On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 7:33 PM, Bob Harner <[email protected]> wrote: > Mark, thanks for the tips! > >> 2. Specify a canonical url for the old pages. > > Not following you there. Care to explain?
Lets say you have a website that sells a running shoe called the x115 and you can find the same shoe with variations under different paths. So you might have: www.example.com/running_shoes/x115.html www.example.com/blue_shoes/x115.html www.example.com/red_shoes/x115.html www.example.com/trendy_shoes/x115.html etc. When a search engine sees this, there isn't really anyway to figure out which page is the canonical page for the x115. To solve this, you can specify the canonical url in your <head> like this: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/running_shoes/x115.html"; /> You put that in each page to tell Google that when someone searches for x115, you really want them to get the version in the running_shoes directory. So in cases where we have a lot of very similar documentation, it could make sense to specify the current version as the canonical version. So basically all the prior versions would point to the current version. You might be able to accomplish about the same thing, simply by linking all old docs that need to be kept for historical purposes to their closes match in the new documentation. Still the canonical is an option to consider. It may depend on what is easiest to implement more than anything. Oh and if you do remove content, the most ideal thing would be to redirect those pages to the closes equivalent using a 301 redirect. That will handle any existing links and it will preserve and redirect the page rank to the new pages. Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
