As the most of you know Yahoo, MSN, and Google announced the support of the new canonical link element tag to clean up duplicate urls on sites. I like to think of this tag as the poor man’s version of the 301 redirect but it might offer some big advantages to use this tag with companies who use media buying as part of their Internet marketing strategy.
As an Internet marketing professional I have grown to accept that my success is dependent on others. Whether it is a client, internal departments such as IT or development, or budget I can be only so successful without support and “buy in” from others key factors. Working with these factors instead of against them is one of the keys to Internet marketing success.
If your company or client is serious about Internet marketing they should have an in-house department or agency handing media buys to gain traffic to your web site. These could be banner ads, text ads, videos, or even invitations to webinars, white papers, or email newsletters. One of the biggest challenges Internet marketing professionals face is how to get SEO value from these relationships.
Your media department or agency needs to track these media buys to establish an ROI which will include some sort of tracking ID and this is where SEO value ends. Google sees this URL – http://www.frankpipolo.com/internet-marketing.html and http://www.frankpipolo.com/internet-marketing.html?mcid=1234 as two totally different web pages yet the content can be the same or slightly different. Also, your media department or agency will be buying media space on hundreds or even thousands of sites and this will create more URL’s as you will want to track each media buy separately to establish an ROI for each.
So you potentially have thousands of URL’s that will be unique in the search engines’ eyes and yet zero SEO value from these referring sites. This is where the canonical link element tag comes into play! Let’s take an example of this and put in play shall we?
Let’s say your client is Allied American University in the online education industry and has an agency performing media buys on hundreds of web sites to generate traffic. One of the places they are buying text links from is military.com within the education section (http://www.military.com/education-home/) and in the “Featured Schools” section a link to your landing page is present (http://www.allied.edu/lp/military-inc.asp). Yahoo Site Explorer shows Allied’s landing page with a back link from Millitary.com’s education so this is good news as Military.com’s has a page rank of 8 on this section and it does not have the dreaded “no-follow” tag on the link!
By reviewing Allied’s landing page you will notice this page is very targeted to military personal, which it should be, and I would think that they have multiple military type landing pages across the top portals that cater to military personal but wouldn’t it be great to have the home page get credit for this nice link or a page internally on Allied’s web site to get that credit? Do you see where I am going with this? If not, in part 2 I will explain what I would do.
