SEO Egghead by Jaimie Sirovich: A blog about SEO, written for nerds, by a nerd.

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Wed
14
Jun '06

Doesn't Matter if You're Black or White

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Excerpt: I was just thinking that it really bothers me that some SEOs are avowed "white-hats," and don't bother with studying blackhat techniques. Not to do so is a crime of ignorance, and it overlaps with site security as well.  If those honkies don't know about spamming, they won' ...
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Tue
13
Jun '06

URL Normalization; Slashing Duplicate Content

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Excerpt: To be honest, I'm not even sure this matters much anymore, but I thought I'd mention it.  Like the issue with parameter ordering (?a=1&b=2 vs. ?b=2&a=1) I mentioned here, a slash at the end of a URL can pose a similar ambiguity problem.  Fortunately, at least for non-rewrit ...
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Mon
12
Jun '06

Link Bait and its Electronic Cousin

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Excerpt: Aaron Wall of Seo Book states here that many sites have no way to easily garner links naturally, despite providing a useful service or information.  He cites traditional examples of link bait, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  These are amazingly effective ways to get traffic and visibil ...
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Sat
10
Jun '06

Does URL Parameter Order Matter?

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Excerpt: This is a question I'm currently researching. I have never looked into it before, because I haven't really used dynamic URLs for anything visible to a search engine recently; I always use mod_rewrite these days. The question goes as follows:When designing a dynamic URL and constructing it by ...
2 Comments »
Fri
9
Jun '06

Checking for Dead Links Automatically

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Excerpt: This neat little class can return the HTTP status code of a URL.  It uses cURL to do so.  Simply take the result of "parseResponseCode"  and see if it's a 200.  Depending on your requirements, 302 or 301 may also be a satisfactory answer, or you may want to update t ...
2 Comments »
Thu
8
Jun '06

Does Anyone Actually Use Status Code 410 (Gone)?

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Excerpt: I was reading through the documentation for mod_rewrite, and I noticed that "G," the gone directive sends a status code of "410," which means "gone," and not "404," which means not found. Strictly speaking there's a slight difference in meaning.  I su ...
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Thu
8
Jun '06

URL Canonicalization (/ vs. index.php)

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Excerpt: Unfortunately, the concept of "index" pages (index.php, Default.asp, etc.), a feature since the beginning of time on the web, causes yet another duplicate content problem.  If no file name in a directory is provided to a webserver, the "index" page is typically provided by d ...
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Thu
8
Jun '06

Using 500 Error Status Codes to Avert Indexing Erroneous Pages

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Excerpt: Once upon a time, in a place far away, your web server is chugging along and everything is fine.  Then, all of a sudden, something terrible happens, and the database goes down. Since this is an unanticipated error condition (all of us could do better error checking ...), many pages return erron ...
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