Mod rewrite tips for SEO

One of the bonuses of attending the WMW Pubcon is that they mail attendees a cd of all of the PowerPoint presentations that were used in the sessions. One of the presentations was by a company called TrueLocal, where they discussed using mod rewrite for various things. Now, I do not claim to have much knowledge about mod rewrite, so I cannot explain any of the code they showed us. But, I thought you might like to have the code in case you need it. So, without further explanation, here it is.

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Google attacking scraper sites and directories

As of yesterday, Google has targetted and banned some scraper sites and directories that are a copy of ODP with no value added. Of course, as with all things Google, there are reports that many innocent sites have been caught up in the net. Apparently, if you have a site that fits some of the characteristics of these types of sites, you might be a victim as well. In this WMW thread, (messages 4 and 16), Googleguy confirms that they are weeding these sites out of the index. Obviously, as happens every time Google casts a wide net, the algo makes mistakes. If you believe your site has been mistakenly identified as a scraper site or ODP clone, you should attempt to rectify the situation by submitting a reinclusion request. I’ve explained how to do this in this reinclusion request post.

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Optimizing for mobile devices

Ok, so since I am not a young teenager, I find it difficult to imagine doing much in the way of using the Internet via a cell phone. I mean, the screen is so tiny! But, I keep getting hit over the head with the idea that this is going to be a big thing, so I guess I had better start listening. Now, at this point, being unable to even comprehend using a cell phone for surfing the web, it is equally difficult for me to imagine optimizing a site for it. However, I guess I’d better start thinking about it.

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Kickstarting a new forum

A few days ago, I read a forum post where someone was offering to help kickstart new forums. I have a new forum and it is a lonely place! I wanted to have some activity in the forum before submitting to directories, but getting posts is not an easy thing with a new forum. So when I saw the following offer, I knew this new forum starter kit might be just what I needed. The offer was: Read more

There one day, gone the next, back again

Two days ago, I mentioned that a new site was no longer showing up with a site: command and lost its rankings. Today, the site: command is again showing the home page, although the rankings did not come back. Still, I’m happy to see it is indexed again. These are the kinds of technical issues that I just cannot seem to wrap my head around. I’ve programmed a lot of apps and used databases extensively, and I just cannot understand how data is “lost” and then found again. Of course, there’s the standard crashes and accidental deletions of data, but that is not what I mean. Google, over the years, has often seemed to lose data temporarily. Sometimes we call it a rollback. Other times we just scratch our heads. Why would data go into a black hole for a couple of days? Remember, I mentioned that I had checked all known datacenters and it had disappeared from all of them. Now, granted, there may be datacenters that we don’t know about, and maybe one of those is the culprit. I don’t have the answers, but it is one of those annoyances that pops up time and time again, and I hate unexplainable things like this. Ah well, I suppose I’m not allowed to know all the mysteries of life.

How to make a mad customer laugh

Ok, about 5 minutes ago, I was getting miffed because when I went to Bloglines all my RSS feed subscriptions had disappeared! Since I also use them here on SEO Scoop in my navigation, it meant they also disappeared from there as well. I don’t know that I could ever remember all of them to be able to add them back in again, so I was starting to get a bit ticked. Then, I went back to the Bloglines site and saw the following in the spot where my feed subscriptions used to be listed. What else could I do but laugh? Good job, Bloglines, on turning an upset customer into a laughing customer. We can all learn from that.

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Search engine humor to begin the week

I am a little late in discovering this humorous Google news page, but if you have not yet seen it, then that does not matter, right? Anyway, I thought a chuckle or two about the omnipresent Google would be a good way to start off the week. Check out Google Announces Search Engine Entering Beta and enjoy.

There one day, gone the next…

Interesting thing I noticed today, interesting but disturbing. I created a brand new site a couple of weeks ago, which was a simple forum. Pure white hat. Out of the box forum. Got a couple of links from relevant niche directories. I am talking about a site that could be considered to have no SEO done on it whatsoever yet. Three days ago, the site showed up in Google at the number 3 position, with just the home page indexed using the site: command. Keep in mind that the keyword has almost no competition at all, and is considered to be a “very easy” keyword to rank for by tools. Today, I check the site: command in Google to see if it has more than just the home page indexed and what do I see? Nothing. Nada. Zip. So I check all the datacenters. Still nothing. The site is no longer indexed and hence, no longer ranking.

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So you want to generate your own RSS feeds?

I have seen the question asked many times on SEO forums. How do I create my own RSS feeds for my site? The best way is to have a programmer create a script that automatically generates the feed for you on a periodic basis. This may involve pulling information from a database and updating the feed page. However, this method may not be available to everyone, so let’s discuss some other ways you can accomplish the goal without the use of a custom script.

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Even an old-timer can miss things

I have been looking back at some of my old sites to decide whether to ramp up the work on them, or send them to the website scrapheap. I’m in reorganizing mode and have decided to pare down to just a few productive sites. (A few, by my standards, is 15-20).

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A behind the scenes peek at another SEO company

I am in an interesting position in that a client of mine is trying out another SEO company – a very very large one – but the client is keeping me on in a double-check capacity. In other words, I get to see all correspondence between the company and the client, and have access to everything to see what is being done, so that I can report back to the client if I see anything amiss. I must say that it is a weird, but enlightening experience. I have just seen the first set of recommendations made. Some were decent recommendations, though nothing that I think will make much of a difference. Others were downright laughable. For instance, they recommended he add a robots.txt file, because he doesn’t have one. Well, um, he wants everything indexed, so the robots.txt file will be what? Empty? Okayyyy. Anyway, I do not intend on outing either the company or the client, but if anything incredibly interesting happens, I’ll be sure to mention it.

A new free SEO ebook

I have added a link to a new, free SEO ebook that is quite good to the list of SEO Scoop tools that you see in the navigation to the right of this page. Brad Callen wrote the ebook, and it is 90 pages of good solid information. It is especially helpful to newbies, but even an experienced SEO might pick up a tip that he or she hadn’t thought of. It’s totally free, so it’s worth taking a look at.

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Doublecheck those home page links

I have been adding forums to some of my sites recently, and I almost overlooked something that could have been a big problem for me. The forum software I am using points to the www.domain.com/index.php url as the home page link. With a forum of any size, you could easily end up with thousands of these internal links to the home page pointing at index.php instead of the domain itself (www.domain.com/). Pointing links this way (unless you ALWAYS point the links to the page, even with all external backlinks) will split your PR and end up hurting you in the long run in your optimization efforts. I quickly changed all the code in the forum templates to point to the domain, but I wanted to remind all of you to do the same. Make sure all of your links to your homepage (internal or external) point to www.domain.com/ and not to www.domain.com/index.html (or whatever your page name is). This way, all backlink and PR power is consolidated into one url. Just my little reminder of the day to you.

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