seo

mod_rewrite to alias one file suffix type to another

Hi guys, I hope I can explain this clearly enough, but if not let me know and I'll try to clarify. I'm currently developing a site using ColdFusion and have a mod_rewrite rule in place to make it look like the site is using PHP. Any requests for index.php get processed by index.cfm (the rule maps *.php to *.cfm). This works great - so...

Associating source and search keywords with account creation

As a part of the signup process for my online application, I'm thinking of tracking the source and/or search keywords used to get to my site. This would allow me to see what advertising is working and from where with a somewhat finer grain than Google Analytics would. I assume I could set some kind of cookie with this information when p...

how to get the googlebot to get the correct GEOIPed content!?

OK. This problem is doing my head in. And I dont know if there even IS a definitive answer. We have a website, lets call it mycompany.com. It's a UK-based site, with UK based content. Google knows about it, and we have done a load of SEO on it. All is well. Except, we are about to relaunch my company, the GLOBAL brand, so we now need m...

How do I generate a friendly URL in Symfony PHP?

I always tend to forget these built-in symfony functions for making links. ...

Dynamic robots.txt

Let's say I have a web site for hosting community generated content that targets a very specific set of users. Now, let's say in the interest of fostering a better community I have an off-topic area where community members can post or talk about anything they want, regardless of the site's main theme. Now, I want most of the content to...

Why do some websites add "Slugs" to the end of URLs?

Many websites, including this one, add what are apparently called slugs - descriptive but as far as I can tell useless bits of text - to the end of URLs. For example, the URL the site gives for this question is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-do-some-websites-add-slugs-to-the-end-of-urls But the following URL works j...

HTML Compression and SEO?

At work, we have a dedicated SEO Analyst who's job is to pour over lots of data (KeyNote/Compete etc) and generate up fancy reports for the executives so they can see how we are doing against our competitors in organic search ranking. He also leads initiatives to improve the SEO rankings on our sites by optimizing things as best we can. ...

SEO Superstitions: Are <script> tags really bad?

We have an SEO team at my office, and one of their dictums is that having lots of <script> blocks inline with the HTML is apocalypticly bad. As a developer that makes no sense to me at all. Surely the Google search engineers, who are the smartest people on the planet, know how to skip over such blocks? My gut instinct is that minimizing...

HTML meta keyword/description element, useful or not?

Does filling out HTML meta description/keyword tags matter for SEO? ...

Getting Good Google PageRank

In SEO people talk a lot about Google PageRank. It's kind of a catch 22 because until your site is actually big and you don't really need search engines as much, it's unlikely that big sites will link to you and increase your PageRank! I've been told that it's easiest to simply get a couple high quality links to point to a site to raise...

Best Permalinking for Rails

What do you think is the best way to create SEO friendly URLs (dynamically) in Rails? ...

How much tolerance does google have for large site maps...

I have a site map of a few thoasand pages where the only different content on them is the title attribute and the content plotted out in a google map? Will google punish me for this as spam? ...

How can I get a history of a website's PageRank?

I want to view, in any format, how the PageRank for a particular URL or domain name has changed over time. Some tools can provide this information from the first time someone manually submitted a request for that site. I would prefer a solution where monitoring of a site is not triggered by a human-made request. ...

How can I get a history of the number of pages in Google's index for a particular site?

A Google search for "site:example.com" will tell you the number of pages of example.com that are currently in Google's index. Is it possible to find out how this number has changed over time? ...

How can I perform a Google search on different Google datacentres?

I would like to get up-to-date information on Google's index of a website, and it seems that results vary depending on which datacentre happens to process your search query. ...

SEO and hard links with dynamic URLs

With ASP.NET MVC (or using HttpHandlers) you can dynamically generate URLs, like the one in this question, which includes the title. What happens if the title changes (for example, editing it) and there's a link pointing to the page from another site, or Google's Pagerank was calculated for that URL? I guess it's all lost right? (The l...

Dash vs. Underscore

Should it be /about_us or /about-us? From usability point of view, I personally think /about-us is much better for end-user yet Google and most other websites (and javascript frameworks) use underscore naming pattern. Is it just matter of style? Are there any compatibility issues with dashes? ...

Supporting URLs like /similar-to-:product in Ruby on Rails?

I have been trying to use routes.rb for creating a URL /similar-to-:product (where product is dynamic) for my website. The issue is that routes.rb readily supports URLs like /:product-similar but doesn't support the former because it requires :product to be preceded with a separator ('/' is a separator but '-' isn't). The list of separat...

What are the differences between SEO and SEM ?

Could you anyone tell me what is the main difference between SEO and SEM? ...

Multiple domains for one site: alias or redirect?

I'm setting up a number sites right now and many of them have multiple domains. The question is: do I alias the domain (with ServerAlias) or do I Redirect the request? Obviously ServerAlias is better/easier from a readability or scripting perspective. I have heard however that Google likes it better if everything redirects to one dom...