Let’s say, arguendo, that you have already decided to change your primary domain. What do you plan to do with your old, no longer going to be used, domain?

Ideally, you should 301 redirect the old domain to the new domain. If you’re completely rebuilding your site from scratch and all of the old URLs are going to change, it’s still a good idea to 301 the old domain to the new domain. It’s an even better idea to 301 all of the old URLs to new, equivalent pages on your new site.

This advice assumes that you have:

1. Had your site long enough for it to have accumulated some decent inbound links. If your current site has absolutely no backlinks then we can talk about the pros and cons of 301′ing; however, in most circumstances, you want to 301 the old URLs to their new equivalents.
2. Not done anything stupid with your site, like gotten it banned from the engines or blacklisted in some way. If the domain is completely burned, then ditching it and running far far away is probably your only course of action. To people that fall into this category, I’m not talking about you, so feel free to move along.

Hoard your old domains like cute kittens. On second thought, don't actually hoard kittens. It's mean and you'll end up on a TLC reality show.

Operating under the assumption that you’ve had your site for a fair bit and it’s got some backlinks and you’re not a dirty spammer/evil-doer…

Do NOT just let the domain expire and definitely do not release it before the end of its registration. Even if you’re not going to use it for just a 301…. even if you’re not going to use it AT ALL… your best bet (in almost all cases) is to keep it.

I know it will cost you $8 a year to maintain a domain you’re not using, and yes, I do know we’re in a recession. The facts are that some very bad things can happen if you release a used domain into the wild.

Bad™ Things That Can Happen

A competitor might get it. If your old domain was keywords only, and there’s nothing trademarked or trademarkable about it, there is absolutely nothing preventing a competitor from snatching up that domain and using it as their own, or 301ing it to THEIR site to take advantage of all of the inbound links you just flushed down the toilet.

If your old domain contained trademarks, you might be able to get it back, but the cost of filing a UDRP is upwards of $10,000 DOLLARS. It’s only 800 pennies a year to hang onto the domain and prevent the whole mess in the first place.

Besides, you’d have to notice someone is doing something they shouldn’t in the first place. If don’t care enough to renew the domain so you can sit on it, you probably won’t bother checking to make sure it isn’t being used by someone else, either.

Someone who doesn’t like your business might start using it. Recently, I discovered that a local chapter of a national not-for-profit organization was being impersonated online and that the fake site was being used as “proof” of the damaging claims the impostor was making on social networks and forums. Most people aren’t savvy enough to go check a domain registration to confirm the legitimacy of a site, so with the right illegally used logos and a cheap shared hosting account, this guy was able to set up a site that looked and read like the “real” site and even had backlinks to it from real government sites and other civic organizations.

The worst part about this story is that a couple years ago, someone else at the real organization had also noticed the fake site and spent the (large sum of) money to file a UDRP — and WON — but then no one kept tabs on the domain and it was allowed to expire again and the same guy went and re-registered it and put everything back the way he had it before.

Want to know the worst part of the story? (Yes, there actually is something even worse…) The domain they gave up (twice) had their full name in it. The new domain is all initials. 8 letters strung together that make no sense to anyone except to the people at the non-profit. All that hassle, and they would have been far better off keeping the original domain in the first place. :(

Someone who has no clue who you are, but is much better at marketing than you are might pick it up. Again, especially if your old domain had no trademarks in it, there is nothing stopping someone else from grabbing that domain and using it (and taking advantage of any accumulated backlinks you had).

The Moral of the Domain Story

Once the domain is registered by someone else, it is highly unlikely you’re going to get it back without giving up a sizable chunk of change — either to the new owner, or to a lawyer. It is much easier to just pay the 8 bucks a year.

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
Why Keeping That Old Domain is Important

As promised, here’s the recap of the recent Chicago SEO Meetup: Harnessing WordPress…

The first thing we covered were reasons why people and businesses might choose WordPress over other platforms like hand-coded HTML, Drupal, ASP, Joomla, etc.

• WordPress has a large and very active development and support community

  Why is this important? This usually translates to more/neater widgets and plugins, better/easier to get support, and because it’s so popular you’ll have an easier time finding people who can help you out if you need help. (Ask me about RedDot some day if you’d like an example of why you should go with a platform that more than 4 people in the US know anything about).

• WordPress has really well written documentation for the DIYers

  This probably doesn’t need explanation… basically, if you ever want to try to understand or fix something on your own, you want to be able to easily find and understand the documentation. There are some software developers who write in weird prose that is only discernible by middle-earthen elvish attorneys — WordPress’s codex is not like that.

