What is URL Canonicalization and how to configure it in ATG Endeca integrated environment? - SEO

Why Canonicalization?

Dynamic sites often produce syntactically different URLs for the same page. Multiple variant URLs result in duplicate content and therefore lower natural search engine ranking. Canonicalizing your URLs reduces that duplicate content and improves search engine ranking. 

Example: User navigation flow and URL's generated

Category: Appliances  - Cooking - Cooktops  - Electric Cooktops

Brand:  GE , Electrolux

/Appliances-Cooking-Cooktops-Electric-Cooktops/Electrolux/GE/N-5yc1vZc3qaZloZarw

Category: Appliances  - Cooking - Cooktops  - Electric Cooktops

Brand:  Electrolux, GE

/Appliances-Cooking-Cooktops-Electric-Cooktops/Electrolux/GE/N-5yc1vZc3qaZloZarw

Regardless of different navigation flow only one URL is generated due to URL canonicalization.

How to configure it in ATG Endeca integrated environment? 

Configure below components in ATG.

/config/atg/endeca/url/basic/SeoUrlFormatter.properties

navStateCanonicalizer=/atg/endeca/url/basic/NavStateCanonicalizer

/config/atg/endeca/url/basic/NavStateCanonicalizer.properties

$class=com.endeca.soleng.urlformatter.seo.SeoNavStateCanonicalizer
$scope=request

sortByName=true
sortByDimension=true
ascending=true
ignoreCase=false

Various ways to avoid duplicate content - SEO Tips

Blocking in Robots.txt

Search engine bots will see the robots.txt file and when it sees to exclude a URL of the hosted domain name, this URL is no longer crawled and indexed.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: /search
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://ravihonakamble.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml

NoIndex/Follow tag

Another way to eliminate duplicate content, is to use the Meta Robots tag noindex/follow:

Syntax:
meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"

noindex value is telling search engines not to index the page, thus eliminating duplicate content. And the follow value is telling search engines to still follow the links found on this page, thus still passing around link juice.

The 301 Redirect

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to the other. If someone doesn't know you moved, you want to make sure all your mail is forwarded to your new place.

Once you have new domain then set up a 301 redirect from your old URL to your new one so the inbound links to your old domain will send the same authority to your new domain.

Example:
Redirect 301 / http://newsite.com/blog/

The Canonical Link Tag
search engines behave in the same way how it would look at a 301 redirect. It is not going to index the duplicate content page. Only the destination page will appear in the search engine index.
Syntax:
link rel="canonical" href="http://www.demo.com/shoes/mens/nike"
All links going to the duplicate content pages will be counted as links of the main content page.

Example:
http://www.demo.com/shoes/mens/nike
http://www.demo.com/nike/shoes/mens

SEO Best Practices : How to Block false bots or Hackers IP?

Using IP based filtering will catch out rogue bots masquerading as major bots. Also, you can use reverse DNS lookup and compare the names of bots approaching. 

ATG Commerce has a pipeline servlet that handles the blocking of requests from certain IP addresses.
 
/atg/dynamo/servlet/pipeline/BlockIPServlet 
# set to false to disable
enabled=true
# IP Lists
blockedIPs=152.52.91.12,\
143.13.65.1

How to verify that your site ranks for your domain name? - SEO Tips

Do a Google search for you site domain url. If your site doesn't appear in the results, or if it ranks poorly in the results, this is a sign that your site may have a manual spam action for violations of the Webmaster Guidelines. 

Example:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=ravihonakamble.blogspot.com

How to find indexed pages and count on Google Search Engine? - SEO Sitemap Tips

Use the site: operator as below: 
Example: site:http://ravihonakamble.blogspot.com 

Note: Don't use a space between the operator and the URL.

 

You can perform the search on a whole domain or limit it to a certain sub-domain or sub-directory

Example: site:http://ravihonakamble.blogspot.com/p/