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We first told you about the Canonical Tag back in February as the three major search players announced their joint effort. The industry responded favorably since the tag would give users more control as well as reduce duplicate content. The four major search engines now support the Canonical Link Element.
Now, nearly four months after the announcement, there seems to be a problem. During a session at SMX Advanced, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts revealed that he had found some examples of the Canonical Tag not being obeyed by Google. He raises the issue that the Canonical Tag is merely a “hint” to Google and cannot be fully relied on.
As a result, Stephan recommends using 301 redirects since they are direct and will be obeyed. Stephan believes that Google misunderstood the explanation of his position since a debate broke out about nofollow and PR sculpting during the session and involved Matt Cutts and Nathan Buggia. Lisa Barone, who liveblogged the debate, recalls that Matt indicated that nofollow was not as effective as it once was. Nathan also stated Bing’s position that PR sculpting using nofollow was not a very valuable tactic for users to implement.
At this point, there has been no clarification of the issue. What are your thoughts? Do you agree with Stephan? How do you think this will get resolved?
(6 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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[...] issue regarding PR Sculpting and nofollow with Google. We first told you about the debate in our interview with Stephan Spencer. In a nutshell, it appears that the risky practice of PR sculpting is not as [...]
I think google do this sort of thing to make sure we all know who is in control!
[...] made a video at SMX Advanced with Stephen Spencer recently where we discussed (among other things) some changes expected(?) to be coming to Google in [...]
Not the clarification I was hoping for.
I personally think Google should pull every on page SEO factor out of the equation and just look at links in, their quality and their relevance.
Forget no follow, forget justifying duplicate content via canonically tagged links. This is making things far more complex than they need to be.
Duplicate is duplicate whatever the reason and the web is no richer for it.
Lets keep it simple, if you have 5 ways to serve the same page - expect pagerank to suffer.
Great stuff! Thanks for putting this up. I’m your new number one fan (and page rank evaporator!)
Thank you for bringing us this valuable and timely information… Very Valuable!
I’m looking for a reference to discussion wherein Matt Cutts indicated that the nofollow wasn’t as effective as it used to be. Please help.
I do this using .htaccess
Sounds like an almighty mess to me. More confusion for the guy just trying to make a website that people will visit.
[...] made a video at SMX Advanced with Stephen Spencer recently where we discussed (among other things) some changes expected(?) to be coming to Google in [...]
[...] made a video at SMX Advanced with Stephen Spencer recently where we discussed (among other things) some changes expected(?) to be coming to Google in [...]