Canonical URL links
22 February 2009 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 4 comments
From Yoast and very cool:
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have just announced a new tag, which we can use to tell the search engines which URL it should have for the current page. This is probably best explained with an example, so here goes.
Suppose you have read my Twitter Analytics post, and you've started tagging all the URLs you spread on Twitter with Google Analytics campaign variables. So at some point, Google enters your site through this URL:
http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter
&utm_campaign=twitterIf it did, in "old times," this would mean you'd have a duplicate content issue: the same content indexed under two different URLs. An issue SEOs have been trying to solve on web pages for ages, which sometimes created huge limitations. This is where the new tag comes in. You add this code to the
<head>section of your page:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://yoast.com/twitter/analytics/" />
Read the rest of Yoast's post and learn more about canonical URLs at http://yoast.com/canonical-url-links/. Google's official post on canonical URLs is at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html.
To make things easy for us, Yoast has already prepared a WordPress Canonical URL plugin , as well as a Magento extension and a Drupal module! Thanks, Joost!
While I appreciate Yoast blogging about this and their work in preparing the plugin, extension and module, one small critique. Technically, this is not a new "tag," rather it is simply a new value for the rel attribute of the existing link tag.
Apple more vulnerable than Microsoft?!?
3 August 2008 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | No comments
I found it surprising that in a new study authored by IBM, Apple was rated the number one software most vulnerable to attack, ahead of Microsoft!
I also found it curious that Webmonkey's post (where I read about the study) was titled "Apple, Microsoft Top List of Most Vulnerable Software," which, although true, implies that Microsoft is number two. This isn't true: Microsoft is number three, after Joomla!
Unfortunately, the report notes two worrisome trends:
- The number of vulnerabilities in our software is increasing.
- Attacks have largely shifted from operating systems to web applications, hence the inclusion of Joomla!, Wordpress and Drupal.
Via Webmonkey. Read the entire report in PDF format.
