How to Utilize Canonical Tags for SEO Best Practices?

By | Date posted: | Last updated: December 29, 2020
seo canonical tags

General

Before we get into the errors with canonical tags, you should first know what a canonical tag is and why it is so important for SEO. Canonical tags affect SEO from two perspectives. You have a direct influence on the display of the search results. They can also influence the general ranking of a website based on several factors such as structure, user experience and PageRank flow.

What are canonical tags and why do they exist?

Canonical tags were created to address duplicate content issues. In short, if you have three duplicate pages, you can only pick one of them that will appear in SERPs. In this way, you can help search engines easily decide which page to display in search engine results. However, canonical tags will only help search engines if you use them properly. Therefore, you should always have this implemented by your link building agency that has the appropriate experience. There are many misunderstandings and we will go over them all. Before we go any further, let’s better understand how search engines handle duplicate content:

How does the Canonical Tag affect SEO?

Since the canonical tags were implemented to solve duplicate content issues and help rank pages for search engines, it clearly has something to do with SEO. Canonical tags influence the ranking of search engines in two ways:

  • It can directly influence the display of search results:
    You can basically tell Google that this page should be displayed instead of this page. So, if you rank B on a keyword, you can basically tell Google to show Page A instead.
  • Correct canonicalization of pages can also lead to a general increase in ranking due to several factors: As already mentioned, Google likes it if you make it easy for yourself. Canonical tags also allow you to focus on a smaller group of pages which target the search engines while keeping all the other pages on your website for a better user experience.

Common Canonical Tag Mistakes That You Should Avoid

Canonicals tags, while in full control, are a branch of technical search engine optimization and can be difficult to work with in certain situations. Canonicalization errors can lead to display problems in search engines and of course to lower rankings. The worst thing is that the mistakes usually go unnoticed for a very long time.

1. Rel = Canonical & Mobile versions

A common mistake is for users to associate their mobile URL versions with a canonical tag. The correct method is to add a canonical tag that points from the mobile URL to the desktop URL, as well as an alternate tag that points to the mobile URL from the desktop URL. Even in a first-index mobile world, Google has indicated that you should keep the same setup, rel-alternating from desktop to mobile and from mobile to desktop.

2. Indication of irrelevant content in the canonical tag

The point of the canonical tag is to fix duplicate content issues. Trying to only classify certain web pages for different keywords won’t work very well. Google will find out your game.

If you think you have two articles or pieces of content that are fairly similar, you can canonicalization one version, but it’s always a better idea to just redirect the weaker version to the stronger. Perhaps even consolidate the two into the stronger URL.

3. Multiple Canonical Tag versions

Adding multiple canonical tags makes sense. However, having multiple canonical versions is completely uninteresting to the search engine. If we chose canonical tags to help search engines make decisions, having multiple canonical tags on the same page basically means that it is a duplicate page. You can choose to view this page or this page. Having multiple canonical tags on a page referring to different major versions is really bad for your website. While they are likely to be ignored altogether, it is better if you avoid them.

4. HTTP and HTTPS problems

Often times, when users are merged from HTTP to HTTPS, they forget to fix the canonical tags as well. Even though you’re running your website on HTTPS, the canonical tag tells Google to check the HTTP version instead. If you’ve set your 301s correctly, Google will send the redirect back to the HTTPS in an endless loop.

5. Canonicalization paginated content

People make the mistake of canonicalization the first page of a list. This is a bad idea if all the other pages will have unique content, and are organized by different keywords. If you have an all-page view, you can only use the canonical tag once, displaying the content on all the other pages. Loading this page will probably take forever.

6. Using Noindex instead of or with rel = canonical

If you don’t want your page to be indexed at all, and never to appear in search engines or be able to rank, you should use noindex. Canonical tags are more likely to be ignored than noindex tags. Given that canonical tags also meet link equity requirements, these should be considered. Who knows, someone might link to your noindex page.

Google will likely ignore mixes of canonical and no-index tags and treat them as errors. It’s better if you don’t use both. You either don’t index a page or you add rel-canonical. Noindex is a great way to deal with duplicate content. You can also do this through the Robots.txt file. however, that you pass the link equity with a canonical tag, while you don’t pass the link equity with the no index. Since you can’t have both, I’ll let you figure out which is the best.

Add a canonical tag

Adding canonical tags in HTML is very easy. However, managing them and avoiding conflict is not that easy. You want different canonical relationships for different page types. There are no shortcuts. Sometimes advanced programming skills are required to get the features you want. This is not very easy as most platforms generate search pages dynamically with no access to their code to add your tags.

An alternative to canonical links is the Google Search Console’s URL parameter tool. This allows you to specify which specific URL parameters should be excluded from the search.

