You may be thinking about joining the website blackout movement, but yikes … what about the SEO implications? How do you take your site offline in protest without messing up your visibility in Google’s search results?

Well, Google’s Pierre Far shared several tips earlier today on Google+ in a post called “Website outages and blackouts the right way.”

In short, the advice is to use a 503 HTTP status code to tell spiders that the website is temporary unavilable. With a 503 status, Google won’t index the content (or lack thereof if you’re blacking out your site) and it won’t consider the site as having duplicate content issues (when all of the pages are blacked out).

But Far adds a couple important caveats to this advice regarding the robots.txt file and what will happen in Webmaster Tools if Google finds your site blacked out. Another Googler, John Mueller, adds additional information in the comments, so you’ll want to read the original Google+ post if you’re thinking about blacking out your website this week for SOPA, or in the future for any other reason.

Of course, also keep in mind that Bing may not handle things the same way if you do blackout your site.

New Monthly Search Update

The news comes from a post to the Google Inside Search blog, itemizing ten search-related changes that have been made.

Google did a similar post like this last month, and now it confirms this will be a monthly update on what it considers to be noteworthy changes but ones not big enough to merit blog posts of their own.

From the post:

Today we’re publishing another list of search improvements, beginning a monthly series where we’ll be sharing even more details about the algorithm and feature enhancements we make on a near-daily basis…

We’ve been wracking our brains trying to think about how to make search even more transparent. The good news is that we make roughly 500 improvements in a given year, so there’s always more to share. With this blog series, we’ll be highlighting many of the subtler algorithmic and visible feature changes we make. These are changes that aren’t necessarily big enough to warrant entire blog posts on their own.

While Google calls these all algorithm changes, some of them are really related to the search interface, while others impact how Google crawls, which is different from the algorithm that controls how Google ranks pages (to understand more about search algorithms, see our What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? page and watch the movie).

On to the changes:

Parked Domains Get Ticketed

One of the most significant changes is that Google says it has a new algorithm to detect parked domains. From the post:

New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites that are seldom useful and often filled with ads. They typically don’t have valuable content for our users, so in most cases we prefer not to show them.

That’s a pretty easy change to understand. Many domainers I’ve spoken to have understood over the years that it’s become harder to rank on Google without having some substantial content on their sites. This is a clear sign life is getting harder.

Ironically, Google’s own AdSense For Domains program has fueled much of the parked domain industry that its web search team is now penalizing against.

Rewarding The Original

Another big change is that Google says it can now better detect which is the “original” page when confronted with several that seem similar:

Original content: We added new signals to help us make better predictions about which of two similar web pages is the original one.

Within a web site, a variety of things can cause a page to be duplicated. However, a bigger issue for many publishers is when people copy or “scrape” their content without permission. These scraper sites sometimes can even outrank the original site for searches.

Google doesn’t specifically say this change is aimed at scraper sites, but it should help with that issue — and it’s an issue Google’s been especially been battling against since launching its Panda Update earlier this year.

Our previous post from August also talks more about this battle: Google Signals Upcoming Algorithm Change, Asks For Help With Scraper Sites.

For Google, it’s also another reason why publishers may want to consider using the canonical tag. The posts below have more about this:

• Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter
• Google Supports Cross-Domain ‘Canonical Tag’
• Do You Have Duplicate Content Issues Across Domain? Google Will Now Alert You

Stop Crowding Me

A third big change was Google saying that it’s pulling back on allowing a single site to potentially occupy too much of the top search results. From the post:

Top result selection code rewrite: This code handles extra processing on the top set of results. For example, it ensures that we don’t show too many results from one site (“host crowding”). We rewrote the code to make it easier to understand, simpler to maintain and more flexible for future extensions.

We’ll try for a follow-up here to get further clarity, but about a year ago, Google made it possible for one site to have more than the usual single listing it might get at the top of the page. These stories, especially the second, explain more about this:

• Official: Google Now Lets One Domain Dominate Search Results
• Google Showing More Results Per Domain For More Queries

The change means that that a brand owner may occupy less of the search results page for a search on their name, so competitors or critics potentially turn up more.

Of course, brands like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola have so many additional sites, along with social media profiles, that they still do well in crowding out others.

My post from September, Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?, explains this more, at the end.

