Rel=canonical Tag Must Have Been Invented For iis Users

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Posted by Kevin Pike | Posted in SEO | Posted on 08-06-2009

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If the rel=canonical tag is just a “hint” to the search engines, why would you deploy rel=canonical instead of 301? …Likely its because you are on an iis server.

I think we can all agree that no matter how many versions of iis Microsoft comes out with, they will have a tough time developing anything as easy as a 301 redirect in .htaccess on an Apache server. This leads me to my point, The rel=canonical tag must have been invented for iis users.

If you are a large company with a dedicated server then you likely have access to the admin console and can fix your canonical issues with a 301 redirect at the server level.

If you are one of the masses with a small site hosted on a shared windows sever running iis your are probabbly screwed on canonicalizing your URL.  I have seen countless iis server issues with regards to canonical domains on a shared hosting environment. I have seen many domains render (and rank) the same site independently of each other in Google.

My best advice at this point is use the rel=canonical tag to suggest to the search engines which URL is recommended. Hosting providers will almost never give you help on this and don’t care you face duplicate content issues.

If you are at the point where you have not developed your site yet, I strongly recommend you choose a Linux based server running Apache. Google “Apache 301 redirect” and you will see hundreds of sites explaining how easy this is.

A May 2009 web hosting survey survey of 235M people showed that Apache gained 3.3 million sites last month while Microsoft iis lost nearly 1 million sites.

May 2009

Graph of market share for top servers across all domains, August 1995 - May 2009

Top Developers
Developer April 2009 Percent May 2009 Percent Change
Apache 106,368,727 45.95% 109,672,897 46.49% 0.55
Microsoft 67,767,928 29.27% 66,871,466 28.35% -0.92
qq.com 28,905,133 12.49% 28,905,135 12.25% -0.23
Google 7,229,033 3.12% 8,678,011 3.68% 0.56
nginx 6,100,424 2.64% 6,342,250 2.69% 0.05

I have to think that a major factor in the decline of iss servers is due to some simple server configuration issues.

Google, Yahoo, & MSN/ Bing.com came together in late 2008 to play nice with site in this predicament with the rel=canonical tag.

How To Submit Your Sitemap to Ask.com

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Posted by Kevin Pike | Posted in ask.com | Posted on 03-06-2009

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Ask.com makes if very VERY easy to submit your XML sitemap for proper indexing of your web site. The URL you have to enter is:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.YourWebSite.com/sitemap.xml

Copy and paste this URL in to your browser and replace “yoursitemapURL.xml” with your XML sitemap URL. That’s it!! You should get a confirmation page from Ask telling you that your sitemap has been submitted.

One interesting note to point out is that if you try to just go to the core URL. (submissions.ask.com) this is not a valid page and will not render in your browser.

Ask.com does not have any formal login page that allows you to review your submission and make sure they accepted it without any error. My recomendation is to submit your XML sitemap to Google for a few days first. If Google likes it, and you have no issues with Google then you are probabbly safe to submit the XML file to Ask.com as well.