Pearl are pleased to announce that websites and ecommerce stores using the Pearl platform should now benefit from a free SEO boost courtesy of a few developments completed this week affecting page titles and link generation. These changes will be rolled out to all clients over the next few days and cover two main areas:

1. Page Titles

The single most important factor of SEO is the page title. The page title is shown at the top of your Internet browser window and as the main link to your site in search engine results pages (SERPs). Page titles in Pearl now show just the category title for category pages and just the product name for product pages, where as previously the page title would show the category tree as well.

The benefit of introducing shorter page titles are that the resulting titles are now more relevant to the page and it is clear to see what you are linking to from a search engine results page, thus encouraging more click throughs to your site.

2. Page URLs

The Page URL is the address that you put in your Internet browser to get to that page. Pearl already supports friendly URLs as outlined in the Search Engine Optimisation page of the Pearl online documentation. The changes we have made affect the way links are built to reflect the category structure of your site.

For example the “Web Based CRM” page on the Pearl website. The original link to this page would have been:

http://www.thisispearl.com/web-based-crm-c-299_301_373.html

Although this is a perfectly valid link to that page, the “Web Based CRM” page is actually a part of the Customers category, which in turn is part of the Features category. The new style Pearl URL structure takes this in to account and will now generate links to the “Web Based CRM” as follows:

http://www.thisispearl.com/features/customers/web-based-crm-c-299_301_373.html

The benefit of this style of URL is that search engines can determine relationships between pages by grouping them in to category levels. In this example any other pages found with /features/customers/ in the URL will be assumed to be related to the “Web Based CRM” page.

This grouping comes in to it’s own when products get involved. Previously Pearl would always generate links to products at the top level of your website domain. Now with our improved URL generation all of your products will have URLs that show them within their correct category.

Canonical Links

While on the subject or URLs it is a great time to mention the concept of “canonical links”. A canonical link is a hidden field on category and product pages that can tell the top search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) where the definitive version of that page exists. The aim is to identify which pages are duplicates of content that may be somewhere else on the site.

Going back to the previous example we saw that the two links shown are both valid and that they both show the same content. The problem search engines have is that because the URLs of those pages are different there is a possibility that both pages may be indexed and shown in the search engine results pages.

You might be thinking “surely the more pages I have listed, the better my rankings?” but the truth is quite the opposite. Many search engines apply a “duplicate content penalty” which can cause one or both of the pages to drop rankings in the SERPs.

By applying a canonical link to both the pages the search engines will be able to determine which URL is the correct one. In the latest version of Firefox if a canonical link is found on a page a new “C” icon will appear in the address bar.

If this icon is grey it indicates that the page you are on is the same as the one listed in the canonical link. If the icon is blue that means you are on a duplicate page; clicking the blue icon will take you to the canonical page.

More information about canonical links can be found at the Google Webmaster Central Blog or if you prefer to watch a video try the Canonical Link Element presentation by Google engineer Matt Cutts on YouTube.

XML Sitemaps

As well as tidying up links that are generated within Pearl we have also tidied up the links in the XML sitemaps. A sitemap is a list of page URLs for your website presented in a format that is easy for search engines to read. You can see the sitemap for your pearl site by tagging /index.php?p=sitemapxml to the end of your domain name. For example the Pearl sitemap can be found at:

http://www.thisispearl.com/index.php?p=sitemapxml

Page links are now generated in the same way for on-page menus, canonical links and XML sitemaps. This allows for much tighter consistant linking throughout Pearl hosted websites, which in turn makes things a lot easier for the search engines to spider your website.

Summary of Changes

To round up what we have discussed here is a summarised list of what has changed:

• Page Titles are now shorter and more relevant
• Page Links (URLs) now show pages and products within their relevant categories
• Canonical Links added to category and product pages to reduce duplicate content issues
• XML Sitemaps now show the same page URLs as the canonical links.

It’s also a good point to mention that there is nothing you need to do to benefit from these changes, as they will happen automagically. It is also key to note that none of your existing links will be broken as we have not changed the way that Pearl handles the older style links. In situations where an old style link is loaded your visitors will still see the page they expect, and links from that page will be rewritten to show the new style links. Search engines will also know what to do as they will detect the new canonical link and after a while will start using that instead.

If you have any further questions or are experiencing difficulty with your Pearl system please raise a ticket via the Pearl helpdesk system.