Or using rel=canonical for fun and profit.
I’ve been toying with this post for about two months now, because this technique is so good that I didn’t really want to share it! Quite honestly I’ve not had enough of a chance to implement this across the network of sites I work on, but I have tested it and it does work.
A picture of a cute kitteh because I'm always being told I need images in posts
Rel=canonical background
When Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced support for the rel=canonical tag, many webmasters rejoiced – in fact I was rather excited and posted about duplicate content and rel=canonical here. At the same time I was looking at some of the anchor text used in the internal links off a number of the large sites I work on, and getting frustrated by navigation links being given generic names like ‘news’, ‘reviews’ and so on while appearing at the top of the page when you look at the raw HTML.
So I did some scouting about and came across an old post by Rand on SEOmoz and Branko on SEO Scientist that appear to confirm my fears. Only the first link on a page counts, and only the anchor text for that link counts. So if you’re linking to your awesome technology news page in the navigation of your site just using the word ‘news’ as anchor text, because let’s face it technology is quite a long word when you’re trying to fit a bunch of stuff onto a top navigation, all those other links to the same page with great anchor text further down the page count for jack.
In my day job we have issues with people stealing our RSS feeds and reusing them. As I have mentioned previously in my post on using blog content theft to your advantage I don’t generally see this as much of an issue. We’re covered by having sensible solutions in place which allow us to effectively garner at least five links per article with anchor text we chose. What irks me somewhat is that because we track all the visits and pageviews per visit to our sites by adding campaign tracking variables to our RSS we don’t see the full benefit of these links. Or we didn’t until we implemented rel=canonical.
Joining the dots
Pulling all these strands together, I realised that it could be possible to use rel=canonical to our advantage. Let’s track the links from site sections – navigation, footer, sidebars, wherever using tracking strings. Let’s make sure that the search engines know what we’re doing and what the canonical page is and let’s get a load of links from one page with different anchor text which all points towards the same page.
So I tested it. And what I found was that by using tracking strings of the type ?attr=stuff&src=somethingelse on the end of a URL – so http://www.example.com?attr=stuff&src=somethingelse you’re telling search engines that is a different URL to just http://www.example.com, and the anchor text you use for both counts and ranks.
Getting more links from high ranking pages
So how does this help you get more links from high ranking pages? In general the page on your site with the highest pagerank will be your homepage. If you’ve got a navigation with sub-optimal anchor text, don’t use nofollow, use a ‘tracking string’ on it. When you find a high ranking page that will link to you more than once, and you want to rank for more than one keyword term for the same page, use a ‘tracking string’. While this method is nowhere near as good as having a sensible navigation and rel=canonical isn’t a foolproof method, it will help you in your efforts to rank for more than one keyword term using both internal and external links.
I will caveat this post by reiterating that I’ve not run large scale tests on this method and I’m unsure as to the ‘hat’ that this may be construed as. I’m thinking it’s light grey at best. Do though let me know how you get on with using it, and if you do see improvements in traffic from natural search as a consequence.
Kitten image via Timylee on Fickr
Tags: canonical URLs, Link Building, rel=nofollow, SEO, tips
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Commenting on blogs that are part of the “do follow” movement, some of them with high Google PR, is another way to get link backs.
@richardbaxter nice to bump into you too mate! Here’s: http://tinyurl.com/ydlfrc7 what I was talking about…
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Interesting post James. I can see what you’re doing and with the right methodology for KW targeting, it seems like a clever way to squeeze a few extra (similar) rankings for a single page.
I’d want to test this in some detail, if you’re saying rel=”canonical” doesn’t lose the anchor text like a 301 often can – then there are practical applications for this – particulary in large site architectures.
As far as I’ve been able to tell – using a few Googlewhacks on a couple of sites and pointing to a very crap site – the anchor text doesn’t get lost like a 301 does. In part I think this might be because you’re telling the search engines that it’s a totally different page so the anchor text counts and then you’re telling them that the original is the most relevant.
I’m thinking the best application for this is for large sites using a top navigation and a ‘fat footer’ with links in the page too. Homepages tend to rank better than any other page, and if you’re linking around the site multiple times from the homepage, why not try and get internal pages to rank better for other keywords – use Google trends to see related or rising searches you want to rank for and link to the same internal page with other anchor text.
Or you could spam the crap out of high ranking forum and blog pages pushing the ranking of one page for multiple keywords…
@jaamit That is bollocks. However you can abuse the first link only counting by doing this: http://tinyurl.com/ydlfrc7
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Awesome internal linking tip! Since only 1st link counts, use URL params + canonical tags to fool Google: http://tr.im/EK6I by @jmorell
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@thetafferboy thought’d you’d like this – canonical tag hi jinks http://tr.im/EK6I (by @jmorell)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Nice tip – this could be really useful tactic for big news sites.
Nice tip.. Thanks for sharing.