Bing, Google, Nutch and Canonical URLs

Google announced a few months back that they started supporting canonical urls. This is a great feature that we already adopted in a couple of sites (mostly to keep tracking codes from messing with our search engine results.

Unfortunelty, altough Microsoft announced they will support this feature in Live, this was not yet implemented in Bing as of now (Jun 2009).

Nutch, on the other hand, had this on thier TODO list for 1.1.

Also, Google Search Appliance (GSA), is currently assumed by all to not support this (although nobody really knows if it does).

More about canonical URLs:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tag-16537
http://janeandrobot.com/library/url-referrer-tracking

Hebrew SEO: גוגל, עברית, וה"א הידיעה

נראה ש-google לא מתייחס נכון לה"א הידיעה.
אם נחפש לדוגמא הממשלה נקבל בתוצאות את "פורטל השרותים של ממשלת ישראל" אבל גוגל מסמן בבולד רק את המילה הממשלה ולא את המילים ממשלה או ממשלת שהן הטיות חוקיות לחלוטין.
בכיוון ההפוך, אם נחפש ממשלה נקבל תוצאות אחרות לגמרי, כאשר המילים ממשלת וממשלה מודגשות אבל המילה הממשלה אינה מוגדשת.
לפי ההבדלים בתוצאות החיפוש נראה שהבעיה קיימת לא רק בהדגשה אלא גם באינדוקס.
בדקתי גם בחיפוש לפי הילדים מול ילדים ומילים נוספות. הדבר נראה נכון גם לגבי live של מיקרוסופט (בלי לדבר על yahooשבכלל לא טרחו לתמוך במורפולוגיה עברית)
המסקנה,לצרכי אופטימיזציה במנועי החיפוש של גוגל כדאי להגדיר את מילות המפתח של האתר עם ובלי ה"א הידיעה.

Absolute vs. Relative URLs and SEO

I've seen several places where people suggest that one should use absolute URLs (http://domain.com/page) to do internal linking instead of relative URLs (/page). Those people relate to a google article where it is quoted that

We also suggest you link to other pages of your site using absolute, rather than relative, links with the version of the domain you want to be indexed under. For instance, from your home page, rather than link to products.html, link to http://www.example.com/products.html . And whenever possible, make sure that other sites are linking to you using the version of the domain name that you prefer

This seems to me a classic example of taking things out of context. If you read the entire article you can see that Ms. Fox is talking about a specific case where your site can be accessed by more then one domain name (e.g. http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com).

There is nothing google ever wrote that i could find that say that absolute URLs are better if your site is only accessed by one domain name.

There is one exception i can think of: if your domain is "coolstuff.com" for example and you do use absolute URLs, then the word "coolstuff" will appear in your pages alot. This might be something that may boost your ranking with regards the the word "coolstuff". But this is just a guess.

More reading: Google Canonicalization Problems? - Crawling, indexing, and ranking | Google Groups

Please note: this is my personal opinion. I've had at least two SEO experts that claim that absolute URLs will give better performance on google ranking. Since I'm strong-headed I will hold to my opinion until I'll be proven (with numbers) otherwise. Feel free to comment with supporting or conflicting opinions and data.