Re-launching a site is a crucial and often worrying time. There are many many things that can go wrong, and when they do go wrong the results are often spectacular.
When was the last time you had a heated discussion with your developer? Or better yet, when was the last time they rolled their eyes at you when you asked them to make some sort of change to the website? My guess is that it probably hasn't been all that long. Or has it? A higher probability is actually that you work with some wicked smart developers who blow your mind away with their sheer awesomeness!
There are some very different schools of thought out there regarding 404 error code pages. Some SEOs recommend: Never allowing them - 301'ing every error page back to the home page or an internal category level page to preserve the maximum amount of link juice (in case someone links to a broken URL) Letting any erroneous/mistyped URL 404. Something...
We all know by this time about the benefits of converting your parameterized URLs to human- and crawler-friendly URLs, but the stock tools of the trade (ISAPI_Rewrite, mod_rewrite, etc.) don't necessarily scale all that well when you have a large number of categories, product pages, etc. I'm going to walk you through what it takes to code this yourself, and I think you'll find it's less scary and complex than you thought, and gives you a number of benefits in terms of ongoing maintenance, flexibility, etc.
I recently read jennita's excellent post, "URL Rewrites and 301 Redirects - How does it all work?", and thought a mod_rewrite example might be helpful to some. So, here's some example code of how I have used mod_rewrite to replace dynamic URLs with SEO friendly URLs.
URL rewrites and 301 redirects... you talk about them, you recommend them, but do you truly understand how they work? Sure, you know that rewriting a URL means that the URL displayed in the browser changes to be more SEO (and user) friendly. And you know that a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. But let's dig a little deeper, and explain how they work together.
A couple of large client projects we are working on at the moment have had me thinking about a tricky issue that rears its head in enterprise SEO projects especially. When large clients are making extensive website changes, our experience is that the section entitled '301 redirects' is inevitably the section that gets read quickly and then quietly shuffled out of scope. We have found we have to push hard to get large businesses to see the importance of permanent redirects.
At the SMX Sydney conference in Australia this past week, search engineers Priyank Garg & Greg Grothaus (of Yahoo! & Google, respectively) shared information about duplicate content filtering across domains of which I and many of the other speakers/attendees were previously unaware. Priyank, when asked about best practices for "localizing" English language content acro...
I've been working with a lot of newcomers to SEO lately thanks to our PRO membership Q+A (BTW - sorry for the delays, the volume's tripled in the last 3 weeks, so we're a bit overwhelmed). It's been a great learning experience and I've gotten to see many of the struggles and misconceptions that affect entrants to the subject. As a partial remedy, I thought I'd take some time tonight to cover a ...
There are some difficulties at the moment with how to manage large numbers of local listings. As the tools for managing local listings improve, this will all get easier, but there is a fundamental problem with the setup if you operate in multiple languages. The guidelines currently say that you cannot create multiple listings for an individual entity (business location in a city) - but each listing is just associated with a single URL which doesn't work well when you operate in multiple languages.
The announcement from Yahoo!, Live & Google that they will be supporting a new "canonical url tag" to help webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is, in my opinion, the biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps. It's rare that we cover search engine announcements or "news items" here on SEOmoz, as this blog is devoted more towards tactics than breaking headlines, but this certainly demands attention and requires quick education.
Root Domains - the domain name you need to buy/register with a TLD extension. Subdomains - the "third level" domain name; these are free to create under any root domain you own/control.
Like any other person out there, I fall into habits, good and bad. Recently while working on a client’s website, I created a Sitemap and submitted it to the search engines, like I always do. I started to think if this really helps the site out and what’s the effect when I submit a Sitemap on the site.
I've been watching a lot more of the Dr. House show, and becoming a bit obsessed with some SEO mysteries of my own. Since our last outing into diagnosis went so well, I thought we'd try again. I haven't got either completely solved, but I feel pretty good about some hypotheses. Let's see how you...