• WordPress is easy to use, even by the technologically challenged.

  If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball… Same basic principle, but much less painful. If you need a platform that can be updated/used by people on your staff who are uneasy with the concept of blogging or aren’t as technologically clueful as you might like, WP is a great option because the interface is intuitive. If you can use Word, you can use WordPress.

The biggest argument against choosing WordPress was security related. Is WordPress more insecure than other platforms? — Not inherently… if it seems like there are more problems, I would argue that it’s due to there being so many people using WordPress (and perhaps not maintaining it properly or using questionable plugins/themes). There are things you can do to mitigate security concerns if you have them, but for the most part, if you’re responsible about maintenance and security practices, you’re not taking an unreasonable risk by choosing WordPress.

On to the SEOing….

Much of the SEO related items that were discussed were not WP specific, but were just general best practices — write good titles, unique meta descriptions on every page, good anchor text, etc.

The WP specific items that were discussed and plugins that were recommended included:

• Don’t over-bling your blog — Be judicious about the types and quantity of plugins you’re using. Too many can cause conflicts (which will make things malfunction), or slow your load time to the point that your rankings suffer, or open you up to security issues (Do you check the source code of the plugins you download and install? Are you checking to see who the programmer is?).
• SEO Smart Links (Plugin) — To auto-insert internal links, this is a useful plugin… (if you’re too lazy to do them manually). Just be careful to not overdo it. Keep it to one or two internal links per post (ESPECIALLY if the posts are on the short side).
• Premium Themes like Thesis, WooThemes and Genesis — In addition to automating much of the design drama that most bloggers or non-technical users don’t care to futz with, these themes also build in a lot of the SEO work as well. This minimizes the number of additional SEO plugins and scripts you’ll need to install, which reduces the chances of conflicts and problems.
• Learn how to modify your own template files — If you’re not going to spring for a premium theme, I strongly strongly strongly urge you to learn how to edit and modify your own template files. You can edit your files to handle some of the mundane SEO work that would otherwise be handled by a plugin, and as mentioned before, the more plugins you have that need to process the data, the more overhead and the slower your site will load. It’s really not difficult to edit the header file to always stick the name of your site at the end of the title, or to insert the the_excerpt() function into the meta description to always have unique page descriptions, etc.

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
Recap of Chicago SEO Meetup: Harnessing WordPress for SEO

We’ll be covering things like “Why WordPress (over other platforms)?”, recommended classes and tools for learning to use WordPress effectively, tips for creating content and plugins to use for helping SEO efforts and improve rankings, and more.

We are not (at this time) 100% sure there will be a projector, so you may want to plan to take notes. Specific tools, plugins and recommendations will be posted online for later consumption, and I might try to bring handouts (if anyone is interested).

The September Chicago Search Engine Optimization Meetup is scheduled for 2:00pm on Saturday, September 25, 2010 at the Budlong Woods Branch of the Chicago Public Library.

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
Chicago SEO Meetup: Harnessing the Power of WordPress

The new solution (WordPress) is fabulous, but now I have a couple hundred inbound links that are broken. Trying to get all of the links updated by the other sites was a losing proposition, so my next step was to put some 301 redirects into my friendly neighborhood .htaccess file and transfer all the link love to the new pages.

Easy (normal) 301 redirects via .htaccess
Normally, a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file would look like this:
Redirect 301 /old/url.shtml http://domain.com/new/filename
or if we’re being fancy…
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^old/url.shtml$ new/filename [R=301,L]

Normally, the examples above are perfect for redirecting incoming links from old, defunct pages to the new, correct location of the file. The problem I ran into is that my pages were dynamically generated; i.e., they all shared the same URL, and which review was presented to the user was determined by an argument passed in the URL after the file extension.
http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/script.cgi?review=bobs_shrimp_hut

To address this, I figured I would just include the argument in the pattern that the RewriteRule tries to match, and make sure that I remembered to escape the question mark after the file extension since question marks are special characters in regex.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^cgi-bin/script.cgi?review=bobs_shrimp_hut$ restaurants/bobs-shrimp-hut [R=301,L]

Looks right… but nothing happened. Like, nothing-nothing. It didn’t return a 500 Server Error, which would have let me know I screwed something up, and it also didn’t even attempt to rewrite the URL. When I tried the original (old) address, I got a 404. :(

Since my .htaccess file already had a number of other RewriteRules that were executing correctly, I ruled out the possibility that the .htaccess file wasn’t being read. To test my assumption, I tried removing the argument portion from the rule (the question mark and everything after it).
RewriteRule ^cgi-bin/script.cgi$ restaurants/bobs-shrimp-hut [R=301,L]

Okay, that worked. We’ve confirmed the .htaccess file is being read and things are working correctly. The only problem with this solution is that this rule will fire every time any of the reviews are accessed, regardless of the argument, and will always rewrite as “restaurants/bobs-shrimp-hut”. Great exposure for Bob’s Shrimp Hut, but not cool if you were expecting to find Chez Francois or Chuck’s Cheese Chalet.

