading an app.
Next select your conversion category, conversion window, markup language (most likely HTML), and set a conversion value if desired.
Navigate to the next screen to generate the code. Here you can select who makes changes to your site, and email them the code with a personalized message. If you make these change to your site you will want to copy the code in the box, and paste it between the <body></body> tags of the page your conversions are directed to after converting.
What now?
Now that you are all set up with conversion tracking, let your account run for a bit to gather data, and then make a habit of allocating time each month to analyze and optimize. Look at your conversions and conversion rate for specific campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads, and landing pages. Allocate more budget to those that are converting well, and revamp underperforming ads or landing pages.
Don’t be afraid to experiment and test additional functionality that you may have not used in the past, for example implementing sitelink extensions or creating a remarketing campaign through the display network. According to Fit Marketing’s Chris Kilbourn, “Even the slightest bump in conversion rate can generate significant incremental business for your company.”
So take your blindfold off, put your glasses on, and start tracking conversions!
4 Reasons to Start Tracking Conversions Today:
Gain insight into what’s working and what’s not: by measuring conversion you can see what campaigns, adgroups, keywords, ads, and landing pages are receiving the most conversions and make changes accordingly.
Get more customers! Who doesn’t want more customers? Once you start getting conversion data you will have a clearer understanding of what changes you need to make to underperforming keywords, ads, etc. Make these changes and watch the customer flood in!
Improve your ROI: Clicks are not valuable if they are not converting. Track conversions to reduce wasted spend, gain more quality clicks, and improve your return on investment.
Experiment and grow: Once you have conversion tracking implemented you will now have the flexibility to experiment with additional functionality in AdWords like ad extensions, remarketing campaigns, product listing ads, etc. Test to find additional ways to gain even more conversions, and grow your business into a money-making machine.
A sitemap should be the definitive 'list' or 'index' of all the pages on your website.
The sitemap.xml file is a standard file that is used to tell the search engines all the pages on your site. XML is a file format (like .csv) that provides data in column format.
Why is this important?
Google, and other search engines look to index your site by following links in your site and from external websites. The sitemap is a trusted 'map' followed by search engines that should guide them to every page on the site. Without a sitemap, Google is relying on your site to provide a link to every page on the site.
Without a sitemap you run the risk of 'hiding' pages from Google's index.
The main search engines, including Google, Bing and Yandex offer free 'Webmaster' accounts that will tell you facts about your site, including a count of how many pages they have indexed on your site. They use your sitemap.xml to benchmark the pages indexed on your site. Without the sitemap, you won't have a benchmark of site performance.
How can I create a sitemap?
There are a number of free tools that can help you create a sitemap. Wordpress users have access to a few different tools that will create and publish your sitemap. Take a look at this one, or the bundled tools inAll in One Webmasters or Yoast SEO plugin. You can also use free online tools like https://www.xml-sitemaps.com to create your sitemap. You will then need a techie to upload it to the site.
"A robots.txt is a small file that tells a search engine which pages to index and which pages to ignore."
Why is it called a robots.txt?
Every search engine has a spider or robot ('bot) that follows links to find and index pages. Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu all have their own 'bots that follow links to find new pages. They are constantly seeking new pages to add to their index and rate them to display a search result. When you search, the results you get are from the search engine index, not a fresh trawl or the whole internet.
So the 'robot' part is simply to state this is for the robots to read. The .txt is because it is simply a text file with no formatting.
What does it do?
A robots.txt is written to tell the 'bots which pages, or parts of the websites that should be indexed and which parts should not. A 'good' robot will follow these instructions.
A simple robots.txt should tell the search engine not to index the admin pages, privacy policy and other content you don't wish to be indexed. For new sites in development or sites that just don't want to be indexed, they can be instructed to ignore everything.
Why do I need a robots.txt?
It is good practice to have a Robots.txt on your site so you can have some control over who and what indexes your site, and which parts are indexed.