Rare Words Count For More

An interesting change is that if you’re searching for a “rare” or unusual word, Google is easing back on ignoring this and potentially returning matching web pages that might not contain that word.

From the post:

Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are similar to the actual search you type. This change makes it less likely that these results will rank highly if the original query had a rare word that was dropped in the alternate query. For example, if you are searching for [rare red widgets], you might not be as interested in a page that only mentions “red widgets.”

Bigger & Fresher

Elsewhere in the post, Google says that it is doing “more comprehensive indexing,” promising that this will make “more long-tail documents available in our index, so they are more likely to rank for relevant queries.”

Google also said that its blog search results are both more comprehensive and fresh. Image results were also said to be fresher.

Suggestions, Tablet Layout & Goal!

In the remaining changes, first, Google says that it will be offering more autocomplete suggestions. Second, it says it has made small changes to improve its look on tablets.

Finally, those looking for Major League Soccer and Canadian Football League scores, rejoice! Google says it will now display scores, schedules and links to game recaps and box scores for games.

Related Stories

• What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
• Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors
•  Google Signals Upcoming Algorithm Change, Asks For Help With Scraper Sites
• Do You Have Duplicate Content Issues Across Domain? Google Will Now Alert You
• Google Showing More Results Per Domain For More Queries
• Responding To Complaints, Google Adds Verbatim Search Results
• Improved Snippets, Rank Boost For “Official” Pages Among 10 New Google Algorithm Changes

“When we discover a group of pages with duplicate content, Google uses algorithms to select one representative URL for that content. A group of pages may contain URLs from the same site or from different sites.”

They note that when they choose a representative URL from a different domain, they call this “cross-domain URL selection”.

In cases where multiple URLs contain the same content (for instance, due to infrastructure configuration, optional parameters, syndication, or internationalization), many options exist for site owners to indicate to Google which version is canonical.

However, in some cases, the site owner doesn’t use these options to specify a preferred version or Google may select a different version than the site owner specifies.

This new feature alerts site owners  when their “algorithms select an external URL instead of one from their website”. They say common reasons for this include:

• Site owner-specified – if you’ve moved your domain or have implemented the rel=canonical attribute to indicate that a page on another domain is canonical, then this alert is simply confirmation that Google is indexing as you’ve specified.
• Regional sites – if you have the same content on multiple regional sites (for instance, the same English content on a .com (for US), a .co.uk, and a .com.au), Google may cluster pages with identical content across sites and use relevance signals to determine which to display per query.
• Incorrect canonicalization – in this case, a page may inadvertently use the rel=canonical attribute to specify a page on a different domain as canonical.
• Misconfigured server – a hosting misconfiguration (this in particular happens sometimes with shared hosting) may cause a two different domains to display the same content)
• Hacked site – sites are sometimes hacked to point to other domains.
• Scraped content – the blog says that “in rare situations”, Google may select a URL from a site that has scraped your content.

Duplicate content is a big problem for SEO for a number of reasons. If you’ve been following this multinational series, you’ll know that some of the biggest gains to be had in SEO today come from fine tuning your SERP sales message to make the landing page you target to a search term convert at a much higher rate than average.

If you are unable to ensure that your landing page is the only page optimised for that term, then you lose that strategic ability.

In short: regardless of the SEO benefit to be had by eliminating duplicate content, the impact of losing the ability to control which page turns up for which search term is a greater concern.

Automated Translation & Duplication

This is a common outcome, especially when looking at multinational websites where the translation in some countries is direct from another language, often as the result of an automated translation.

Matt Cutts has gone on record to state that such translation would be considered duplicate, and so many webmasters are getting into difficulties despite trying to do the whitehat thing and generate relevant content for the country.

Auditing For Duplicate Content With Google

Of course, Google gives you some idea of what other content it considers duplicate via its Webmaster Tools, with The HTML suggestion report highlighting areas of duplication in title tags and meta descriptions.

But this is really only useful as a refining tool and won’t indicate when, for example, your e-commerce system generates new pages for every available colour for every item of clothing you sell; if the colour is included in the title and meta description (generating 10 pages for domain authority to be spread across – therefore struggling –  to compete for a competitive product when one single page would perform significantly better).

