Google Spotted 5 Common SEO Mistakes with rel=canonical

When it comes to content duplication, you'll often hear about the term 'rel=canonical'. This is often used  as a SEO technique to avoid penalty, because search engines will penalize you if you have duplicate content on multiple pages. This happens when you deliver archive pages, data sorted according to the user's preference, and so on. Rel=canonical is used to overcome such problems, and helps consolidate all different versions of the same page. It tells search engines what URL to consider and display in search results. Useful as it is, rel=canonical can be a bit tricky to implement properly.

Here are some common mistakes regarding rel=canonical, and tips to avoid them.

1. Using rel=canonical in pagination

Most blogs use pagination to break up their content chronologically. For example, you might have a page with a URL www.yoursite.com/page/2, and another page with a URL www.yoursite.com/page/3, and subsequent pages numbered accordingly. Some people canonicalize the additional pages to point to the starting page. This isn't a good idea. There is no duplication actually taking place. So canonicalizing in this case would lead to your pages beyond your first page to not be indexed at all.

Solution: Either canonicalize from component pages to the pages with full content in them, or use the rel="prev" and rel="next" pagination markup.

2. Absolute vs Relative URLs

A lot of people make the mistake of using relative URLs when they should be using relative URLs. Relative URLs are relative to the current location. For eg, resources/resource1.php means 'find the resources directory in the current directory, and then go to resource1.php file. In contrast, absolute URLs have the full path, for eg www.yoursite.com/resources/resource1.php. If you're working in the same folder, then that's not a problem. But using relative URLs is a very generic approach, and will not work once you change your cirectory. And this will give you canonicalization errors.

3. Rel=canonical should be used in the <head>

To avoid parsing issues, rel=canonical should be used as early as possible in the <head> section of a webpage. If you plce it in the body, it will simply be disregarded.

4. Category pages

Most blogs have category pages, such as SEO, Social Media (for this blog) or Tech Reviews, News, Gadgets (for a technology blog). Often times, some posts are featured regularly on such pages. In such cases, there is some content duplication going on. Here, you will add a rel=canonical from the category page to that featured post's direct URL (i.e. where you can see the full article). 

5. Multiple rel=canonical declarations

Sometimes, people just tend to be careless with their canonicalization. Often times, it happens that when someone uses a template from another site, they forget to notice that there was a rel=canonical to the template site. Sometimes, people install multiple SEO plugins, that cause conflicts and add multiple rel=canonicals. Either case will cause problems. The best solution would be to check the source code of your site, and make sure that there are no errors.

So, are you having problems with canonicalizing? I hope this small guide helped you out. If it didn't, please feel free to ask questions in our comments section. Peace :)

Why Should you Optimize your Site for Mobile Devices?

The trend of using mobile devices to search for content online is steadily on the rise, and gaining momentum. And tablets really seem to be advancing the cause, since more and more people are buying and using them. So how are these evolving trends changing things, and how does it effect you as a website owner? The focus is now centering more towards responsiveness and adaptability, which means that more content needs to made and optimized for mobile devices.

What the numbers say?

In the last quarter of the year 2012, almost as much as 11% of the internet users were using mobile devices, more than 6% of which came from smartphones whereas less than 5% came from tablet devices. And although tablet devices nowadays have a computational power comparable to desktop devices (well, so do smartphones, but screen size matters a lot here), users still want the content optimized and rendered specifically for tablet devices. Hence, in a way, smartphones and tablets can be treated in a similar way.

But what about now? According to a study, from the first quarter of 2012 to now, mobile internet usage has gone up by a staggering 26%, whereas tablet usage has grown by 19%, both very impressive figures in themselves.

Desktop figures, however have taken a beating, with a decline of 6%. This, considering the size of desktop users, is a large decrease. but then again, who has the time to start up a computer everytime they need to Google something, right?

What should you do?

These stats indicate that it is probably time to give more thought into optimizing your website, and aligning it more towards mobile devices. Here are a couple posts we have written that should help you out.

• Google Tips for optimizing your site for mobile devices


• Make a Mobile version of your Blog

So, have you got any questions? Feel free to ask any in the comments below. And leave your feedback to let us know how we're doing. Cheers :)

Why Google Search is Faster than your own computer?

Have you ever wondered how come Google is as fast as it is? When you enter a search query in Google Search, you see the time taken to return your results, and that time isn't even measured in seconds, but rather, milliseconds. How can it be so fast? Searching for a file on your computer or a local area network can take minutes. Surely, the internet can not be faster than your own computer's storage? That's a really good question which I am sure some of us have pondered over at one time or another. So what actually is going on?