Let’s RTFM!
After re-reading the Apache documentation on the Mod_Rewrite Module, I found this in the RewriteRule Directive section:

What is matched?

The Pattern will initially be matched against the part of the URL after the hostname and port, and before the query string. If you wish to match against the hostname, port, or query string, use a RewriteCond with the %{HTTP_HOST}, %{SERVER_PORT}, or %{QUERY_STRING} variables respectively.

Crap. The part of the URL after the hostname and before the query string is identical for all 200 restaurants. The query string is what I HAVE to match.

Alrighty, so the manual says I need a RewriteCond if I want to match anything against the QUERY_STRING (argument). So I tried the following:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)bobs_shrimp_hut$
RewriteRule ^cgi-bin/script.cgi$ restaurants/bobs-shrimp-hut [R=301,L]

And it worked! Mostly. The rewritten URL looked like this:
http://www.domain.com/restaurants/bobs-shrimp-hut/?review=bobs_shrimp_hut

So we’re 98% of the way there at this point. Realistically, this is still a success as far as the user is concerned because the link does redirect to the new page successfully. It’s just ugly and will cause some canonical issues for the engines.

So I RTFMd some more, and a little further down the page, I found this:

Modifying the Query String

By default, the query string is passed through unchanged. You can, however, create URLs in the substitution string containing a query string part. Simply use a question mark inside the substitution string to indicate that the following text should be re-injected into the query string. When you want to erase an existing query string, end the substitution string with just a question mark. To combine new and old query strings, use the [QSA] flag.

Eureka! So now my .htaccess looks like this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)bobs_shrimp_hut$
RewriteRule ^cgi-bin/script.cgi$ restaurants/bobs-shrimp-hut? [R=301,L]
which gives us
http://www.domain.com/restaurants/bobs-shrimp-hut
YAY!

The only downside to this method of redirection is that there has to be a separate RewriteCond/RewriteRule pair for each argument I need to redirect. This is only because I failed to use a consistent naming scheme. If I had thought ahead when I set up the original script, I probably would have named the files differently and wouldn’t be having this problem now.

If the names were consistent between the old script and the new solution, I would have been able to do something like this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^review=(.*)$
RewriteRule ^cgi-bin/script.cgi$ restaurants/%1? [R=301,L]
%1 retrieves a captured value from the RewriteCond. $1 (more commonly seen) retrieves a captured value from the first part of a RewriteRule. This single Condition/Rule pair would have handled all of the dynamic URLs from the old script and redirected them to their new homes.

Okay, that’s it for the .htaccess tonight. My head feels like it’s going to explode.

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
Mod_rewrite doesn’t look at arguments? D’oh!

Think of this as sort of like those essay contests the English teachers used to make everyone participate in, but the differences are 1) we won’t take off points for poor grammar or spelling (because this is all about style and ability to persuade!) and 2) the prize is way cooler than some lame $50 savings bond that you can’t do anything with for 20 years.

BEHOLD, the Details

1. Listen to SEO 101 tonight at 9p Central
2. Call (646) 716-6190
3. When you’re on… give us your most compelling reasons why YOUR business needs and can use the information and tools you’ll learn at the seminar.

Just remember, the seminar is near St. Louis, Missouri. You have to be able to get yourself there and home again because we’re only supplying admission to the event ;)

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
SEO 101 Call-In Show Tonight

In addition to the talks, there will also be a “Ask the Experts” panel and a two hour networking event (with a bar — naturally) and the sponsors are also giving each attendee a complimentary SEO audit of their business Web site.

I believe there are just under 50 tickets left for this event, so if you’re in the St. Louis area, hurry and register (now!)

