SEO: 301 Search Engine Friendly Redirect
July 16, 2008 | SEO
This post was inspired by another post I just happened across in another blog. It basically said if you move your blog just put a meta refresh tag, it works very simply in that your visitor gets automatically redirected, no problems or at least you would assume so. This is just one of many examples I could point to where the information that gets left out is more important than what gets included.
The problem in this case is the redirect is fine in itself but it is a spammy technique and Google doesn’t like the meta refresh tag approach. Ah! Just a minor problem. The reason for this is it’s one of the oldest black hat tricks in the book, you buy a domain that’s expired with some Page Rank or link juice from the previous owners and then redirect to your site.
We’ve had instances in quite a few projects recently where we’ve had to implement SEO friendly redirects for one reason or another.:
- site redesign
- page names need changing
- from dynamic links to static url’s
- url’s that are not friendly to the user
- urls need to be made more keyword friendly
- simple typo for both internal and external links
- bad navigation architecture
If you need to redirect a page then done in the correct manner this can be as highly effective as any other critical implementation you make for SEO or done badly it can get you banned. A redirect is highly effective and can correct most problems that cause Page Rank or link juice leakage
So how do you do it correctly? Well first we should say with anything we do to enhance our site for SEO we’re not trying to trick or deceive the Search Engines into giving us brownie points we don’t deserve, we’re simply helping them.
With redirects there are two types:
- Permanent / 301
- non-permanent / 302
Obviously if your permanently moving a page then you want a permanent redirect and vice versa. A redirect is put on your web site’s server and not into the pages of the site itself unlike the dodgy meta tag refresh. The bad news is that means you have to do some programming, the good news is the programming is very simple. The most popular server on the web is the Apache server so we will deal with that.
There is probably more likely than not a file named .htaccess in the root of your folder, if not don’t worry just create a file in notepad or an other program and upload to your server via ftp. The line of coding in the case of moving a blog would be something like this:
Redirect permanent /old-blog http://www.mysite.com/new-blog
The programming should make sense. For those who are lost simply we tell the server:
- what we’re doing - redirect
- type of redirect - permanent
- old url (/old-blog) this is relative to the server so doesn’t need the full web address
- new url (http://www…) we can redirect to another site so this needs to be the full address
It’s that simple, if you’ve read once of our previous posts on Page Rank you’ll know that Engines count any web address without ‘www’ in it as a seperate url so make sure it’s included, in fact if this is how other sites link to you then you’ll have to add this redirect if you don’t want those link leaking PR or juice which you shouldn’t!
If stumped or want a redirect for something other than Apache then there’s a whole mine of information on this subject alone on the web.
Page Rank by a Manchester SEO - Hurry up!
July 4, 2008 | Link Building, SEO
Page Rank is really starting to get on my nerves! Does Google actually care about it anymore. It seems to be way out of date, and Google seem to be in no hurry to do anything about it.
As I’m writing this host, the king of Manchester’s seo scene, WMA’s Head of Search Tim will but ‘tutting’ away. He tells me page rank is not so important anymore, but I want that green bar on the Google tool bar to grow, and grow big time. You can imagine the conversation…”Tim, how long before we get a Pagerank of 7″…”Guy, go flying or something, I’m busy!”
So, what can we do about increasing our Pagerank? Who knows if it ever works, but if it did, here is what I would do!
1. Get a good link high up on the page from a website which has a high Pagerank its self. Pagerank is actually shared out between the links on a page, so the less links as the higher the link the better!
2. Make sure there are internal links within your site so Google can distribute the Pagerank of your site between the pages.
When it comes down to it, that about it. Incoming links, and good internal links – the rest is just waiting! This Manchester seo is not known for his patience!
Have a great weekend!
What’s the point of blogging?
June 24, 2008 | SEO, internet marketing
At Web Marketing Advisor, we try to blog every day. On the whole we do so well, but on some of those days, you can’t help but think why do I bother? I’m tired and I have a to-do list which would make any Everest expedition party go green in the face.
I think it’s some sort of karma revenge for the work we ask our clients to do!
So here are some of the reasons why we write our blog
1. Google loves fresh content, and blogging every day gives that.
2. There are only so many keywords you can stuff into main website without it looking to contrived. Your blog is a great place to focus on more keywords, infact, each article can be optimised for its own set.
3. You can really hit the long tail of keywords, the ones which are 3-4 words long, driving small but targeted traffic.
4. It gives you a voice.
5. It helps you to create a community around your business.
Each one of the above posts could be expanded and developed into its own book, never mind blog post, but we must start at the beginning, and the first step is your first post!
Good Luck
Search engine submission - a waste of time!
June 13, 2008 | SEO
At this point I should say the process of search engine submission is a complete waste of time. You should never submit a page that is already in a site’s index. Search Engine Submission is to alert an engine to new pages. Each engine is quite particular about how you submit to it. This is because people make pointless submissions on a regular basis, submitting pages that are not only are known about but haven’t even been updated. If you do this you could find yourself penalised depending on the engine or whether you’ve broken it’s rules. Even if you have updated a page or more importantly have a new page it is still a waste of time submitting it.
When you submit to an engine’s search engine submission process it goes in a long list of submissions. Each engine as we have pointed out has its own method of finding new content. To spend any amount of time processing pointless user generated queries is going to make any search engine less efficient. Imagine you are Google! Now imagine keeping tabs on 160,000,000,000 web pages. Any distraction from that and Google would be presenting more and more out of date results. That’s not great for the Big G’s image. By the time an engine does deal with a worthwhile submission it is several weeks later at the very earliest, buy that time it is no longer worthwhile and I’d hope if you have new pages you’d prefer them to spidered in days not weeks or months.
An engine will find a new page or site by finding a link to it on another page, and this is how you get pages spidered quickly. It’s as simple as that! If you have a new page it’s best to link to it from your index page as it will get picked up earlier, better also if you can get a link from an external website.
The more important the website and particularly the more frequently content is update on it , the more regularly it will get spidered. Here at WMA know of a site or two where we can get links spidered in a matter of mins! But you would expect that wouldn’t you!
Fresh Content
June 12, 2008 | SEO
Fresh Content is the best way to get a spider to visit your site. This is a really, really important subject to post so we will do so in another post. You can’t dictate to a spider how frequently it visits your site or what pages it visits. Search Engines know how frequently your pages get changed because they store some of the information they retrieve every time they visit. A sitemap will help, having good navigation architecture in your site is a must and it’s good to link to new pages, especially critical ones from your index page as that’s the page spiders will visit more frequently. The best thing to do is create fresh content. The more engines visit and find new content the more frequently they will come back.