Similarly, it won’t tell you if your site used frames to host the bulk of page content, excluded from spider access via the robots.txt while the frameset pages are correctly tagged for SEO.

And so on. But most importantly, it won’t help you dig into a site to identify ‘crawler traps’ created by inadvertently creating navigation loops the generate near infinite permutations of URLs to be indexed, causing search engines to simply abandon crawling at a certain point – as defined by its perceived authority of your domain.

That means that if your site is considered low authority, or if you are hosting a large number of pages on a medium authority site, then page parsimony is critical to get the best possible performance out of your landing pages.

So what’s the best way to quickly narrow down duplicate content issues you may have?

Simple: unleash the power of chained Google site:, inurl: and  intitle: operators.

If you haven’t read about search operators, this is a good place to start, but there are a few that aren’t listed in there which we can look at in more depth in a future article. For now, lets see how we hunt down duplication.

Finding Site Architecture Duplication

Lets take a look at Hilton Hotels’ global site architecture as an example audit.

First up, run a quick site: command, setting results to 100 so you can easily browse through the results: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Ahilton.com.

Running that search today, I get 388,000 results.

If I click through to the last paginated page Google offers me, we can also see that after 848 results, Google has truncated the results suggesting that the rest are ‘very similar’ to the listings it has already displayed; i.e. the site contains massive amounts of duplicate content.

If I were to click on the link above, then Google would append &filter=0 to my search URL.

Those reading who’ve been around search for a long time will recognise that as the old ‘Supplemental listing’ parameter discussed by Matt Cutts and largely ignored for the last few years since the tag highlighting supplemental results was dropped.

We won’t go into supplementals further in this article, but it’s important to note the supplemental index was created to handle the mass duplication frequently encountered by Google in attempting to index the whole Internet.

The important attribute of supplemental listings to be aware of is that it can’t outrank any other page in the main index returning for a competitive search query.

So, hilton.com seems to have a pretty severe problem. Can we work out what’s happening, just by querying Google?

Well, to a large extent, yes. We can.

Just quickly browsing down the first page of results, I can see frequent repetition of Hilton Doubletree Results as non-www hilton.com results. So, for example, the following are both identical:

• http://hilton.com/en/dt/promotions/dt_greenhotels/index.jhtml
• http://doubletree.hilton.com/en/dt/promotions/dt_greenhotels/index.jhtml

Also, there’s a heck of a lot of jsessionid parameters, and sure enough we can chain our search operators to get an idea of the full extent of that issue:

• http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Ahilton.com+inurl%3A%22jsessionid%22.

Ouch! By chaining the operators, we in fact get a larger number of indexed pages that Google would originally admit: 587,000.

For hilton.com, we can start to identify other duplication issues by making excluding the jsessionid issue from our site operator search simply by appending a minus sign ‘-’ to our search chain.

Using this filtering technique, we can carry on using search operators to find that:

• There’s massive duplication from the secure site (https) being indexed while selecting hotel availability dates:
  • http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Asecure.hilton.com+inurl%3Achoose_dates%22
• Their special offers are indexed and are poorly differentiated:
  • http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Ahilton.com+intitle%3A%22Special+Offers%22

And so on… leaving us with a search chain filtering out those issue so we can keep combing the results for more problems.

• http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Ahilton.com+-inurl%3A%22jsessionid%22+-inurl%3A%22choose_dates%22+-intitle%3A%22Special+Offers%22

There’s no silver bullet solution, although canonical tags would go a long way to solving some of the more severe issues. But a concerted effort to solve these duplicate content issues with a well documented business case for the various change requests required would return huge improvements in Hilton Group’s Web presence and deliver immediate, significant bottom line impact.

Using Google’s view of your domain to identify issues with your domains and take back control of your landing pages to better convert your search engine traffic to sale is a solid approach, in any language.

When I took a random sample of 11 of the most popular mobile queries and examined the characteristics of the top 5 Google smartphone results for each query, the average domain authority (using SEOMoz metrics) for the first five positions was 83/100, and the first result (on average) had as many links pointing to the first listing as it did to listings 2 through 5.

Furthermore, there was only one site in the sample that ranked with fewer than 10 links, and three quarters of the total sample had more than 1,000 total links. As with desktop search, it appears linking and link building matters in mobile search.