Attention! Adding incorrect settings in Google Search Console can have a significant impact on the indexing of your website. So, make sure you know what you are doing, let a professional SEO agency do it directly. Having a very large website with tons of parameters can save you a lot of time and money.

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Why Email Marketing is an Essential Part of Successful Ecommerce Store?

By | Date posted: | Last updated: December 29, 2020
Email Marketing for Ecommerce

Ecommerce is the fastest growing industries in the world. Globalization and digitization mean more and more transactions are made online. New ecommerce stores are emerging and established retailers are increasingly relying on business on the Internet. In addition to a good website and a suitable store system, direct communication with customers and interested parties is the focus of the providers. In this blog you will find out why professional email marketing is an essential part of successful ecommerce store.

What else makes email marketing so attractive for ecommerce store?

Newsletters score with relatively low costs and decent performance of marketing. A study shows that newsletter readers have bought at least one product that was advertised in a newsletter in the last three months. This makes email marketing one of the most efficient marketing channels in ecommerce.

But newsletters don’t just perform like that. The newsletters, which are tailored to individual target audiences, score particularly well in addition to creative content, good subject lines and a call to actions. The more interesting newsletters the better the performance for individual recipients. This is where functions such as segmentation and personalization come into play.

Email marketing tools offer the possibility of dividing recipients into different groups. Recipient segmentation is usually carried out using personal data and behaviour-based characteristics.

A strategic division helps to get a summary of your own recipients and to send individual campaigns and newsletters to specific groups. for example, newsletter subscribers are often segmented consistent with age, place of residence or gender (personal static data) or consistent with the number of purchases, product category purchased or newsletters received (behaviour-based characteristics).

The more information about recipients is available, the higher individual mailings can be tailored to them. Additionally, to segmentation in groups, individual blocks of the newsletter also can be personalized for specific customers. For example, this is useful for presenting various products inside a newsletter to the individual recipients. The customer-oriented adaptation of newsletter content is an important component for successful email marketing.

In the era of WhatsApp, Facebook and Telegram, classic newsletters are one of the older measures of communication. Some providers now provide newsletters for the WhatsApp. For example, why should use email marketing over other marketing activities?

As of now, newer channels like WhatsApp newsletters cannot yet compete with email marketing. this is often due on the one hand to the type of use of the various messaging services and on the other hand to the target group. While WhatsApp newsletters tend to appeal to a younger audience, email is an established channel and has virtually no limited target group. At the same time, consumers see WhatsApp and Co. as a very personal channel, so that only very sporadically is the newsletter function utilised.

Currently, mobile messaging services such as WhatsApp cannot replace email marketing with limited target groups and few subscribers. Therefore, most companies providing a newsletter by WhatsApp only use it in addition to the email newsletter.

With its reach and efficiency, email marketing is one of the most important marketing channels in ecommerce. With the right strategy and a professional newsletter tool, email marketing can become a high-performance channel in any ecommerce.

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What is Duplicate Content & How to Fix it for Higher Search Engine Rankings?

By | Date posted: | Last updated: December 29, 2020
Fix Duplicate Content

Why duplicate content affects your search engine ranking?

Many website operators have already heard of this ominous “duplicate content” and that it is really bad when it comes to SEO. But what exactly is “duplicate content”, how does it arise and, above all, how can it be avoided? Because one thing is clear, duplicate content is actually a problem for the ranking of your website.

1. What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is understood to be content/text that appears unchanged or very similar several times on a website. Also, there can be different URLs on a website that have exactly the same content. This is called internal duplicate content or, in the case of very similar content, of “near duplicate content”.

Of external duplicate content is when the same text can be found on different websites. This is the case, for example, when posts appear on multiple platforms.

For a good ranking on Google, the quality and uniqueness of the texts are crucial, i.e. content that is relevant to the user and does not appear anywhere else in this form.

2. What types of duplicate content are there?

2.1. Different versions of a URL

Different versions of a URL are classic duplicate content for Google. In practice this does happen that seldom, depending on the web project, e.g.

  • Upper and lower case: example.com/example1 and example.com/Example1
  • Different versions of the start page:
  • example.com and example.com/index.php
  • At the end, or not with “trailing slash”: example.com/example1 and example.com/example1/
  • Different protocols:
  • https://www. example.com and https:// example.com
  • Various URLs of the same content, and only a few changes to the content, e.g. for events: example.com/event-xy-2020-06 and example.com/event-xy-2020-09

2.2. Filter in URL parameters and session IDs

Filters in ecommerce store often produce many URLs with the same content, e.g. due to variations in colors and sizes. This can be prevented by telling Google which page contains the original article. The so-called “Canonical Tag” is used for this and refers to the original page. This is usually integrated in ecommerce store, but it can also happen with non-ecommerce websites that many additional URLs are created here.

