Starting this week, you may start seeing a new referring URL format for visitors coming from Google search result pages. Up to now, the usual referrer for clicks on search results for the term “flowers”, for example, would be something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

Now you will start seeing some referrer strings that look like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Patrick Altoft of BlogStorm has noticed an interesting addition to the string. He thinks that the cd=7 part stands for “click detail 7,” and is the ranking for your page. So if someone clicked through from Google to your site, your analytics software could collect the referrer string, and determine not just what the user searched for when they found your site, but what the page ranked!

This is valuable information for Search Engine Optimization, and makers of traffic statistics software, certainly.

You simply add the fully W3c-compliant <link> tag in your header, and have it point to the permalink for a given post. Google will most likely rank that page in their results, and ignore others. That should help out your ranking overall.

<link rel="canonical" src="http://www.example.org/your/permalink/page/" />

Obviously you’ll want some way to integrate this with your CSS. Some will want to roll their own solution, but if not, there are already prefab options available.

• Yoast has a WordPress plugin, a Magento extension, and a Drupal module available
• Omninoggin has a pasteable code snippet for your WordPress theme’s functions.php file

The plugin

• Prevents duplicate content issues
• Rewrites page titles to be more search engine-friendly.
• Generates dynamic meta tags for permalink pages. A short snippet from the article is used for the meta description, and the post’s tags are used for the keywords.
• Allows you to manually override the meta tags and title tag on a post-by-post basis as well.

These things can really help out your rankings. The <title> tag is a major point of focus for Google and other search engines, and it’s the part of a result that searchers pay the most attention to. It pays to have good titles.

Meta tags may not have the weight they once did, but they are still considered, and are worth paying attention to all the same.

As with all matters of SEO, your mileage will vary. This plugin will definitely do more good than harm though.

Let me back up and give you a little history. When someone comes to your site’s webserver and asks for a page that doesn’t exist, like http://www.mattcutts.com/asdfasdfasdf , most web servers are configured to return an HTTP status code of 404, which means that the page was “Not Found.” If someone links to a page on your site that doesn’t exist, most webservers give a pretty sucky experience: visitors usually land on a pretty useless page, and search engines might not give you full credit for those 404 errors.

Now Google’s webmaster portal lets you see who is linking to your 404 pages. Once you register your site, click on Diagnostics, then Web crawl, and select “Not found”.

Read Matt Cutts’ full post.

Also, BloggingTips.com has a more in-depth post on making use of the tool.

What I want to know is what Google thinks about duplicate content cases such as Reference.com or the Associated Press.

Head over to Reference.com, the encyclopedia branch of the Ask.com network of reference sites. Enter a search term. Now go over to Wikipedia and enter the same search term. They’re the same! Reference.com is pulling Wikipedia articles onto their site and throwing in a few ads. (How are they doing this? Does Wikipedia have some sort of API?) What does Google think of this?

Or what about Associated Press articles? They’re syndicated by many newspapers, and appear on their websites. That means the same article on multiple sites, no?

Is Google demoting these pages in their results, or are they giving them a free pass? It’s hard to tell. Reference.com as a whole has a toolbar PageRank of 8, while their iPod article is listed as N/A (while the original Wikipedia article has a PageRank of 7). So that would lead us to believe that they’re being demoted. There’s not really any way to tell for sure though, is there?

It seems that the algorithm is working, and filtering out pages such as those, but I’d like to know what the search giant’s opinion is on such pages. Is duplicate content simply duplicate content?

Website Optimization is worth a read if you’re trying to get more from your website. The book covers several aspects of optimization. Search engines, loading times, conversion rates, and a little bit on accessibility. There is a heavy emphasis on Search Engine Optimization of course.

It’s a pretty good book, and is very informative, but I have to disagree with some of the SEO advice. The book seems to promote the idea of being stingy when linking to external sites, in an effort to hoard PageRank, linking reciprocally, and making use of the nofollow attribute excessively. Then the book goes and tells you that blogs are a good way to get more inbound links.

I can tell you that an attitude like that regarding links will get you nowere fast. If you want to get links, you must give them first. Link to things that you think will be of interest to your users. The sites you link to will then learn about your site when they find some traffic coming in from your site. Nofollow shouldn’t be used to cripple links you place on your site either. It should be for things like blog commenters’ posted URL’s, which weren’t added by you, and therefore you may not want to recieve PageRank points. As for reciprocal linking, don’t bother. Google thinks reciprocal linking schemes are generally of little interest to the end user, and are therefore discounted when ranking pages.

Other than my minor complaints about some of the linking advice given, it’s a pretty good book.

1. SEO Maniacs – They’re obsessed with improving their PageRank, and driving up their rankings using any means possible. A.K.A. John Chow before Google caught-on.
2. The SEO Disinclined – The sort who just blog and ignore the SEO aspect.
3. The SEO Neutral – Serious bloggers who do a little SEO, but don’t focus on it that much.

No matter which group you fall into, consider implementing the following tips.

• Use h2 tags for your post titles – Search engines like heading tags; the lower numbered the better. Use h2 tags for post titles, and h3s for sections inside your posts.
• Make your post titles into links – On archive pages, and on permalink pages, make your post titles link to the permalink page. Think about it. You have an h2 tag, which search engines place a high value on, with keywords relevant to the post, enclosed in a link pointing to the post. If you’ve heard of Google Bombing before, then you’ll realize the significance of this fairly quick.
• Optimize Page Titles – Your title tag should contain more than just your blog’s name. It’s contents are valued greatly by most major search engines, and it’s a great place to throw-in some keywords. Try this format: “My Cool Post – TheBlog.” Your average post title probably has good keywords relevant to your post, right? For your index page, you want something like the name of your blog, and either your tagline or just a list of keywords that relate to your site.
• Change Your Permalink Structure – If you use WordPress, don’t use the default permalink style! Pick the best option for your purposes, and stick with it. The default ?p=37 permalinks will always redirect to the ones you specifically set.
• Optimize Post Slugs – Many blogging scripts, such as WordPress, offer a “Post Slug” feature that allows you to tweak the URL of the post. By default permalink URLs are somewhere along the lines of “/2008/02/01/name-of-post/.” Using the Post Slug function, you can change “name-of-post” to something better, SEO-wise. This is useful for times when your post title has a lot of extraneous words like “of”, “the”, and the like.
• Use Meta Tags – While meta tags don’t have as much value placed on them as they used to, there still is some, and it’s a good idea to use them.
• ALT and Link Your Logo – Make sure your logo links to your blog’s homepage. This is more of a usability thing than SEO advice, but it’s still a good idea. On a SEO note, make sure you use an “alt” tag on the image, adding something such as the blog’s name to it.