Historically, conversations around mobile link building have been sparse, as mobile sites have been seen more as a link equity problem for brands, rather than as something that can help them gain links.

Performics, for example, recently compared mobile sites to print URLs, in that they both contribute to reduced link equity as a result of duplicate content. John Mueller of Google also recently recommended using the canonical tag on mobile sites that duplicate desktop content.

These recommendations are fine if all you’re doing with your mobile site is duplicating desktop content. However, brands that simply use their mobile site to reformat desktop content for mobile users are missing the point.

If you’re old enough to remember pre-bubble early Internet days, when some brands thought it was okay to put PDFs of your print brochures online and expect them to do as well in a digital context, you should know better.

Site owners want to link to content that is unique, innovative and unusual, and cutting-edge mobile sites can be just that. Break out of the mobile sites as duplicate content trap and follow these guidelines to possibly get more links to your mobile site than your desktop site.

1.  Don’t Put All Your Eggs In The App Basket

If you’re going mobile, make sure your mobile strategy includes a mobile site, and not just apps. Apart from the many problems inherent with focusing on mobile apps as a way of gaining a mobile audience, mobile sites appear in search results for more queries, and link equity to the sites will ultimately benefit your domain, and not just the app stores you submit to.

2. Publicize With Mobile Directories & Awards Sites

Just having a mobile website is enough to get you additional links from certain sites that focus on mobile content. If you have a really good one, letting sites that cover mobile content know about it could get you listed in a top mobile sites story, such as this one that ran on Mashable last year.

If it’s exceptional, you could get an additional link from Time magazine or the Webby Awards. And if it’s maybe not exceptional but not outright embarrassing, you can get a link from WAP Review, Mobile Awesomeness, or one of the many mobile directories that have emerged with the mobile Web.

It’s worth noting that all of these links are only available to brands that have built mobile content, so if you haven’t yet, it’s not yet too late to start.

3.  Use Mobile Information Architecture & Content

I recently looked at Staples’ mobile site, which is one of many sites that mobilizes its desktop content using a transcoder, rather than builds content specifically for mobile users. Because searchers often search using the same keywords, but with different frequencies, this is often a missed opportunity to address the mobile user experience of the mobile site.

For example, with Staples’ mobile site, it’s clear from the branded mobile queries found in the Google Keyword Tool that when it comes to Staples, searchers overwhelmingly care about finding information about their local Staples store.

Figure 1 Mobile queries of searchers looking for Staples brand filtered by mobile intent and sorted by volume.

Smart marketers would use this information to their advantage, and give the searcher not just a stripped down version of their desktop site, but also a mobile experience that highlights the locations they’re looking for and uses the unique properties of mobile to make a connection to the stores as soon as possible.

For example, instead of including a separate page adjacent to the home page with a store locator that requires the user to input his/her information, the home page could easily use the unique properties of mobile to find the user’s location based on GPS and display a map and contact information for the nearest Staples to the user.

It could also link to an optimized store page that would give local shoppers a list of products on sale at the local store with the option to buy and pick up in store. Perhaps Staples could even include mobile coupons to redeem in-store or time-sensitive deals that could be redeemed on the device at the nearest Staples.

These things would be of value to mobile users, and they would help brands get links to content that they can’t get just by transcoding their desktop site for mobile users.

4.  Use Mobile Functionality Desktop Users Would Envy

I saw Alan Moore of SMLXL speak at a mobile conference a few years ago, and he told a story about a site in Japan that allowed mobile users to map the shortest path to their destination in a rainstorm that passed under as many awnings as possible.

There are apps now like Shazam that use the strengths of mobile phone and design around them, rather than taking something that was built for the desktop and making it mobile. Google recently announced that their mobile visual search technology is available in  desktop search, but it started as a mobile innovation that made desktop computer users want to try.

If one of the great truisms of SEO is “content is king”, why wouldn’t that apply to mobile content as well?

The best sites play to the strengths of mobile in their design, and compel users to share and link to them. What is it that you can provide your users that would be so useful to them while mobile that they are compelled to share, link to and write about it?

If you can’t answer that, it may be time to go back to the drawing board and provide something useful that doesn’t yet exist on your desktop site. Most modern browsers now have access to the gyroscope, camera and accelerometer. Use them to create something unique that mobile users will find invaluable, and the links will find you.