This states for any robot (User-agent:*) don't index /wp-admin - that is the front door for editing the site (Disallow), but DO index everything else. Sometimes you can add funny messages as the search engines won't read it. Check out Nike's (below.)
You can see what other sites have included in their robots.txt:
You can create a simple robots.txt with your computer notepad or text pad, or use Google's Robots.txt tool to create and check. You will then need to have it uploaded to your server - ask your techies to fix this, or use a Wordpress plugin to do the heavy lifting.
We check the presence of a robots.txt in every SEO Audit report.
Sitemap is basically the map that contain information of all located resource on a website. It helps users, as well as search engines, to easily explore a website for their required object. On the other hand it also helps them to improve their search (for user) and indexing experience (for search engines).
What are Different Types of Sitemaps?
There are principally two types of sitemaps;
HTML sitemap (written in Hypertext Markup Language)
XML sitemap (written in Extensible Markup Language)
XML Sitemaps can have two types.
Index Sitemap (how many URL sitemaps a website have)
URL Sitemap (contain final information of URLs on webpage)
XML sitemaps are further divided into 3 different categories.
Sitemaps for webpages (commonly known as xml sitemap in community)
Image sitemaps (details of images and their URLs on website)
Video sitemaps (what webpages have videos embedded in them and their details)
So, final tree of sitemaps categorization we have is;
XML Sitemap
Index Sitemap
URL Sitemap
Sitemaps for Webpages
Sitemaps for Images
Sitemaps for videos
HTML Sitemaps
What is an HTML Sitemap?
HTML sitemap, as stated above, is a map that contains information about website resources and their location. These sitemaps are primarily for users to assist them to find their desired item on website or to explore a website easily. Let’s take an example:
A website has thousands of webpage categorized in different sections in form of directories. Now with this massive quantity of webpages user can feel himself at nowhere when he lands on such website. The first thing that can assist him is search option. But if he has no luck then HTML sitemap is the last resort for him where he can explore the website.
Secondly, as HTML sitemap links the resources internally and internal links help in improving keyword rankings; these sitemaps also help linked webpages in their rankings with search engines.
What are XML Sitemaps?
XML is basically a language that store information about an object in organized or pre-defined format. This format is not understandable by humans but search engines do understand what is written in it and the purpose of writing. So, we can say that;
XML sitemaps are primarily for search engines to have a map of internal/external resources of website with their information. Fast and secure indexing of website by search engines rely on these sitemaps.
What do We Write in XML Sitemap?
We write information about objects like its location of availability, importance, type of object, how frequently it gets change etc.
What is URL Canonicalization and how to Use Canonical Tag Properly?
I was checking one of the websites I was doing SEO on, and I found that the website had some serious issues related to Canonicalization. I fixed the issues in no time but also decided that I would work on a post for explaining what Canonicalization means and how can one perform Canonicalization of a website properly.
What is URL Canonicalization?
The term Canonicalization can be tough to understand. Let me try to explain this in simple terms.
Let’s say there are two URLs of a website:
http://thewebpage.org
http://www.thewebpage.org
Both of those pages show content, and none of these pages redirects to any one of them. This can result in duplicate content issue on Google, and you can face penalties.
et us see one more example. There are two URLs on a website that result in the same page resolution.
http://thewebpage.org
http://thewebpage.org/index.php
If both of these web pages show the same result, then this might cause an issue as well!
You might not pay much attention to this issue, but this might result in serious duplicate content penalties. The problem with search engine bots is that they can’t decide which version of the URL they should add in their index. If two pages are resolving the same content, they will just assume one copy is a copy of the other and your website will get penalized.
If your site is opening on 2 URLS showing the same content, then you must fix it. You must use server settings so that whether a user opens with www or without www, the site will open on any of the one version. In this way, you can fix the canonicalization.
Though, at times you would like to share same content on two URLS, then you can use rel=”canonical” tags to let search engine know that which is the original and which one is a copy of it. This can save you from duplicate content penalties.
