What is a canonical page?
Saturday, 21 June 2014
A canonical page is the preferred URL of a page or set of pages with duplicate or highly similar content.By adding rel="canonical" to your pages you can tell search engines about the preferred content / page for a given page or set of pages ....
<link rel="canonical" href="http://xmlsitemapgenerator.org"/>
Why use it?
The rel="canonical" element helps search engines reduce duplicate content. To help de-duplicate your content and prevent yourself from being seen to publish duplicate content you should include a canonical url for similar/the same pages.When to use it
- Sites with dynamic URLs which can lead to the same content
- eCommerce sites, especially on product listings where the same content may be displayed in various sort orders or products with multiple pages for minor variations (e.g. colour)
- Syndicated content to point to the original content.
When not to use it
- If your page has moved or there is a preferred version your first choice should be a HTTP 301 redirect. This not only tells the search engine the correct page, but will also redirect the user to the correct version of the page.
- This includes if you are changing your website structure, use HTTP 301 redirects.
How we use it
The sitemap generator only includes your primary page. If we discover a page with a canonical attribute we will drop the current page with the canonical URL and move on to the URL specified in the canonical element.
Filter and save your sitemap
Sunday, 15 June 2014
In this latest release we've added features to make it easier for you to filter out urls and images you want to exclude from your sitemap using pattern based matching as well as the ability to save your sitemap settings.Filtering
When using "more settings" option you can enter patterns of URLs to exclude for files and images.Use can use simple filter strings as illustrated below, or more complex regular expressions.
- /images/Temp/*
- /TempFiles/*
Saving sitemap settings
Another handy feature we have added is the ability to save your sitemap settings. If you've spent a lot of time and effort setting up the more advanced sitemap settings you don't want to have to re-enter them every time you update your sitemap.
You'll then be asked to login or create an account. Your sitemap settings will be saved to your account so you can edit and re-run them again when you update your website.You can add multiple sitemaps to your account to enable you to manage them all in one place.
You can then edit and re-run your XML Sitemaps when you update your website.
Give it a try and generate a Google XML Sitemap.
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