Restricting access for search engine spiders to certain areas in your website is an important part of your search engine optimisation strategy. A good SEO agency will offer advice on this area as there are several methods that can be used to put trouble spots off limits to robots. One such method is to use canonical tags.
Used at page level, this meta tag is found within a web page’s HTML header. It is used to avoid duplicate content being indexed by the search engines and also consolidates the strength of a web page by bringing it together into a single ‘canonical’ web page.
Advantages of canonical tags
The main advantage is that they are easy to put in place. This means you can put your development energies into something bigger rather than wasting time restricting Googlebot.
You can also use these tags to find content within other domains. This can work well for websites that work in syndicate but are looking for ways to protect your own website’s presence with the search engines.
Disadvantages of canonical tags
In the same way it can be set up easily – it’s easy to set it up incorrectly so be careful. The message it sends to search engines can be inconsistent. They view it as a signal rather than an instruction.
Overall this provides a robust solution. One great way of using this is to avoid issues when a mobile version of your site has a better ranking than your standard site.
At www.searchengineoptimisation.co.uk we provide expert support with Google SEO to help you achieve your goals.
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Posted by Rory.
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