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A Template For Virginia USA, #4

As the frustrations about the CC TLD aliases continue to be reported in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, and some of the details are discovered and resolved, we are seeing suggestions of other, more subtle problems.

Some blog owners claim that their page rank / search engine reputation has taken a nose dive, because their readership is spread out over many different countries. Apparently, canonical resolution by the search engines does not work, for all "blogspot.com" published blogs. Older blogs, including those with Classic (HTML based) templates - and possibly some older Layout templates - seem to lack canonical resolution.

The canonical resolution process, by the search engines, requires a canonical tag which defines the base URL of the blog. Blogs with older templates don't have the canonical tag in the template header - and the search engines can't aggregate the CC alias URLs generated by the many different country code references.

Any blog, indexed by the search engines, separately, under the different CC TLD aliases, is going to have a lower overall search reputation. The different references, under the many aliases, will be indexed - but as each will be more diverse, each reference will appear lower in SERP lists. This will result in less search engine related traffic - and subsequently still lower SERP positioning.

If your blog depends upon search engine generated traffic for publicity, and you have an older blog, you are going to want to check the template header.
<link href='http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/' rel='canonical'/>

If you do not find a similar tag in the template header for your blog, you need to upgrade your template. Your readers will thank you, too.

Comments

Adam said…
Chuck, I'm confused.

If I read you right, both of my layout-template-based blogs should already have this tag. However, neither of them do.

(One of these is an "older" Layout template--two whole years old--but the other is not.)

Can I just write this tag in, or will that make things worse?

I think that the tag will apply to all my blog pages, which sounds confusing.
Nitecruzr said…
Adam,

I started this article referencing Classic templates, exclusively. Then I realised that some Layout templates are similarly without the canonical tag.

I am pretty sure that the canonical tag is part of an "include" - and the "include" is used in newer templates.

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

I have not tested this, however, to see if additional code is required. That's a future activity.
Matt said…
I checked my template too, the following line of code is there:



However still face the issue.
Nitecruzr said…
Matt,

I see that you just learned that you can't easily paste

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

into place, and have it appear.

So, the line of code is present, in your template. But what issue do you still face?

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