How to correctly apply URL Canonicalization?
Let us now check how to apply URL Canonicalization. We don’t need to type in lines of code to do it. A simple rel=”canonical” tag is enough to apply Canonicalization.
Take an example, there are two URLs on the website that result in the same content when they resolve. These two URLs are:
http://thewebpage.org
http://thewebpage.org/index.php
HTML Canonicalization
The second URL results in the same content as the first URL. They are both displaying the same page and hence you can apply the rel=”canonical” tag, in this case, to indicate that the URL with index.php is a Canonical URL of the first one.
The above markup can be used in the case of HTML content but what if we are dealing with non-HTML content like a PDF document? In those cases, we can use HTTP Header Canonicalization.
Now that you know what exactly Canonicalization means, you can move forward on the topic and see when should you use it. Because there are many more cases other than the two I have mentioned in the examples above.
Here are a few conditions that can be prevented with proper URL Canonicalization.
Different URL for one same content
Various various categories and tags that result in same content
Mobile website displaying same content but on different URL/subdomain
URLs having HTTP and HTTPS URLs and both resulting in same content
Various ports
When website has a www and a non-www version
In case of sharing syndicated content
These are some major conditions in which we can apply URL Canonicalization to save our site from facing any kind of duplicate content penalty.
This is when you should NOT perform URL Canonicalization!
There are scenarios in which we should not perform URL Canonicalization, and this section of this post is targeted towards specifying these particular conditions. You can also consider these as errors when it comes to URL Canonicalization. Let me list these one by one. I will try to explain most of them in a really simple manner.
Skip pagination canonicalization
If you are planning to canonicalize paginated URLs, then you should know that this is a very bad idea. You should not add a canonicalization tag on the second page of a URL as that URL will not be indexed at all by Google.
Multiple Canonical tags are bad
If a web page has multiple rel=”canonical” tags, then it can be really harmful to you. Make one specific tag and make it clear which one you prefer.
I have seen that many people apply the Canonical tag like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”index.php”>
This style of canonicalization is an invitation to a lot of errors. You need to understand that the more complete your canonical markup is, the better it will be for you and your content.
Localization means targeting and manipulating the content of the website in order to serve it on the basis of the region it is being viewed in. If you really want to create a better website for your global audience, you can read this guide to create multilingual websites by Google.
Canonicalization on mobile version of websites
Just a canonical tag to differentiate a mobile website on the subdomain of your main website is not enough. Google suggests that you use both rel=”alternate” as well as rel=”canonical” in order to mention that the URL is for displaying the mobile version of the website.
Search engine bots will totally ignore the tags that are set outside the <head> are of the website so in order to apply a proper canonical tag, you need to add it between <head></head>.
Don’t use multiple Canonical tags on a website
Using multiple Canonical tags is pointless. Search engines will ignore both of the tags and you will face weird SEO behavior and issues. Multiple canonical tag URLs are sometimes caused due to plugin glitches so you might have to keep an eye on that.
Don’t point a Canonical URL to a website with a non-200 status code
A website with a code like 301 and 302 will force the search engines to crawl one extra URL and this means that they need to crawl two URLs at once. This adds up to a big amount and it can easily deplete your crawl budget.
A URL with a status code of 404 is a totally wasted crawl and search engines will ignore your tag at all.
Don’t use Canonicalization for PageRank Sculpting
PageRank is no more a public entity or statistic to a website but it is still considered by the search engines. If you are planning to use Canonical tags for PageRank sculpting and to get better ranking, let me make it clear that it will do more harm to your website than good.
Final Word
The concept of onsite SEO is much bigger than what you imagine it to be. You need to take care of many things at once, and you also need to keep yourself updated with the changes that take place in everyday time.
This post was a post for showing how you can apply Canonical URLs on a website. Keep in mind that Canonicalization is a delicate process and if done in a wrong manner, it can harm your website. Keep your website in check and make sure you perform Canonicalization properly.