5.  Don’t Put Canonical Tags On Your Entire Mobile Site

Yes, if you duplicate desktop content in a mobile format, the best practice today is to use CSS to reformat the content on a single URL or use canonical tags to redirect the mobile link equity.

However, if you just do that you’re missing out on a lot of mobile traffic and links, as I hope I’ve demonstrated in this article. Better to add canonical tags to transcoded desktop content, and build unique content for mobile users that will help you be found when they search.

My original article on parameter handling describes the issues that parameters can cause with how search engines crawl and index a site. In particular, as the parameters multiply, the number of near duplicate pages grows exponentially and links may be coming in to all of the various versions. This dilutes PageRank potential, and the “canonical” version of a page may not ending ranking as well as it otherwise would. Search engines may also spend much of their crawl time of various versions of a small subset of pages, preventing them from fully crawling (and thus indexing) the site.

New Options for Providing Google Information About the Parameters In Your URLs

So what’s new? You can now specify whether or not a parameter changes the content on the page. For those that don’t, once you specify that, you’re done! Things get more complicated if a parameter changes the content on the page. You now have a number of options available, described in more detail below. This latest incarnation of the feature impacts both which URLs are crawled and how the parameters are handled.

To access the feature, log into your Google webmaster tools account, click on the site you want to configure, and then choose Site configuration > URL parameters. You’ll see a list of parameters Google has found on the site, along with the number of URLs Google is “monitoring” that contain this parameter.

The default behavior is “Let Googlebot decide”. This results in Google figuring out duplicates and clustering them. As they say in their help content:

“When Google detects duplicate content, such as variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster and select what we think is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL. Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results.

To improve this process, we recommend using the parameter handling tool to give Google information about how to handle URLs containing specific parameters. We’ll do our best to take this information into account; however, there may be cases when the provided suggestions may do more harm than good for a site.”

But if you want to have some control over that process, click Edit to specify whether that parameter changes the page content. You can look at a list of recently crawled URLs with that parameter to help you figure out what they’re used for.

Your choices are:

• No: Doesn’t affect page content
• Yes: Changes, reorders, or narrows page content

If a Parameters Doesn’t Page Content

If you choose no, you see the following message:

Google will associate any URLs with those parameters with the versions without them. So for instance, if Google comes across the following two URLs, they’ll cluster both together as the first URL:

• www.mygreatsite.com/buffy-is-still-awesome.php
• www.mygreatsite.com/buffy-is-still-great.php?referrer=buffyangelship4eva

If a Parameter Changes Page Content

If you choose Yes, you see even more options.

How does this parameter affect page content:

• Sorts – the content stays the same, but is reordered
• Narrows - the parameter is a filter that displays a subset of the content
• Specifies - the parameter determines the page content
• Translates - the page content appears in a different language
• Paginates - that parameter indicates the page number of a larger set of content
• Other - none of the above

Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl:

• Let Googlebot decide -this is the default; Google will use other signals to determine which URLs to crawl
• Every URL - Google should crawl all URLs and use the value information above to choose what to consolidate
• Only URLs with value – triggers a list of values Googlebot has crawled to  choose from; use this option if you want Google to crawl only URLs that contain a specific value for a parameter (and not crawl any others)
• No URLs – you don’t want Google to crawl any URLs with this parameter (but not that using a pattern match in robots.txt may be better option in this case)

Handily, Google shows you how your choices will impact crawling:

Seem overwhelming? Fortunately, another new feature Google has launched is the ability to download all of the parameter settings as a CSV file so you can sort though them offline.

Should You Use This Feature?

As Google notes on the page, “Only use this feature if you feel confident about how parameters work for your site. Telling Googlebot to exclude URLs with certain parameters could result in large numbers of your pages disappearing from our index.” The benefit, though, is multifold. The crawl is more efficient, so more pages of the site may get crawled and therefore indexed, and links are consolidated to a single version that may then gain rankings.

My guess is that Google may not immediately stop crawling the pages, as they may want to make sure the content is in fact the same before consolidating the URLs into a single version. But if you aren’t an expert with URL parameters and canonicalization, you probably want to let Google sort this out and not change these settings. They do, in fact, do a fairly good job, particularly when URLs use standard key-value pairs.

