Smart Traffic SEO Tip #73 – Consistency is King
Google confirmed that they are using more than 200 signals as ranking factors. Each of these factors communicates to Google, and some are applied to engine’s internal algorithms.
If all of these signals are pointing in the same direction, then you can imagine powerful things will occur – A powerful SEO for a website.
This is why consistency is very important especially in duplicate content and canonicalization issues.
In a typical site, it is likely to have pages linking internally to multiple versions of URLs. The most common problem is in the homepage where sites often link to both domain.com and domain.com/index.html. For inner pages, usual error is the use of both upper and lower case versions of a page in the internal links, example is domain.com/products.html and domain.com/Products.html.
There are several ways to tell search engines as to which URL is to be treated as canonical, these include 301 redirects, xml Sitemaps, canonical tags, internal and external linking. The most common recommendation to fix this issue is by redirection or canonical tags. Though for some sites that can’t support redirection, canonical tag is more popular. It is such an easy thing to do that sometimes errors can’t be helped. Errors like the non-canonical version is used in canonical tags, domain.com/index.html is used instead of domain.com (or vice versa) or placing the canonical tag in all pages of the site – this is the case for auto generated tags.
But even if you have correctly implemented 301 redirection or canonical tags, if a page linked to non-canonical URL on prominent locations of the site, internal PageRank dilution still occurs – since each URL is scored as a separate and unique entity. That is why it is important to be consistent in internal linking structure of the site, always use the canonical versions to ensure that no link juice is wasted. If you’re into link building, be sure to always use the canonical versions as target URLs.
(Note: Matt Cutts confirmed that there is some loss of PR even through 301 redirection)
Though there are several ways to tell search engines about your canonical pages, each of these is susceptible to human error. But when each of these signals is pointing in the same direction, including the site’s linking structure, a very strong signal of canonicalization is being passed.
