Saturday, September 20th, 2008
As I wrote in a prvious post, duplicate content on your own website can come in the form of “www.mysite.com/†vs. “www.mysite.com/index.html.†The search engines see this same page as two different ones, but with identical content. As I also mentioned, most search engines are smart enough to figure out that these two pages are the same one, but still, they do share Pagerank.
What to do? That’s easy too. Just open up your .htaccess again and type in the following code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]
You can do this with other pages that have the same problem as well.
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Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
There may be cases when you would like to see what your webpage HTTP headers look like. Why? Well, because they are kind of important. As Wikipedia states, the HTTP headers define what the returned data looks like.
Still you ask, “Why in the world do I care about that?” Ok, I’ll keep going. The main reason I look at the HTTP headers is to find out what the HTTP status code is. The reason the status code is important to me is because this is the code the search engines use for a multitude of things.
Let me give you a little example, and this related to my previous post regarding the sudden drop in Google rankings. As I was doing research into what the problem may be for this particular website, I came across an issue where someone had recently put custom “404 Not Found” error pages up on some of their websites. Everyone knows that custom “404 Not Found” error pages are cool, but what some people don’t know is that if those 404 error pages show a “200 OK” (successful HTTP requests) code, the site may be in big trouble, SEO-wise. The reason for this is because there are going to be many “404 Not Found” error pages on a dynamic website. If you have your custom “404 Not Found” error page showing a “200 OK” response code, the search engines will think that all the instances of this page are duplicate. You know as well as I do, that spells trouble.
What’s worse is if you set your homepage as your “404 Not Found” page. Your homepage is going to return a response code of “200 OK.” That’s not good, because now you have multiple instances of your homepage…all duplicate content.
It’s my opinion that the search engines are smart enough to figure this out. The page (such as your homepage) with the highest Pagerank will prevail. Still, I have some websites that I am working on that have multiple instances of the homepage and they all have Pagerank, which isn’t good, because the duplicates are taking the Pagerank from the real page. Now, again, that’s my opinion.
Here are two tips:
- How to check your HTTP headers – visit this website or just Google “Website header check”
- How to set a particular page as your “404 Not Found” error page in your .htaccess file – Just place this code in the file: “ErrorDocument 404 /404.php” without the quotes. The 404.php file is the actual error page in this case.
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Saturday, January 12th, 2008
I was sitting here last night, when I noticed that my new blog here finally had a Google PageRank. I was pretty happy about that, but there was one tiny problem. The PageRank is a 1.
Remember back when I told you that I switched this blog over to a new domain name? Well, back then, this blog (on the old domain) had a PageRank of 5. I did a simple 301 redirect for the entire blog in the .htaccess file, pointing it to this new domain. I figured that the nice PageRank I had earned over the years would follow me to this new domain. Guess not.
I did notice that the kwaree.com domain still has a PageRank of 5. That’s weird, because all there is over there are a few static pages that never change. So what’s all this about the size of a website, the frequency of updates, etc…? I know of a very specific factor that heavily affects PageRank, but am not ready to share it just yet. I am still doing some research.
I took a look around all my sites. They all pretty much stayed the same, except for one. That one dropped a point, which is disappointing. I looked at a few blogs I know of. One got hit pretty hard and lost 3 points. Man, is this PageRank update about hitting blogs?
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Monday, October 29th, 2007
This is getting rather entertaining. Well, I think it’s entertaining because nothing beyond some sites losing PageRank has happened yet. I don’t think anyone has lost any traffic. One thing is for sure, there are more than a few people who have lost faith in the whole PageRank thing.
I was reading this great article today called, “Google Drops PageRank For Many Sites : Paid Links or New Algorithm?” It’s a pretty good read.
Take a look at the article and click on some of the links in it. Ones like WashingtonPost.com and Forbes.com. What’s really interesting is their new PageRank. They are now “5″ and “4″ respectively. What happened there? My own blog lost a point and is now a 5. So, does that mean that I am right up there with WashingtonPost? I think not. WashingtonPost has 64,300 backlinks. Ok, there goes that relationship.
