Meteor Blog

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Meteor Solutions in the Seattle Times

Here's a link to a nice write-up of Meteor Solutions in the Seattle Times.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Will Meteor Tracker impact my site’s SEO?

We get this question from time to time.

Most search engines have a hard time knowing what to do with content they find that can be accessed from different URLs. This is typically referred to as the "Duplicate Content" problem. Because of the way Meteor works, this can sometimes present an issue for our customers. There are several imperfect solutions to addressing this problem but nothing as simple as what was announced recently by the major engines.

As of a few weeks ago, the major engines announced support of a simple solution to the duplicate content problem. All one needs to do is to include a Canonical Link Tag between the "HEAD" tags on the page(s) where there might be a duplicate content issue. This tag essentially acts like a 301 redirect for the search engine crawlers. So, no matter how one refers to a specific URL:
  • example.com
  • www.example.com
  • www.example.com/index.html
  • www.example.com/index.html?sessionID=ABC123
the canonical link tag will translate each of these references into a standard one that then shows up in the index and search results:

example.com => www.example.com

This method is fully supported by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask search engines which takes care of the vast majority of the search traffic.

For more information on the use and formatting of this tag, please see Google’s description of the benefits of the tag and how it works here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Video Description and more information from Google's Matt Cutts:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394