2.3. Boilerplate content

Boilerplate text (binder) is a text block that remains the same, usually at the end of a text. This should be avoided, especially if it is longer than the main text of the website.

2.4. Print versions

If the option to print the page is given on a page, another URL may be created which, apart from the images and the sidebar, has exactly the same content as the original, which is also duplicate content.

2.5. External duplicate content

Store often adopt the manufacturer’s texts, which is a problem as these can often be found on the Internet. Of course, it is clear that an ecommerce store with thousands of products cannot formulate all the texts itself, at least not right from the start. But in a smaller ecommerce store that has to compete against large providers, good product texts can have a positive effect on the ranking, quite apart from the fact that they are of course usually much more appealing to consumers.

If press releases or specialist articles are published on different platforms, this is also a case of duplicate content. However, if you want your own page to rank, it is advisable to first publish the article on your own website and only a few days later on the other platforms. It is important that Google records your website first.

3. Which duplicate content is not an issue?

3.1. Same content in the footer and in the sidebar

The fact that there is footer and a sidebar with the same content on every page is a completely normal thing and Google also gets along well with that. In this context, it is also important to know that links in the footer and sidebar are not seen as relevant as links in the main part of a page.

3.2. Translated content

If there is e.g. For example, if there are English and other language pages with translated content, this is of course not duplicate content, as these are different languages. However, you should make sure that the hreflang attribute is used, with which languages are specified in the HTML code. There are various plugins for WordPress that automatically insert this attribute.

4. Does duplicate content affect the ranking?

If there is too much duplicate content on a website, it can negatively affect the ranking. If many pages contain the same content, Google will not find any positive signals, such as the quality, the added value for the user or the uniqueness of the content. The duplicate content can prevent Google from quickly finding new and valuable content.

Another problem is the one-to-one copied content appearing on other websites. If your text is also published on other websites, it will be very difficult for your page to appear in Google search results. Because Google simply wants to show users the best page for their search query that offers real added value and satisfies the user. And that might not be your own page, but that of another website. So don’t expect your site to rank well if your own content appears on other sites. The same of course also applies if you publish the content of other websites on your own.

5. Does duplicate content penalize the website?

Google claims that there is NO penalty for duplicate content because duplicate content is simply part of the internet. However, as mentioned above, they can negatively affect ranking.

Google would only penalize a website if it is the intention of the website owner to manipulate the search engine. However, this is often not the case and the duplicate content arises more from ignorance.

6. What about duplicate content on blog pages?

Blog systems such as WordPress generate teaser texts/marker texts on category and keyword/tag pages. Each category and each tag forms individual URLs. So if an article is assigned to several categories and several tags, there may be many URLs with the teaser text. The text appears several times on the website. Google has no problem with that, it’s not duplicate content.

The problem here is that there may be only one article under each URL. Google would then judge such a page to be of little relevance and describe it as “thin content”, i.e. as thin content that offers the user no added value.

If there are too many such pages on a website because there are X categories and tags, the website may not rank well. Therefore, for example, tag pages in WordPress are mostly excluded from the index. In WordPress this is done with the help of SEO plugins like Yoast’s.

7. Does text spinning make sense?

If you have the same content that should appear on several websites, the so-called spinning of texts, i.e. the easy adaptation of original articles, is no solution. Because the mostly automated changing of texts by replacing tiny text passages, filler words or the use of synonyms are still duplicate content for Google and the corresponding page will not appear well in the search results.

8. How do you check whether there is duplicate content?

The Google Search Console provides an overview of the pages that are in the index. With the help of an XML sitemap, you can tell Google exactly which pages should end up in the index and which should not. This saves you crawling budget and allows Google to find out which pages are important. A plagiarism tools are used to determine whether there is duplicate content on the website.

9. What should you watch out for in order to avoid duplicate content?

The best option to achieve a good ranking is of course to avoid duplicate content and to write unique texts specifically for your own website. Google wants to see informative and high-quality content and rewards it with a better ranking. The quality standard that Google sets here has steadily increased in recent years.

Some steps you can take to avoid duplicate or thin content include:

  • Exclude categories and tag pages from the index, especially if you have a lot of them, but there aren’t that many articles for each category and each tag
  • Pages that do not contain any added value set to <noindex> or exclude them in the robots.txt (please do not use both methods, just select one)
  • For product pages with several variations, make sure that the canonical tag is set on the original page
  • Make sure that the content management system does not output multiple versions of a URL
  • Either avoid print versions of the website entirely or also set them to noindex or exclude them in robots.txt (or do not offer a print version at all).
  • Avoid and consolidate very similar content on the website

Conclusion

As far as SEO goes, duplicate content is a problem even if there is no website penalty. But Google lacks positive signals when there is little unique content that could add value for consumers. In the absence of these signals, your website doesn’t have that many chances of ranking well. Copied content in any form is also not an option for a sustainable SEO strategy. It is important to get rid of or at least reduce duplicate or near duplicate content.

