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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 erroneous blank pages or 404s. Or perhaps the webserver goes down altogether. Worse still, you don't have a hot standby to replace it. Meanwhile, Google is trying to index your pages, not finding anything, getting blank pages, pages with heaps of errors, or 404s. Let's go through the possibilities:Returning…
Jun
8
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May
24
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Excerpt: This is a technique I've seen applied to bulletin boards, but never on eCommerce sites, and I'm not sure why. Really, I'm not sure. So you have an eCommerce site, let's call it something cliche like "DiscountWidgets.com." A user types the query "inexpensive macintosh compatible widget." He sees a SERP that's highlighted with relevant-looking text bolded in the excerpted copy, but he want to see more. That's nice, but when he gets to the page, it's not bolded anymore, so he's lost. If he's not totally determined to find what he's looking for (and most users…
May
22
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Excerpt: This is an old topic for me; one that I feel is largely ignored by the SEM community. I asked Jake Baillie of TrueLocal at an SES conference awhile back, and he suggested that breadcrumbs are trouble when it comes to duplicate content no-matter-what, and, of course, I used to work for Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick, who is a big believer in breadcrumbs, but believes that the search engines should just "deal with it." He may have changed his mind, so take it with a grain of salt. Don't quote me.I tend to agree with Barry, but I'm not sure…
May
22
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Excerpt: Here I am, minding my own business, trying to write a rule for mod_rewrite that redirects /blog/ to / so there's no duplicate content (just in case I missed a homepage link in the template — or someone links it — it gets redirected). And here I am discovering that Yahoo (quite lamely) doesn't support .htaccess files at all. Wow, this totally stinks.This comes after also discovering that Yahoo also doesn't allow their managed WordPress installation to go in the root directory, either.But I found a solution:if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == '/blog/') { header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: http://www.seoegghead.com/"); exit(); } Just…
Apr
27
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Excerpt: I've seen many misconceptions about mod_rewrite. I believe this is because most people in this industry know what it is, but aren't programmers, or don't understand the concepts well. First, I've seen people say mod_rewrite incurs major overhead. This may be true if you ask apes to write your regular expressions, and all of your expressions are PT (pass through) and execute every other expression in the list, so I don't know where that came from.Then there are the other people who think mod_rewrite is a revelation from God, a sort of third testament between SEOs and a higher entity. This…
Apr
12
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Excerpt: I remember the days when search engine optimization was a black art of analyzing and improving on-page factors. WebPosition Gold was king, and people obsessed over keyword density and which HTML tags to use. The WebPosition Gold manual went so far as to recommend optimizing content for different search engines individually, thusly creating different pages with similar content optimized with different densities and tags.Now, in 2006, that would be called duplicate content. The struggle today is creating a site with interactive content and navigation with no duplicate content, with fancy rewritten URLs, with good internal linking-structure, etc. I read a…
Apr
7
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Excerpt: So we all know MSN search was down on March, 6, right? And this totally sucks. But MSN bashing aside, I personally have noticed that MSN search has silently been getting better. And I expect it to get better still.Why is this?Well, 2 reasons. One, Microsoft is increasingly hiring the best people from the best schools, quite like Google. Only a small handful of the best students (I never applied, but I'm not sure I'd make it — maybe) get interviewed, and maybe one per year gets hired. The school is Stevens Institute of Technology if any of you are…
Mar
22
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Excerpt: I've been asked to write an SEO book from a technological point of view. As part of the process, I will post some of my ideas on this blog. The title is TBD, but it will be a handbook for all the common questions and concerns that a search engine marketer will have addressed entirely from a programming angle. A stress will be placed on showing examples in PHP, and, perhaps, a later edition in ASP. As a first topic, I will discuss the topic of search engine sitemaps. I am not referring to the general concept of a sitemap,…