If you know the ins and outs of URL parameters and know exactly what you want Google to crawl, then go for it. Jonathon Colman of REI jumped on these new features right away!

Should you use this feature if you’re already using the rel=canonical attribute on the pages? Sure! Google’s help says:

“You can also give Google additional information by adding the rel="canonical" element to the HTML source of your preferred URL. Use which option works best for you; it’s fine to use both if you want to be very thorough.”

I still have questions about this feature, like how it impacts a crawlable link architecture with substantial pagination. If you’re interested in digging as well, note that I’ll be moderating a session on this at SMX East, and Maile Ohye of Google, who’s spent a lot of time on this issue, as well as experienced practioners, will be on hand to provide practical answers.

I’ve pulled out the key points from this post in bullet format:

• Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones.
• Google has two bots: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content.
• Currently only traditional phones are supported with special useragent strings within Googlebot-Mobile, not smartphones (this may change)
• Google said they “expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters.
• It does not mean you can’t serve a special style sheet to smartphones, Google said, “the decision to do so should be based on how you can best serve your users.”
• URL structure: For Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile, it does not matter what the URL structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too.
• Using the same URL “is not considered cloaking by Google.”
• Mobile sitemaps: you should include only mobile content URLs in Mobile Sitemaps, even if these URLs also return non-mobile content when accessed by a non-mobile User-agent.

This blog post was in response to a question I had in regards to a video Matt published, which is below. But make sure to understand that you do not need to use a mobile specific URL, you can serve up mobile content on the same URLs you serve up to desktop users. In addition, it is important to note that smartphones like iPhones and Android phones are not necessarily and currently considered “mobile” devices to Google or Googlebot-Mobile.

Related Stories:

• The New Mobile SEO: What You Need To Know
• Two New Mobile SEO Tips For 2011
• Has The iPhone Made Mobile SEO Obsolete?
• Mobile SEO Tip: Transcoding Services Can Dilute Link Popularity
• Don’t Penalize Yourself: Mobile Sites Are Not Duplicate Content
• Why Mobile Searchers Need Mobile-Optimized Sites
• Sorting Out The Mobile Search & SEO Mess
• Google Writes On Mobile Site SEO Concerns & Techniques

What Is Syndication-Source?

Web sites that syndicate their content to others can use the syndication-source meta tag to give Google a signal that theirs is the one that should be included in Google News. In a perfect world, the tag will be used by both the site that syndicates its content, as well as the site that receives and publishes the syndicated content from another source. The tag looks like this:

meta name=”syndication-source” content=”http://www.somedomain.com/article1.html”

What Is Original-Source?

The original-source meta tag can be used by publishers wanting to claim their article as the original version. In a sense, it’s somewhat like the rel=”canonical” tag, which can be used to indicate the canonical version of similar web pages (more about the canonical tag below).

Search Engine Land, for example, could use the original-source meta tag on this article (and others) to indicate that ours — not the various sites that scrape our content or reference it in other ways — is the original version.

Similarly, Google says this meta tag can also be used in the same way publishers link to other sites. For example, since this article is also referencing an announcement on the Google News blog, we could use the original-source tag similarly to how we cite them via a link.

In fact, Google says you can cite several different sources with multiple versions of this tag if you want to credit each one that led to the article you’ve published. The tag looks like this:

meta name=”original-source” content=”http://www.somedomain.com/article1.html”

What About The Canonical Tag?

As mentioned, there’s another tag (technically, an attribute), that Google introduced that seems similar to what today’s new “source” tags do. That’s the canonical tag. See our past coverage about the tag for more background:

• Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter
• Google Supports Cross-Domain ‘Canonical Tag’

Why use these new tags if you’re already using the canonical tag? Simple answer — because you’re a news publisher. These tags only work for within Google News, and they are designed to help Googel News experiment more with source identification and attributions. Google told us:

We felt the options currently in existence [the canonical tag] addressed different use cases and were insufficient to achieve our goals. The more accurate metadata that’s out there on the web, the better the web will be.

What About Spam?