There are a lot of theories out there on what happened. I think, if you are interested in the whole thing, you should start looking at the sites that gained PageRank and not the ones who lost. That’s where you are going to find some answers.
PS – Some say that “Google PR” stands for “Public Relations.” If so, Google is doing a mighty good job of it. They are succeeding at dangling the carrot out there. If you follow that logic, you would think that bloggers would be rewarded with the whole PageRank thing, instead of being the main ones hit with the latest update.
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Sunday, October 28th, 2007
FirstRSS ERROR: "http://www.digg.com/rss_search?search=pagerank&area=all&type=both§ion=all" NOT FOUND!
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Sunday, October 28th, 2007
The other day, I noticed that my Google PageRank on this blog lost a point and is now a 5. I scratched my head and thought to myself that it was kind of expected. I know that I haven’t been writing too much lately as I try to figure out some business stuff.
I was just checking out my Uncle Bob’s blog and noticed that his PageRank jumped a point and is now a 7. Ahhh…the good days are over. Well, for me anyway.
The actual Google PageRank isn’t the thing that gets to me…it’s the competition of the whole thing. Not that I am competing with him, per se, but I am competing with every other website on the planet.
My search engine rankings aren’t affected by my PageRank and my traffic certainly isn’t either. So why do I care? Who knows. It’s probably a guy thing.
I am wondering why I suffered from Google’s last PageRank update and Bob flourished. I guess if I think about it for a second I can figure it out. Let’s look at the differences between the two sites -
1. His is mostly on topic and mine is all over the place. You can see this from my two million categories.
2. He writes frequent posts. Lately, I have gotten out of the habit.
3. He write long posts, most of the time. Only sometimes do I write long posts. I tend to use a lot of pictures.
4. He has a fairly loyal audience of readers who comment often. I have a smaller audience of loyal readers who comment not as often.
5. His comments are long. Mine are good, but not as long.
6. I tend to give away links to brand new sites with 0 PageRank. I don’t think that matters, because I trust those sites.
7. His readers may be slightly more tech savvy than mine in that they may have bookmarked his blog in their Google Toolbar Bookmarks.
8. He is smarter than me, but I don’t think that has anything to do with it.
So does this even matter, beyond my own ego? A lot of people are saying it doesn’t.
I tend to agree with them, but I can’t say that I’m still not a little hurt.
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Thursday, September 14th, 2006
This post may ruffle some feathers. I will try to keep it short.
I had a conversation with a friend this morning about SEO. I started thinking. Now, you may not know, but one of my favorite pastimes is managing my websites (of which I mentioned in an earlier post). There are many parts to managing these sites…customer service, updates and upgrades, new features and very importantly, SEO.
Basically, SEO is adjusting of website code and content so it consistently appears on the early pages of search results for strong search terms. The key words here are consistently, early and strong search terms. I could go on for hours, but I won’t. Bob has a great post here about the ins and the outs of this topic.
Anyway, much focus has been put on Google PageRank over the years. I read a lot about this on forum after forum and watch as people cheer or sulk every time Google adjusts their algorithm. The minute they see their website’s PageRank bounce around during a Google update, they freak out and start tearing things apart and asking for all sorts of advice. Granted, a lot of people making these posts are brand new to this stuff and haven’t realized yet that Google PageRank is just not that important. That’s right…it’s just not that important. I know this for a fact. My years of experience have taught me a few things. What is important is your rankings in the search results, which are based on…well, read Bob’s post above. If you are into ecommerce, these rankings affect your income.
So, here is a question: With your own website, have you seen a relationship between your website’s rankings and your Google PageRank?
This really has nothing to do with this morning’s conversation. We actually were talking about conversion. That is, getting people to sign up, spend money or do the thing you want them to do after they arrive at your website. We’ll talk about this later.
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