We're currently replacing all special characters and spaces in our URLs with hypens (-). From an SEO and readability point-of-view this works fine. However, in some cases, we are feeding parts of the URL into a search after stripping the hyphens out. The problem occurs when the search term should have hyphens as it returns no results whe...
If I have a forums site with a large number of threads, will the search engine bot crawl the whole site every time? Say I have over 1,000,000 threads in my site, will they get crawled every time the bot crawls my site? or how does it work? I want my website to be indexed but I don't want the bot to kill my website! In other words I don't...
I have some pages on my site that are plain HTML pages, but I want to add some ASP .NET type functionality to these pages. My concern is that if I simple rename the .html page to .aspx that I will break links, and lose SEO, and so on. I would think there is a "best practice" for how to handle this situation. ...
Wikipedia allows you to reproduce its content. If you want to use Wikipedia materials in your own books/articles/websites or other publications, you can do so -- but only in compliance with the GFDL. See here. I am considering using some wikipedia content to pad out pages on my website. For example - just taking the first couple of par...
I know this is a question that has been asked a hundred times on the Internet, but I have a couple of reasons to ask it here: (1) so it's on SO; (2) it's something that hard to find--there is a lot of junk. What I'm trying to determine which page, for example, example.com is in the Google search results, for say "stackoverflow.com". Is ...
Looking for some SEO (Search engine optimization) questions on Stackoverflow, I saw ambivalent reactions to these questions. Some were closed as "not programming related" or were downvoted, others were answered and got upvoted. It seems that many developers think SEO was something "dirty" or belonged in the realm of spam. IMHO designing...
Hi guys, sorry about the title :) Here is my basic problem, I trying to implement an SEO type query for a location. Here are my examples /Leeds /Leeds_England /Hampshire_England /England_Leeds /Europe_England I am trying to get the location, now I am splitting on the '_', then doing a LINQ lookup through my List's for each part. Lo...
I run a site where users have their own profile pages. They are also able to post products for sale (that they have made) and write/import blog posts. I am going to be implementing a sitemap and I need to make a final decision with the URL strategy. Here's what I currently have for products (where 1234 is the product ID that I use to lo...
I'm managing an established site which is currently in the process of being upgraded (completely replaced anew), but I'm worried that I'll lose all my Google indexing (that is, there will be a lot of pages in Google's index which won't exist in that place any more). The last time I upgraded a (different) site, someone told me I should h...
I have been noticing on my trackers that bots are visiting my site ALOT. Should I change or edit my robots.txt or change something? Not sure if thats good, because they are indexing or what? ...
In a situation when you are doing a major code release and/or database schema change to a production environment is it detrimental to SEO to put up a "Gone Fishin'" page while the upgrade happening? Assume that using the old code/database schema during the upgrade could put the post-upgrade DB into an undesirable/unknown state. ...
When adding a bookmark or favorite the browser uses the TITLE tag of the page to automatically populate the title of the bookmark. However, my web pages use SEO-friendly titles which are not really user-friendly. Is there a method to override the title when the browser makes a bookmark? I am aware that I can create a link on the page th...
Any google search for anything about SEO yields more articles than you can shake a stick at, but lot of the articles are out of date, many have conflicting advice and I just about none of them ever give any reasons/proof/data to back up their claims about what works and what doesn't. Has anyone done any at least somewhat scientific test...
Our SEO team would like to open up our main dynamic search results page to spiders and remove the 'nofollow' from the meta tags. It is currently accessible to spiders via allowing the path in robots.txt, but with a 'nofollow' clause in the meta tag which prevents spiders from going beyond the first page. <meta name="robots" content="in...
What is everyone's opinion of SEO companies and is there a true honest service that can help? Is it a waste of money and time? Are they really able to influence your ranking in a search? ...
Hi again! I am looking for url encoding tips for SEO compliant site. I have a list of variables I need! hypen = used to split locations, Leeds-UK-England space = underscore for where spaces occur hypen = plus sign used in some british locations (stafford-upon-avon) forward slash = exclamation used in house for names of things. Are t...
I will take the example of the SO site. To go to the list of questions, the url is www.stackoverflow.com/questions. Behind the scene, this goes to a controller (whose name is unknown) and to one of its actions. Let's say that this is controller=home and action=questions. How to prevent the user to type www.stackoverflow.com/home/questio...
I have a web forum that I have coded in Python for the App Engine platform. I have noticed that it is not being index well by Google and am trying to fix that. I have Google Webmaster to submit a sitemap with almost 400 URLs but apparently only 8 were index! I even get a warning stating: All the URLs in your Sitemap are marked as hav...
Are all these types of sites just illegally scraping Google or another search engine? As far as I can tell ther is no 'legal' way to get this data for a commercial site.. The Yahoo! api ( http://developer.yahoo.com/search/siteexplorer/V1/inlinkData.html ) is only for noncommercial use, Yahoo! Boss does not allow automated queries etc. An...
Love to hear your opinions and justification? I've heard deep directories are bad, but how does it compare to underscore characters? ...