Title: Look At Me Seminar – Market Saint Louis
Location: Glendale, Missouri
Link out: Click here
Description: The “Look at Me” seminar will help you understand the power of online marketing, and how it will boost your bottom line significantly. This event is tailored entirely for business owners in the Saint Louis area that want to get in front of online customers, but don’t know how.
Start Time: 9:00
Date: 2009-06-11
End Time: 18:00

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
‘Look At Me’ Seminar – Market Saint Louis

Podcast Recap
Before I join the podcast, Brian and Robert covered a pretty extensive array of e-commerce topics:

• Twitter “Help Engines”
• A lengthy discussion of Magento Commerce, prompted by the announcement that Brian is converting his properties from his own custom-built ecommerce platform to Magento (which speaks volumes about how impressed Brian is with the features available — it’s not like he hasn’t just built his own platform when he needed features existing programs didn’t offer).
• Robert Garcia (Rumblepup) is now offering e-commerce and SEO consulting.
• There was fairly in-depth discussion of the evolution of social media — from the days of BBSs and Usenet News through to all the “new” Web 2.0 social media options.
• Brian and Robert also discussed a number of social bookmarking and social shopping sites that retailers should definitely be paying attention to…. specifically mentioned were:
  • ThisNext
  • Kaboodle
  • HonestBargain
  • Dealigg
• Finally, they wrapped up by talking about must-haves for every e-commerce website: “Add This” buttons to enable customers to easily submit products to the aforementioned social bookmarking and shopping sites, product reviews, and forums for customers to discuss services and products, as well as get support.

So then….
Whew! Still with me? Okay :) This is where I joined the conversation… I just returned from PubCon South in Austin, where Twitter was discussed *incessantly*. I shared with Brian and Robert some of the major points that were discussed, what software is most popular for using and monitoring Twitter streams, and some best practices for retailers on how to use, but not abuse one’s Tweeple.

I’ll warn you, this is a 95 minute long episode, so make sure you’ve either got a long drive ahead of you, or have a comfy place to sit before you begin :)

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
Ecom Phenom: Social Media and eCommerce

Thankfully, the guys at IM Broadcast have created a mini-conference designed to maximize the education and networking while minimizing the cash out of your wallet. The concept is simple: shorter conference, single room, limited attendance, intensive education…. for a *reasonable* price.

Their first conference using this format (Scary SEO) was a great success. I was tremendously impressed with the quality of both the sessions and the networking. (The cookie breaks in the afternoon were a personal favorite, too!)

Spring Break hopes to expand on the success of Scary SEO by expanding the formay from two to three days to accommodate more topics and more great speakers, but keeping the attendee numbers and admission price low.

So here’s the skinny:

IM Spring Break is 3 days of intensive search education featuring world class speakers (who can also be found speaking at the “big-big” conferences), very limited attendance (read: this WILL sell out quickly), and lots of time in between presentations for work group discussions and opportunities to get real expert help with your specific issues.

On top of all this, the price of admission is only $500 and it’s in Deerfield Beach Florida (near Ft. Lauderdale and hence the “Spring Break” part) AND the hotel is only $159 a night.

To put it in perspective, you’re getting up close and personal access to the biggest names in the search world, plus entertainment, plus Florida DURING spring break, plus a nice hotel room, plus a great educational opportunity… for less than the cost of JUST the admission to one of the big conferences.

In a nutshell:

If money is tight and you can only choose one conference to attend this year…. attend IM Spring Break. It’s a great value.

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
IM Spring Break: Sun, Fun and Internet Marketing

In addition to the obligatory, heymybookisgreatsogobuyit stuff, Mike talks with us about developing and implementing a search marketing program in your business, the ins and outs of exploring new media and social media (again, in the context of “how will this benefit my business”), and then finally, the absolute importance of optimizing your internal Web site search.

P.S. If you’re looking for something to keep you from dying of boredom at the relative-who-has-no-wifi’s house over the holidays… grab a copy… good readin’

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
SEO 101: Mike Moran discusses Search Engine Marketing, Inc

Specifically, we discuss:

• Crawling through HTML Forms — Friday, April 11, 2008
• Dynamic URLs vs static URLs — Monday, September 22, 2008

In a nutshell, Google says they pull “important” terms from surrounding pages and use them to populate search boxes and other forms in an effort to get more content. Some of the terms they pull don’t seem like things normal people would be searching for, so we’re not sure how exactly they decide what terms to try or not try. You should be able to scan through your access logs and pick out examples of the bot filling in forms to see for yourself.

As for the 180 degree flip on dynamic URLs vs. static URLs, we’re pretty much in agreement that it’s not a green light to shut off URL rewriting or stop doing “pretty URLs”. Pretty URLs enhance the user experience, and in cases where you have an existing web site that is already turning ugly, dynamic URLs into pretty static strings, you should DEFINITELY not deviate from the status quo. Changing all of your existing URLs will cause a horrendous drop in traffic while the engines try to figure out what you’ve done and get everything sorted out.

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
SEO 101: Google Revelations