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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 suppose "not found" implies it was never there, and "gone" implies it was deleted; but does anyone actually use it?  I don't think so.From mod_rewrite documentation (http://…

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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 default, but without redirection. The problem arises when both URLs are linked, either internally or from other sites.  Bang - duplicate content.  Strictly speaking, neither URL is more corre…

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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 f…

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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,…

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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.  Do…

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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,…

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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 …

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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 s…