If your website might be suffering from duplicate content issues, without you even knowing. We are happy to assist you. If you are looking for content writing, content marketing strategies, SEO content marketing, SEO, online marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization services, digital marketing services, PPC campaign management service and more, Please Explore our SEO Services!

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Online Marketing – Dos & Don’ts you must know!

By | Date posted: | Last updated: February 15, 2021
Online Marketing

SEO, social media, chatbots, usability – online marketing has developed into a broad field with countless measures of the most varied characteristics. Used correctly, it can significantly increase awareness and sales of the company.

The digital jungle often poses major challenges for many small and medium-sized companies, because their core business is often a long way from online marketing. Which tools are relevant? Which channels have to be used? Who is my target group and how do I reach them? And most importantly, how can online measures boost offline business? Questions that SMEs have to ask themselves if digitization is to be successfully mastered.

Because one thing is clear: Online marketing today includes much more than owning a Facebook page and doing a little SEO. Buzzwords such as affiliate marketing, programmatic advertising, automation, big data or influencer marketing are circulating in countless blogs and specialist magazines and are declared as must-haves. However, which instruments ultimately contribute to the company’s own goals and are specifically relevant for SMEs depends on various company-specific factors – there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” solution. Nevertheless, local providers can orientate themselves on a few dos and don’ts.

DOs in Online Marketing

1. Know and understand the target groups for online marketing

The times of linear communication are over. Like no other medium, the Internet offers the possibility of constant feedback and transparency about the activities of individual target groups. At the same time, however, this also means that customers expect direct dialogue and tailor-made offers. Every page view, every click and every scrolling can be tracked on the web, thus allowing conclusions to be drawn about user behaviour, which in turn can be used in the next step for precise target group segmentation. In this context, the correct and data protection-compliant collection, storage and processing of data play an important role, after all, they contain valuable information about the target groups, for example about their buying or surfing behaviour, their needs, their whereabouts, their habits and preferences.

2. Create a network for online marketing

Connectivity creates strength – that is what makes networks on the Internet so important. It is therefore advisable for local providers to join strong, collaborative networks such as rating platforms or online marketplaces. The advantage: Individual players in the network benefit from synergies and swarm strength. An offer that would hardly get any attention on its own becomes relevant through the bundling of many interesting offers on the online marketplace and thus gives the provider visibility and access to various target groups. At the same time, the network benefits from every additional partner who joins it, as it expands the offer, and the reach and attractiveness of the marketplace are growing steadily.

3. Content is key for online marketing

Nothing works on the Internet without good content, however much the individual marketing measures may be state-of-the-art. Unique and authentic content that offers added value for the target group is indispensable for online, after all, marketing activities should lead the generated traffic to their own channels. The most important channel is the website, only here is direct customer contact. In addition to providing all relevant information about the company, it is important to take up the topics of the target groups in the form of high-quality content in order to adequately collect and convince customers according to their specific needs. Good content creates credibility and trust and helps to tell interesting stories,

Don’ts in Online Marketing

1. Leave the marketing to laypeople

Online marketing is not a hobby or something that you can teach yourself through a few YouTube videos and forums. A deep understanding of the tools and know-how in dealing with online marketing is necessary if the measures do not cause additional costs, but rather increase efficiency and effectiveness. Smaller companies in particular often set wrong priorities here and leave the entire marketing to the managing director, who, however, sometimes does not have explicit knowledge. It is important to set up a team of specialists or to commission external service providers. Even if many companies initially shy away from investing, the professionalization of online marketing will pay off.

2. Missing or inconsistent strategy

Marketing based on the “shotgun principle”, i.e. the broad to the indiscriminate distribution of individual marketing measures, will not lead to the desired success on the Internet. A sustainable and secure strategy for how online marketing should be used and which goals it has to pay is the most important and first step. The strategy serves as the red thread of every measure and is based on the individual issues that the company has: Should new customers be won, applicants won over, awareness increased or products sold? In the strategy, various online and offline measures are combined into a functioning marketing mix.

3. Do not monitor

Current surveys show: Many smaller companies operate little or no web monitoring. The abundance of tools and the lack of knowledge about how to use them are often daunting. Web monitoring is an essential part of online marketing, after all, it can be used to check in real time whether the measures are fulfilling their purpose, the selected target groups are being reached and advertisements are being perceived. In addition, direct changes can be made if necessary. Monitoring measures are much easier on the web than in the offline area, so that wastage is minimized and marketing can be used more effectively and in a more targeted manner. The results of the monitoring can in turn be used for further strategic planning.

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