You may have noted from some of my earlier entries that nothing frustrates me more than people; typically “web designers” claiming to be SEO’s. This really bothers me because invariably the culprits I’m referring to have at best a very basic understanding of what is required to generate traffic and good search rankings.

And yet they claim to be SEO’s? You don’t see me branding myself a web designer.

Whats worse is that I see more and more “SEO” sites with canonical domain issues. Put simply search engines don’t like to see more than one copy of any given page in their search results unfortunately this is often the case.

Now your thinking, how can there be more than one copy of my pages. I only have one site.

But..

Few realize that typically two variants of your sites pages exist, those that include the “www” and those that don’t.

Examples - Click on some of the following:-

http://www.sloanehelicopters.co.uk

http://sloanehelicopters.co.uk

http://www.modelhelicopters.co.uk/acatalog/m_index.htm
http://modelhelicopters.co.uk/acatalog/m_index.htm

http://www.iglookids.co.uk/
http://iglookids.co.uk/

See what I mean? each of the above sites currently has two variants of their homepage. I visit many sites that have been “SEO’d” only to discover that the basics are still wrong. Next time your considering taking out SEO services be sure to try the little test above. A lot of “SEO’s” can’t get this right on their own sites let alone anyone else’s.

..and just to validate the above, the below is a page found on Matt Cutt’s blog. Matt works for Google so it’s safe to say he knows a thing or two!

Matts Take on it

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 9:04 pm and is filed under seo-blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.