My URLs look like "/pages.php?page=pageName" because I am using a database to supply the page's content. Does rewriting URLs to something like "/pageName" help search engines find the pages? If so how do I rewrite them? ...
I have a website and I'm employing Clean URLs to all of the links. I'm wondering what the opinion is about short, basic URLs versus longer, descriptive URLs. For instance, if my website was about Georgia Bulldog football news, which would be better for SEO purposes? http://www.example.com/news or http://www.example.com/georgia-bulldo...
I was wondering if using HTML entities in meta tags (like keywords and description) is the best way to go? Does it influence the indexing from search engines? ...
I will shortly be redesigning and launching a new version of my business site. I am currently in the top 5 search results for similar businesses in my line of work and in my area. I am concerned that the launch of my new site will result in a drop in rankings and a loss of business - Google has been good to me! What can I do to minimis...
I realize that keywords and descriptions are old-school SEO techniques and many search engines ignore them. However, it seems like it's good practice to still include them in your HTML pages. One of the best practices I've read concern not repeating keywords in the header tags. My question is then, what exactly is a repeat? For instanc...
I have thought about using WordPress – or maybe just copy a few functions to a internal site – but before I'd use it I would like to know how it's working. I'm thinking that WP is a bunch of slamcode so I'm hoping some of you could help me on how it's built. How is the .htaccess and URL rewrite combined with index.php? - The .htaccess ...
Hi, Why is it a bad idea to have a ID in the URL in terms of SEO? How does this: http://example.com/user/1234 Make SEO bad? Can someone give me a practical example where the SEPR lowers? ...
I was thinking about how i should write my URLs. I want them to A) Be user friendly B) SEO C) allow fast DB queries. The information i have are username, category, mediaId, title and other data i dont feel is necessary (date, hash, etc). Should i have the username before or after the domain name? (username.mysite.com/ vs mysite.com/user...
Recently a user told me to avoid subdomains when i can. I remember reading google consider subdomains as a unique site (is this true?). What else happens when i use a subdomain and when should i use or should not use a subdomain? I heard cookies are not shared between subdomains? i know 2 images can be DL simultaneously from a site. Wou...
What do you guys think is better? mysite.com/<username>/media/<mediaId>/<title> or mysite.com/<username>/media/<title>-<mediaId> The title portion is ignored entirely and only exist to provide user readable urls. It can change. What do you guys think is better? A pro for the former is if the title is cut off/not linked the url will st...
For example, when I post to Stackoverflow, the post appears in the Google index a minute later. How is this accomplished? What do I have to do to my web-site to get the same frequency of indexing? ...
Hi there, With all HTTP data available,What 'signs' can you look for to recognize Google's search engine robots? ...
I want http://mynewdomain.com to forward with masking to http://mysecretdomain.com/mynewsite. When a user types in http://mynewdomain.com/aboutus.html, he should see the contents of http://mysecretdomain.com/mynewsite/aboutus.html. I do not want the public to be aware of http://mysecretdomain.com. Will the way I use forwarding and mask...
When you are building URLs that should be legible for users and search engines and you do it automatically from the content, what's the best way to represent blank spaces? Hyphens (this is what StackOverflow uses)? Underscores? Any other? Does any of those make a different for SEO? ...
Here's my situation. I register myweb.ca (country specific) domain with Webhost Provider A because they allow ccTLD, while Webhost Provider B does not. I host my PHP files on Webhost Provider B at http://mysecretweb.com/myweb/ because I like them better (reliable, cheaper, proven etc...). I want to achieve the following: When user t...
If I have a page divided in sections/fragments, that are linked to within the page with anchors, like this: <div class="menu"> <a href="#sec1">Section 1</a> <a href="#sec2">Section 2</a> <a href="#sec3">Section 3</a> </div> <div class="content"> <a name="#sec1"></a> <h2>Section 1</h2> <p>Bla bla bla...</p> </div...
One section of our website presents a paged randomized content. The first time a new user visits the site, she is assigned a new random seed which passed in URL's and for persistence stored also in cookies. The problem is that the seed in URL's confuses Googlebot (and other indexing services); it complains that there are too many URL's p...
Hello all, I run a small e-commerce site that over the last few years has built up a reasonable search engine status. I've been working on a new site that uses new URL formats and I am worried about how to deal with all the broken links and customer frustration for users finding out dated links through search engines. Can anyone offer...
I am redesigning a site in ASP.NET MVC and as a consequence every page will have a new URL. I'm going to implement 301 permanent redirects from the old pages to the new. I'm wondering if doing this for thousands of pages all at once will have a negative effect on SEO. What about hundreds of thousands? ...
Hi I'm developing a PHP website, and currently my links are in a facebook-ish style, like so me.com/profile.php?id=123 I'm thinking of moving to something more friendly to crawling search engines (like here at stackoverflow), something like: me.com/john-adams But how can I differentiate from two users with the same name - or more ...