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Sphinn Home » Usability
Having A Crawlable Site Architecture Still Matters
Usability News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Published: Mar 07, 2009 - 01:18 am
Story Found By: DavidWallace 1074 Days ago
Category: Usability
Michael Gray writes, "Over the past few years, all of the search engines have made tremendous strides in trying to discover different parts of the web, find deep content and understand complex URL structures better. The first big stride came when each of the search engines adopted the XML Sitemap protocol. Website owners now had the ability to give the search engines a list of all of their URL’s. A few weeks ago, another major step occurred when the search engines announced the adoption of a canonical URL tag to help them understand what the true URL is."
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from Jill 1074 Days ago #
Votes: 2

Amen brother! All developers need to read this article and stop relying on SEO crutches that will only take their websites so far.

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from Sebastian 1074 Days ago #
Votes: 1

What Jill said!

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from NatashaRobinson 1074 Days ago #
Votes: 0

completely agree about the crutches... but sometimes they ARE necessary.Re: "What happens when those URL’s start acquiring more backlinks than the pure URL, which is specified in the canonical tag - which URL will the engines prefer?My understanding from Google is the tag "helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version."   (note: even though they’ve said this, in the tests we’ve been running on this, we have not seen this to be the case yet)

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from Jill 1073 Days ago #
Votes: 0

NatashaRobinson said: (note: even though they’ve said this, in the tests we’ve been running on this, we have not seen this to be the case yet)Interesting, thanks for sharing that! I would guess it may be too soon to tell, however. Even 301’s take quite some time to pass the juice, no?I also agree that sometimes the crutches are necessary, and I’m also really glad Google came out with the Canonical Link Element for those that really can’t fix the underlying structure (or while they’re waiting for it to be fixed).

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from NatashaRobinson 1073 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Agreed that it’s too soon to know yet. We started testing at the beginning of Feb (we’ve been working on the structural fix for a few months now - which is why this is exciting for us since it should help while we wait for the structural fix to get implemented) on some  URLs that are not crawled really frequently - so I figure the full results will need more time to appear.

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