After a whirlwind weekend of culinary delights, travels to DC, and soul searching on the Lincoln Memorial while gazing at the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool, I'm happy to be back and reporting about what I learned when I finally finished Moz's SEO Beginners Guide Chapter 4. Mind you, Chapter 4 had a lot of content so to finish it up for this morning's blog post I had to take every stolen moment I could get!

With that being said, here's what I learned in the final segments of Chapter 4:

Canonical tag: same content on different sources, crawlers have to figure out which is the real or original and that one will get the best rating. To make sure that you don’t run into this problem, make sure each page of content has its own unique URL even if it is just the different between a web and print doc. The tag will tell the crawlers that the website is a copy of the original source
- Similar to a 301 redirect, which is used when you want to redirect people and search engines from one URL to another
Rich snippets are code that allows search engines to pick up what webmasters specifically want search engines to see. A variety of information can be shown, but some common examples are: user reviews (stars) and author profiles (pictures). Below you can see how Goodreads includes star ratings in book search results on Google. Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist has been on my to-read list for sometime now!

Scraping: when people steal your content and republish it as their own. The problem is that scrapers can pull better rankings than the original content. What nonsense is that?!
- Defense Against the Dark Arts: Alert major search engines that you’ve updates your site via pinging them. You can automate the service on Pingomatic. I definitely didn’t know about this and plan on using it for this post!
- According to Moz, you should also include absolute links in your internal linking structure (so links with your full website address). This way if a scraper takes your content, the viewer will still be redirected back to your website. For a better understanding of relative links (as it relates to the website the content is published on) and absolute links (full address, not in relation to what site the info is published on), I visited CoffeeCup.com.

I'm looking forward to digging into the next chapters soon and reporting back. As I'm hanging out in DC for the day for a job interview, I can't help but think about the potential I have with Web Talent Marketing. While I'll go into this interview with my game face on, I think my heart will still be at 322 N. Arch Street in Lancaster. In the meantime, check out what else I've learned about SEO.

Sarah Masters SEO: What Chapter 4 Taught Me