How Search Engines work?

To understand the answer to the question, you must first get a very basic idea of how search engines actually work. At its core, a search engine consists of a crawler and an indexer (let's leave the headache ranking pages for now, shall we?)

The crawler's job is to crawl the web, and I mean literally! It crawls from one page to another through hyperlinks. That is why if you build a new website, building links to it from other sites is a quicker way of getting it noticed than submitting it to Google's index. The crawler reaches into every accessible corner of a website (if it is linked from another page).

Once the crawler has found a page, it is the indexer's job to index the page's content. Indexing means processing and parsing the data on the page, and then saving it in a statistical, more meaningful form, something which the search engine can understand easily. This data is saved on the search provider's web server.

So once a crawler finds a page, the indexer processes it and stores it on a server. The search engine now has nothing more to do with the page in question, unless it wants to re-crawl and re-index that page (in case of updates. Google indexes webpages every second or every day, depending upon the ranking of the website). Now, when a user requests a query, the search engine doesn't actually search the web. It has already done that! It simply searches from the index found on its own servers, and returns relevant results.

What else?

So how is it still faster than your local hard drive? Well, Google isn't the best search engine for no reason! It employs some really efficient algorithms and data structures that help in the quick retrieval of data. Google also has huge 'farm' servers that have index data stored in them. And the computational powers of these machines is immense, nothing like your ordinary desktop microprocessor. So when all these factors add up, you really get a solution that's faster than your Personal Computer's hard drive.



There is a way to speed up search for your hard drive too. Applying the same principle of indexing, we can find files and content much quicker. Windows XP, 7 and 8 have built-in drive managers that give you the option to defragment or index your hard drives. This will optimize your hard drives, and make search much quicker. Windows 7 and onwards has tried to implement this by default too, which is why you can write anything in the search menu search bar, and see results displaying instantaneously. This has been achieved via the Windows Search Index. Hence, indexing is the key to speeding up search results.



Did you enjoy this post? Please share your opinions in the comments below. And if in doubt, feel free to ask us questions. Cheers :)

Facebook New API for Monitoring comment Replies

As you might have noticed, Facebook introduced threaded comments to posts on Fan Pages. And I must say, it was a long-awaited and much-needed feature indeed. It made conversations much more organized, and readable. But what if you wanted to integrate this functionality, and fetch & deliver comments and their replies from your page onto your website? If you're a developer, you'd know that you need an API for this sort of work. Fortunately, you are in luck, because Facebook just rolled out  a new update for its API for comments and replies on Facebook pages. Using this, you can monitor and respond to comments and replies on your Page.

Updates to the API

This update comments API now provides developers with different 'views' of the comments on your page. There are three basic views; Top Level Comments, Replies and Comment Streams. These views can be accessed by the Graph API as well as through Facebook's FQL table.

Top Level comments - These are individual comments to the post itself, and not replied to any comment. This view is called "top level". The comments in this view might be ranked on the basis of their quality, replies, and some other factors.



Replies - This view, called "replies" fetches replies to an individual comment of a post.



Comment Streams - "stream" will return all top level comments and their replies in a chronological order, so the top level comments here won't be ranked.

FQL Commands

You can get data using both FQL ad Graph API. If you're using existing API, you need to keep in mind that the 'comments' column in the 'stream' FQL table has been depreciated. Instead, use 'comment_info' field to fetch data from 'can_comments' and 'comment_count' fields. Here are the FQL queries for the three views.

Top Level comments

SELECT id, fromid, time, text, likes

FROM comment

WHERE object_id={object_id} AND parent_id='0'

Replies

SELECT id, fromid, time, text, likes

FROM comment

WHERE parent_id={comment_id}

Comment streams

SELECT id, fromid, time, text, likes

FROM comment

WHERE object_id={object_id}

ORDER BY time

(almost exactly the same as Top level Comments query, but ordered by time, and no check for parent_id being 0;

Missing out on something?

If you're wondering why you don't see threaded comments on your Facebook Fan Page, then that's because Threaded comments have only been enabled for popular pages with a lot of fans (1,000+). If you're not quite there yet, then don't worry. This option will be turned on by default for all pages by June 10.



