SEO/SEF: Best practice?
Moderator: General Moderators
-
alex.barylski
- DevNet Evangelist
- Posts: 6267
- Joined: Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:00 pm
- Location: Winnipeg
SEO/SEF: Best practice?
I'm curious, I have switched, rebuilt and redesigned my web site about 20 times over the last 7 or 8 years. The URL's have changed drastically, from static HTML to dynamic PHP to CMS single script delivery using .htaccess to emulate physical URI's
When these links change, search engines need to either add or remove offending links.
I have *never* bothered to official redirect using a 300 with header() but I wonder if doing so has hurt my SE rankings, not that I have ever focused on that , but still...
If everytime I removed a page I had to add a 300 redirect, I think I would go mad, but if this is a best practice, maybe I can make a quick hack for the current CMS to do this for me automagically.
What says you, people Devnetwork?
Cheers,
Alex
When these links change, search engines need to either add or remove offending links.
I have *never* bothered to official redirect using a 300 with header() but I wonder if doing so has hurt my SE rankings, not that I have ever focused on that , but still...
If everytime I removed a page I had to add a 300 redirect, I think I would go mad, but if this is a best practice, maybe I can make a quick hack for the current CMS to do this for me automagically.
What says you, people Devnetwork?
Cheers,
Alex
Re: SEO/SEF: Best practice?
I think generally you're fine so long as the URL is the same (http://example.com/) and search engines will just follow the links. If you move from http://myoldlongexample.com to http://example.com then use the 300.
- volomike
- Forum Regular
- Posts: 633
- Joined: Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:04 am
- Location: Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, USA
Re: SEO/SEF: Best practice?
I've been redirecting with 301 after I view this post from Nathan Malone:
Usage:
Web::Redirect('/e/settings');
Nathan is an ex-PHP developer who does SEO and AM now for a living.
Code: Select all
class Web {
public static Redirect($sPath) {
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header("Location: $sPath");
exit;
}
}Web::Redirect('/e/settings');
Nathan is an ex-PHP developer who does SEO and AM now for a living.
-
alex.barylski
- DevNet Evangelist
- Posts: 6267
- Joined: Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:00 pm
- Location: Winnipeg
Re: SEO/SEF: Best practice?
Interesting...I wasn't even aware there was a temporary redirect.
Thanks for the link
Thanks for the link
Re: SEO/SEF: Best practice?
What about this dilema, does having 2 versions ( http and https ) cause duplicate entries in google? I mean you can search and find both entries.. but are they penalizing you for this? They say to pick either www. or no www, but say nothing about offering your website both over secured and insecure connections. There's a lot of legacy code that does this that would be near impossible to refactor without identifying / exercising each and every URL. A similar question, if you expose a search results page to google and people keep coming up with random URL query strings, google _does_ index these pages ( like the hosting providers PCspectra wrote about in another thread ). Could I *exploit* another site by linking to them, and causing extraneous duplicate content to show up, which sucks away PR from the real pages like a sponge? in that case yahoo is vulnerable. Google says there is "no way to devalue another person's page", but obviously if there were a bug in that page's code that allowed you to cause it to behave differently towards google, wouldn't they penalize you? The closest official statement from google is that "if you get hacked, they try to contact you / resolve the issue as long as you remedy the problem". What if something like this were going on large scale and unnoticed? 
Re: SEO/SEF: Best practice?
Why would you be offering the same page in secure and non-secure protocols?
- volomike
- Forum Regular
- Posts: 633
- Joined: Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:04 am
- Location: Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, USA
Re: SEO/SEF: Best practice?
I guess I've never checked, but I thought that Google doesn't index https page links?
Re: SEO/SEF: Best practice?
Normally I set up 2 virtual hosts, 1 for the secure and 1 for the unsecure version. Both with the same documentRoot, one answers http calls the other catches https calls, how do you do it differently? Im talking about a legacy application that can't use a MVC routing component (yet)
Re: SEO/SEF: Best practice?
Yes, but there are no links directing to secure pages without the https protocol. Google only indexes what it can find through links
Re: SEO/SEF: Best practice?
My point was a 3rd party "black hat" could put up a page with millions of links, or inadvertantly leak a "https" link to google and google could then follow that link to the rest of the https pages. There interwebs a small place, I know 