Messy SEO Part 2: The importance of canonicalization - Search Engine Land

Messy SEO is a column covering the nitty-gritty, unpolished tasks involved in the auditing, planning, and optimization of websites, using MarTech’s new domain as a case study.

This second installment for “Messy SEO” details my process of rectifying the canonicalization issues that arose following the MarTech website consolidation. In Part 1 we discussed fixes for duplicate content issues—redirects. Fixing these issues is expected to address our site’s issue with diluted rankings and a decreased crawl budget.

>> You can read Part 1 of our Messy SEO series here <<

During this process, we discovered some instances where another factor needed to be addressed—canonicalization. Virtually all of the articles on MarTech contained canonical tags pointing to now non-existent URLs.

Unlike redirection—which improves user experience while simultaneously sending ranking signals to search engines—canonicalization addresses the algorithm side of the equation. Specifying which version of a page we want to rank for helps dictate what shows up for your potential site visitors.

Proper page canonicalization ultimately serves the searcher in the long run. It makes it easier for them to find the content we’ve created that best meets their needs.

A crowd of canonicals

As mentioned in our introductory “Messy SEO” article, the new MarTech site was born from the consolidation of Marketing Land and MarTech Today. And between the hundreds of pages between each property, there was a large...



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