Do you like the new changes? You can read the Facebook Developers Blog for more information, or check out the documentation for this API for detailed instructions. You can also ask us questions in the comments below. Stay tuned :)

How to Do Guest Blogging Correctly

You don�t need to create a number of blogs just to promote your site. You can do so with multiple channels. Aside from social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and so on, you can use guest posting as a link building technique to harness your SEO strategy. By guest blogging, traffic will be increased and your interaction with a bigger circle will be expanded. In this article, we will learn how to do guest blogging the right way.

But, Before going to read this article you've to know

what is guest blogging? and what are It's benefits?

Someone(guest bloggers) who posts an article on a blog that is not their own. Their incentive for doing so is getting backlinks to increase their own site�s search engine ranking is known as Guest Blogging. It also helps to gain new readers and reputation.

Now you have a cleared your mind that what exactly guest blogging is and it's benefits.

OK, Now let's see how to Do this Guest Blogging correctly.
Read more �

Brand New Google Analytics Features for better Real Time Reporting

Monitoring analytics is integral for the success of any website. Businesses use this data to improve upon their products. And if you're a website owner, you might be using some analytics program to monitor your progress. Some analytics programs such as Google Analytics also give you the real-time reporting. This data can be invaluable to optimization efforts, since it can give you insights into how well your users are interacting with your website instantaneously. It lets you respond to immediate changes that are a result of time and are temporary, such as trending and viral topics, limited-time traffic (holiday traffic etc), and so on. If you're looking for an effective real-time reporting solution, look no further than Google Analytics, because it just got better with 4 latest improvements to its real-time reporting!

Real-time events

Real-time event reporting will let you see the top events as they occur, which you can then filter as well based on event categories. Furthermore, you can see whether particular segments of your visitors trigger different events.

Click on the Real-time section in Google Analytics, and then click on Events to get this feature. You can click on any event category to see Event actions and labels for that category. You can also add filters, which will then be saved. And you can use these filters to see events that a particular segment of visitors trigger, for example, events triggered by traffic coming from social media etc.

Breakdown of real-time traffic by user agent

Google Analytics will now show your traffic broken down based on user agents. In the right now section, you can see your current traffic, and its breakdown based on whether the users are using Mobile, Desktop, or Tablet devices. Clicking on any segment will display detailed analytics.

Realtime vs overall data

You can view your overall pageviews and compare them with segments of visitors in real time. For example, you can compare your total traffic with your mobile traffic after a particular post on social media to see how well do social media users who are on mobile devices pick up your content.

Shortcuts

Last, but not least, you can now set up shortcuts for your real-time segment filters. Once you look at your data through a particular filter, you can save it, so you won't have to create that filter again and again. And you can easily access all your shortcuts from the navigation menu on the left side.

Like these new features? Do share your experiences and opinions with us in the comments section below. And if in confusion, feel free to ask. Peace :)

Upgrade To Mobile App Analytics with Google Analytics

Measuring the success of a mobile app is crucial for any mobile app developer. If you are an Android or iOS app developer, you must be using some kind of analytics program to help you determine how your apps are received. Have you considered using Google's Mobile App Analytics for that purpose?  You might already be familiar with Google Analytics, or at least you may have an idea of the vast repository of features it brings to the competition. With the Mobile App Analytics, you can get all the rich functionality you get with Google Analytics. And now, Google has upgraded the Mobile App Analytics, so you get even more features now!

What's new?

The Mobile App Analytics has been redesigned especially for app developers and marketers who need to access information about their app. The Android and iOS analytics SDKs have been rebuilt from scratch to be more lightweight and efficient, and provide a good experience to developers, while keeping it easy to understand and use.

Change history

When you have multiple users for an analytics account, it can become confusing when people are making changes to that account, changes such as account info, profiles, properties, filters etc. You can't seem to figure out who changed what. Google has now included a new feature, the Change History. This feature will show you a summary of all such important changes made to your account over the past 6 months - plenty of time to track activity.

Multi-currency support

Now, you can track transaction metrics such as total revenue, shipping/handling costs, tax etc in multiple currencies within a single interface. Google has added this support in eCommerce for a multitude of currencies. And you can convert all those currencies into one currency of your preference. This makes things really easy for brands with a diverse international fan base, since everything can be managed from one place.

Tag Assistant

This is a Google Chrome extension designed by engineers at Google. It aims at simplifying the task of troubleshooting tag installs, and helps find problems. Tag Assistant will highlight warnings and errors, and will give you useful suggestions on Google's most widely adopted tags such as Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and so on. This extension will alert you of tags installed on a page you are currently on, and will also tell you whether there are any problems with the implementation of those tags.

Are you excited about these latest features? Leave your interesting responses in the comments section below :)