Canonicalization was a big topic a few years back, which had concerned webmasters worried they were dividing or diluting their Google PageRank. Should you still use it or not? Read to find out…

URL Canonicalization - Should You Do It?

Canonicalization was a big topic a few years back, at least in SEO circles, which had concerned webmasters
worried they were dividing or diluting their Google PageRank.
Was their site’s PR and Link Popularity being messed up by the old (www.yoursite.com vs. yoursite.com) argument - search engines were reading those URLs as separate domains although they were pointing to the same site and content.

Basically, canonicalization was a somewhat strange word attached to this discussion and process of directing all your PR/links to one URL - most webmasters prefer the
www.yoursite.com model, although it doesn’t matter as long as you pick one and stick to it in all your link building and site construction. Wikipedia uses the words URL normalization as a way to “determine if two
syntactically different URLs are equivalent.”

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By: Svetlana Gladkova

It seems that everyone has already grown accustomed to the idea of search engines market completely dominated by Google. But at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Search, Portal and Advertising Platform Group, has made a statement showing that at least the software giant sees a possibility to change the situation. And the change is in the field of better user experience based on behavioral targeting and semantic search technologies. Currently the share of Microsoft Live Search in total search queries is only 10% and this share is supposed to grow if the users are offered true value by Microsoft when it comes to search experience. And now understand what exactly Microsoft is going to use the recently acquired Powerset for - Redmond’s company is going to compete with Google in the search engines market.

The idea that Microsoft has is in the fact that a search engine that wants to be truly useful to searchers should actually understand what every particular user wants to find (not just some pages that are supposed to be relevant for the majority of users). And to understand that the search engine should know more about the users by remembering and analyzing what this particular user searched for in other queries. Right now Microsoft only keeps information for one previous search performed by a user but the plan is to extend this to include more search queries and hopefully understand what user is actually looking for.

Microsoft statistics shows that currently half of search queries processed by search engines are lengthy 30-minute search sessions where a user researches the information on a particular subject, checking various websites from the search results and refining the search query to get better results. If a half of the web population actually spends this much time in search sessions, this definitely is a very promising market. So this is the area where Microsoft sees true potential: if a user is involved in such an in-depth research, various search queries a user tries out to get the results needed are supposed to help understand what the user actually needs and provide the user with better targeted results.

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AdWords, Blogger, and YouTube named in patent fight

The week is not off to a great start for Google. GraphOn Corporation issued a release bright and early this morning stating that it is suing the search giant for patent infringement.

Four separate patents have been cited, and these “protect GraphOn’s unique method of maintaining an automated and network-accessible database,” according to the company. Only the method’s not too unique, as Google Base, AdWords, Blogger, Sites, and YouTube allegedly make use of it.

So will Google have to pay some heavy licensing fees, or even lose control of its central products? Don’t bet on it.

We can first look at where GraphOn’s complaint was filed: the Eastern District of Texas. This venue was characterized in a Smart Business article as “demonstrably where bad patent cases go to die.”

Then, consider that GraphOn’s history tends towards the lawsuit-happy. AutoTrader, Juniper Networks, IAC/InterActiveCorp, Match.com, Yahoo, eHarmony, and CareerBuilder have all been targeted before.

Toss in the fact that Google’s lawyers have a pretty good track record, and the patent suit looks even less serious. We’ll see what happens, though, as strange rulings have been known to occur and appeals are almost inevitable.

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Source: Webpro News