The new talk of the SEO world is ‘Canonical URL‘. What is canonical URL? This is the definition given in Google’s Webmaster Central Blog…

a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Emphasis mine

It is very easy to specify the canonical URL of a page – all you have to do is add this line in the head section…

<link rel="canonical" href="http://binnyva.com/" />

The purpose of this tag is to prevent the problem of duplicate content.

The best thing about this tag is that all three major search engines(Google, Yahoo and MS Live) support this initiative.

WordPress

If you are on wordpress, this tag can be integrated into your theme easily. There is a plugin to do the job for you – but you don’t need a plugin to do something as simple as this.

header.php

Go to the theme folder in wordpress(wp-content/themes/<theme_name>) and open the file header.php in your favorite editor. Now find the line…

</head>

and add the following code before that line…

<?php if ( is_singular() ) { ?>
<link rel="canonical" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" />
<?php } ?>

Now, it should look something like this…

<?php if ( is_singular() ) { ?>
<link rel="canonical" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" />
<?php } ?>
</head>

That’s it – you are done! Save the file and upload it to your server.

This fix will add the canonical URL tag to all the posts and pages of your blog. If you want to see a blog that have implemented this fix, take a look at the source of this page.

Related Links

• Canonical URL
• What Is A Canonical URL?
• Canonical URLs To Avoid Duplicate Content
• Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes

FeedBurner has a feature called ‘clickthrough tracking’. If a feed has this feature enabled, FeedBurner will track the number of clickthrough from your feed. You will be able to see how many users have come to your site after reading the feed. But there is a problem – they do the tracking by modifying the link URL – this could hurt your Google PageRank in the long run.

The problem happens as FeedBurner changes the URL in the feed to point to their site. It is not a FeedBurner issue – that is the only possible way to track clicks in a feed. This becomes an issue because google will not credit these links to you.

For example, this is the URL of my last post…

http://www.bin-co.com/blog/2007/05/jus5-light-weight-cms/

In the FeedBurner RSS feed, this link becomes

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/bin-blog/~3/114722273/

Both points to the same location – but in case of the FeedBurner link, the user goes to the FeedBurner server and is redirected from there to my site. This link is counted as a link to feedburner by google.

How this Affect Google Page Rank

This system is designed for humans – not for machines. But these feeds are are harvested by bots and used on other sites. I have seen my content being swiped and used in other sites. Earlier I used to get angry about it – now that phase is over. I have accepted the situation. Like people accept spam and ads, after a while you learn to accept the fact that others are using your content without your permission.

There is one good thing about this – most people link back to the the original page when using the content. And as all bloggers know, links are very important. Recently I found this page…

http://www.fixmood.com/indian-college-students-face-bleak-prospects/2006/12/11/

This is an exact copy of one of my blog post over at BinnyVA.

Like many others, this site links to the original article – but to my horror, it uses the FeedBurner link…

Original post by <em><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/BinnyvaBlog/%7E3/59866721/" title="" onclick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outbound/feeds.feedburner.com');">BinnyVA</a></em> ...

Google will not count this link as a link to my site. The only advantage of others using my content is lost.

Another problem is that people copy the URL right from the feed reader into their blog – and if they are using a WYSIWYG editor when creating the post, they will not notice that they used the wrong URL.

Turn ‘Clickthrough Tracking’ Off

The benefits of ‘clickthrough tracking’ are not worth the problems caused by it. Fortunately, it is easy to turn it off. If you are not using FeedBurner to publish your feed, you don’t have this problem. Even if you are using FeedBurner, chances are that you don’t have the problem – you have to explicitly turn this option on. If you have turned it on here’s how to turn it off…

Login to the FeedBurner site and elect your feed. At the bottom left side of the Feed page, there will be a link called ‘Standard Stats’.

See the checkbox ‘Item link clicks (clickthrough tracking)’ – make sure its off.

Click ‘Save’. Do this for all your feeds.