Neil Pursey's Blog

SEOmoz – Crawling & Indexing

Neil — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:54:58 PDT

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz takes us through the important factors which influence search engine indexing and crawling. He goes back to the basics. The video will be found more interesting by people who are new to the SEO industry but for those more advanced SEO’ers, the video might help keep you focused on the critical factors and help you forget about the “fluff” that we sometimes find ourselves getting involved in.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Crawling & Indexing from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Rating: 4.5/5 (2 votes cast)

Canonical issues

Neil — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:37:14 PDT

Something that is very important but most webmasters overlook is Canonical optimisation. A common canonical mistake is having both http://www.mydomian.com and http://mydomain.com, Google will index both. Thus it causes duplicate content issues and page strength syphoning.

Examples of Bad Canonical Optimisation

http://www.mydomain.com

http://mydomain.com

http://www.mydomain.com/index.html

http://mydomain.com/index.html

Example of Good Canonical Optimisation

http://www.mydomain.com

Thanks to the guys at Search Engine Round Table, here are a few ways to fix these Canonical Issues:

Canonicalize the domain (e.g. redirect non-www and IP address to www)
Canonicalize my index pages (redirect “/index.html” to “/”)
Remove multiple slashes in the URL
Remove spurious query strings (my sites’ pages are mostly ’static’ with a few exceptions)
Fix-up common typos in type-in URLs
Fix-up invalid inbound links caused by bad HTML mark-up
Fix-up URLs resulting from bad copy-and-pastes
Fix-up outdated or otherwise incorrect query strings
Suppress the fix-up redirect if the resulting URL does not resolve to an existing file
Suppress the fix-up if the link is on my own site (In this case, I want to see the 404 error)
Suppress the fix-up if the remote user is me or a site tester (Again, we want to see the 404 error)
Avoid recursion in mod_rewrite running in a per-directory .htaccess context
Avoid the nasty mod_rewrite bug in Apache 1.3.x
Do all of the above using a single 301-Moved Permanently redirect

Rating: 3.5/5 (4 votes cast)

Wordpress 2.8 is here

Neil — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:38:55 PDT

Rating: 4.5/5 (2 votes cast)

What impact does server location have on rankings?

Neil — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:33:48 PDT

Matt Cutts has been answering questions on Google’s webmaster central YouTube Channel rather frequently of late. With Google’s search engine algorithm changing their goal posts slightly over the past few months, many SEO’ers are looking to Matt Cutts to provide answers as to what to focus on. One of them being server location, this has been a bit of mystery and no one has really posted solid proof that server location is required for successful SEO.

Matt Cutts briefly explains that server location is important especially if you have a TLD domain.

Rating: 4.0/5 (1 vote cast)

Shortening URLs case study

Neil — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:18:20 PDT

A recent article in Search Engine Land’s blog got me thinking about refining Wordpress’s URL structure. When writing blog posts Wordpress creates a link structure like so (provided you uploaded .htaccess and set permalink structure correctly):

http://www.yourdomain.com/2009/03/19/article-title/

What Search Engine Land’s case study reveals is that the above URL is less likely to get clicked than the following one, which is the same but without the dates:

http://www.yourdomain.com/article-title/

What’s interesting is that Google’s spam expert, Matt Cutts, and SEObook’s, Aaron Wall, implement this URL structure as well. So clearly this is the correct URL structure when blogging.

I’ve gone and done the same to WebGrowth’s blog, it’ll be interesting to see how it affects the click through rate and SEO of the URLs.

I modified the permalink settings within wordpress:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

to the following:

/%postname%/

I also made sure to activate Alex King’s 404 plugin, which emails me whenever a “not-found (404)” error is generated on my site. It is always a good idea to activate this plugin whenever you make any structural changes to your blog, as it will help identify any errors you may have created.

I also added a 301 redirection plugin so I can make the changes manually.

It will take a while for the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN to re-index your blog, one must realise that you may lose page strength of previous URLs but for the longterm this is a better way to structure your URLs.

From a SEO perspective it is also good because you will have less “fluff” in your URL i.e. no more dates, now the URL is more focused on the keywords within the URL.

Rating: 4.5/5 (2 votes cast)