You can use the Google Cache of a page to figure out if Google is handling your parameters, tag pages, etc., without creating problems.  Click on the "Cached Snapshot" in the Google toolbar from URL and see if the path displayed in the cache matches the original URL.  If it does not match, the cache is displaying the canonical URL and you know that Google has figured out your duplicate content and has mapped the pages together.  This technique is particularly useful for any site that uses tracking parameters, controls display through or has canonical concerns.

I discovered this trick while investigating Semtech.com the other day, a semiconductor company that makes ICs for circuit protection and ESD protection .  Semtech has complex needs because engineers want to locate products with specific parameters. Semtech solves this requirement with a very powerful CMS, but one with some SEO concerns.

The user navigation portion of the site has a hierarchical navigation system that put products in categories with subcategories while the parametric search calls products part number in the /products/ root directory.  External links point to both versions, depending on the path the user took to find it.  This canonicalization issue has largely been address by blocking the parametric search path via robots.txt, but the products continue to exist with two different URLs: the canonically deterministic URL and in the /products/ directory.  For example, one of their power management product has a canonical URL of http://www.semtech.com/products/power_management/switching_regulators/sc2440/ but also exists at http://www.semtech.com/products/sc2440/.

If you look at the Cache for the non-canonical URL , http://www.semtech.com/products/sc2440/, you can see that Google shows the canonical URL in the Cache.

Aaron Wall had a great post today about Black Hole SEO in which he called out The New York Times, among others, for hording Page Rank by refusing to give links.

The idea may appeal to some, but it is a recipe for failure. Page Rank hording is an illusion. Linking out to an authority site actually helps your site be authoritative. My take is that Google probably manages internal Page Rank flow and external flow separately. Linking out to an external page has nothing to do with how much juice you can pass internally.

The willingness of bloggers to liberally link out whenever they write a post has a lot to do with how much easier it is for a blog to rank than a typical commercial site with the same amount of content and link juice. This generous link profile also explains why so many conspiracy SEOs think that .orgs and .edu sites are preferred by Google. Not for profits and particularly academic sites tend to include a lot of citations. Only commercial sites fail to link out or put all of there outbound links on a single page.

Black Hole Linking profiles are pretty easy for Google to spot. A big site without outbound links probably sticks out like the Great Wall of China– search engines can from outer space!

So, play the link of forward. The world will reciprocate.

Anyone else out there seeing Google changing from 10 results per page to 7? This appears to be a UI experiment rather than a definite change. While only a few people have seen this tweak, it may be a sign of the biggest change to hit search engine results in years.

The idea of 10 organic results seemed sacred, surviving the launch of blended/universal and the integration of local/maps, One Box and Sitelinks, not to mention preserved across all the major and not so major engines. Google may have been preparing for this for some time with changes such as reducing the number of ad units in the right rail.

It will be very interesting to see how this change influences user behavior.  Will this increase the percentage of people who go to page 2?  Will it increase CTR for the 4-7th positions?  Will it increase the number of people who reformulate the query?

Implicit in this decision seems to be Google’s belief that the top seven results contain all that is relevant.  Hubris is the first step towards defeat.