Meta tags are, in some circles, an invitation to spam. And there’s nothing to stop Joe’s Search Blog from scraping and re-publishing this article, while also using one or both of these tags to claim that his is the original version. Worse, there’s also nothing to stop a high-trust, authoritative site from using — or misusing, to be more accurate — these tags.

Google’s blog post talks about this being an experiment and needing to see how people use these tags “in the wild.” Clearly, they’ll be looking for misuses, too. Google says they may reduce the importance assigned to the metatags on an individual site if they’re being misused, and they also reserve the right to remove sites from Google News altogether if need be.

Google also has a help page about the tags here.

However, if you’re considering using a solution like this for your company, understand that a solution like Usablenet can index multiple copies of pages on many domains, making for a duplicate content issue that can be far more significant than what you might encounter in the standard web world, and this can make it difficult for your page to appear in competitive mobile searches.

Case in point, travel site Expedia.com, who was nominated for a Webby for their Usablenet site, currently has about 4,800 results in Google using the site: search. However, only 3-4 of these pages are the transcoded Expedia site. The rest of the content is other Usablenet clients that appear to be hosted on the Expedia.com domain.

308 of these pages have the title tag Best Western for example.

And 373 are copies of AA.com.

And 1,060 pages indexed in Google under the Expedia.com domain are actually pages from Delta’s mobile web site.

Apart from the potential legal nightmare of hosting content on your domain that you haven’t created and have no disclaimers for, there are other reasons why brands who are interested in being competitive in mobile search should care about having other brands’ content indexed on their domain. These duplicate content issues are well known to SEOs who optimize standard web content.

For one, it could mean fewer actual pages will be indexed, as a search engine comes to a site with a limited crawl budget. In the case of Expedia.com it means that their home page is not currently indexed on Expedia.com, and since the majority of their inbound links (including the Webby links) are pointing to that page, the link popularity to that page is not helping Expedia rank for competitive keywords.

Another problem is that if these pages appear on Expedia.com’s domain, it’s possible that Expedia.com’s pages are being duplicated on other domains, which could be competing for competitive keywords with Expedia.com. The problem is not widespread for Expedia, as it is for many brands, but their pages are also currently indexed at the Usablenet domain, which could be splitting their link popularity if Google or Bing mistakenly identifies those pages as canonical.

I don’t want to harp on Expedia or Usablenet, as I don’t work for either of them and am not here to do a site audit. The point is that SEO doesn’t become irrelevant because your pages are mobile in nature, and if you’re not paying attention to search engine optimization issues like how pages are crawled, indexed, returned and ranked, it could have real consequences to the visibility of your pages, regardless of whether they are intended for desktop or mobile users.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the American Airlines mobile site powered by Usablenet comes up fifth in Google for the navigational mobile query [aa mobile], for example. Imagine how such a site might rank for nonbranded informational or transactional queries that are more competitive.

What’s really disheartening is that this has been a problem with Usablenet since I interviewed their VP of mobile products almost two years ago, and I know that most of the companies who can afford their services have excellent SEOs on staff who should demand more from their mobile content. I understand why it might not have been a priority for SEOs two years ago, but with mobile searches currently being 10% of Google queries, or more than 1 billion monthly searches per month in the US alone, and growing by triple digits year over year, I wonder how much longer enterprise SEOs like these will be able to ignore the mobile searcher.

Here’s a weird one. Try a search for the BBC TV series Doctor Who on Google. You’ll find the official site, but look closely at the domain name. It’s amirgabriel.com, as shown above — not bbc.co.uk as it should be.

What’s up with that? Has the BBC undergone a transformation in the way Doctor Who himself undergoes?

It’s not a case of someone redirecting their domain over to the BBC and somehow “hijacking” the listing, a problem more common a few years ago. That’s because the domain doesn’t do a redirection, take you from one place over to the BBC. Instead, it “resolves” directly to the BBC –there’s no forwarding at all.

Maybe it’s a BBC-owned domain that’s used as an alternative for the BBC site for some reason, though it’s hard to tell if the BBC owns it because the “whois” owner information is protected.

However it happened, Google thinks bbc.co.uk and amirgabriel.com are the same, as this search shows:

While it’s not uncommon for a web site to have multiple domain names, usually Google will display the most popular or most known one in its listings. That’s not happening in this case, and it should. Even Google agrees. The company told me:

This is a known bug and we’re working to address it