if possible, I would like to know what is the best practies for SEO to put url in <a href="">
Method 1:
<a href="/blog-1">
Method 2:
<a href="http://example.com/blog-1">
Can you help me?
Bots can interpret relative as well as absolute URLs and follow them.
I would prefer absolute URLs as we can govern what the urls are, rather than leaving it to bot to find out and follow through them. It also provides the flexibility of switching the protocols from http to https:// even though the page is non secure or vice versa. Hope this helps.
Related
I have been building a forum from scratch with my friends just for fun, and we're starting to see bots and scrapers go by. The problem we're having is that you can load a page /post/1 with four replies, and each reply includes a little permalink to itself /reply/1#reply-1. If I am on /post/1 and navigate to /reply/1, I'll end up right back where I started, just with the anchor to the reply. But! Scrapers have no idea this is the case, so they're opening every /post link and then following every /reply link, and it's causing performance issues, so I've been looking around SEO sites to try to fix it.
I've started using rel=canonical on the /reply page, to tell the bots they're all the same, but as far as I can tell that doesn't help me until the bot has already loaded the page, and thus I wind up with tons of traffic. Would it be correct to change my
Permalink
tags to
Permalink
since they should be the same content? Or would this be misusing rel="self" and there's another, better rel tag I should be using instead?
The self link type is not defined for HTML (but for Atom), so it can’t be used in HTML5 documents.
The canonical link type is appropriate for your case (if you make sure that it always points to the correct page, in case the thread is paginated), but it doesn’t prevent bots from crawling the URLs.
If you want to prevent crawling, no link type will help (not even the nofollow link type, but it’s not appropriate for your case anyway). You’d have to use robots.txt, e.g.:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /reply/
That said, you might want to consider changing the permalink design. I think it’s not useful (neither for your users nor for bots) to have such an architecture. It’s a good practice to have exactly one URL per document, and if users want to link to a certain post, there is no reason to require a new page load if it’s actually the same document.
So I would either use the "canonical" URL and add a fragment component (/post/1#reply-1, or what might make more sense: /threads/1#post-1), or (if you think it can be useful for your users) I would create a page that only contains the reply (with a link back to the full thread).
For technical reasons on a site we may have two or more links that refer to the same product page. For example:
http://example.com/a-nice-product-no1234.html
and:
http://example.com/a-nice-foobar-product-no1234.html
Apparently the first one is the "correct" link. What is the right approach when the second link is opened?
Approach 1)
Redirect 301 to the first link
Approach 2)
Status 200 and
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/a-nice-product-no1234.html">
in the HTML head? Is approach 2) applicable for other search engines than Google? Other suggestions?
Thank you!
If
http://example.com/a-nice-foobar-product-no1234.html
Is in any way invalid or you have the intention of removing it a 301 Moved Permanently is the way to go.
A technical discussion from google of rel="canonical" shows it should be used to indicate original content, as opposed to say, the same content ordered differently, using different formatting and so on.
This will also have the benefit of users not bookmarking and using links to these "slightly invalid" pages. Making their use lessen over time.
It looks as though this question has been asked in part by some others, but I can't find the answer I'm looking for specifically, so I thought I'd pose my particular scenario in case anyone is able to help.
We have an old website (developed externally by a third party) that is due to be retired and replaced by a new site designed in house. For reasons best known to themselves, the developers of the old site used the hash character as part of the URL for the old site (www.mysite.com/#/my-content-stuff). To assist with the transition and help with SEO I need to set up 301 redirects for the top performing URLs from the old site. As I'm now discovering however, I'm not able to set up a simple redirect in the .htaccess file as I believe it takes the hash character to be a comment and ignores the remainder of the line. I've tried escape characters, using %23 instead, wildcard matching, nothing seems to work.
As a workaround, I wondered about simply creating dummy files with the same paths and URLs as the old site had, then simply creating HTML redirects within them to drive traffic to the correct new pages, but it looks as though the server is doing something similar regarding the hash character in the URL, and ignoring anything afterit. So, if I create a sub-folder on my news server called '#' and create a file in there called 'test.html', I expected to be able to just go to 'www.myNEWsite.com/#/test.html', but it just takes me to the default root file of my site.
Please can anyone shed any light on how I might get around this? I must admit I'm not that clued up on Apache so I'm having to learn a lot as I go.
Many thanks in advance for any pointers or info anyone can provide.
Cheers,
Rich
A hash character in the URL specifies the anchor, and it's not even sent to your webserver. A redirect is impossible on the server side, and the old developer probably did it using JavaScript. Implement fallback URLs without the hash instead, and have a global JavaScript script detect these URLs and redirect automatically.
Hash tags cannot be read by the server. They are regarded as locations within the document and are therefore not exposed to the server. The client is the only one whom see's these. The best you could do is use a "meta refresh" tag, or alternatively, you could use javascript to detect the url, and if its one which requires 301 redirection, use "window.location" to move the user to a full url where mod_rewrite or a php page can issue a 301 header.
However neither are SEO friendly and only really solve the issue for users that click onto an old link via an external site
<!-- Put in head tag so the page does not wait to load the content-->
<script type="text/javascript">
if(window.location.hash != "") {
var h = window.location.hash.match(/#\/?(.*)/i)[1];
switch(h) {
case "something_old":
window.location = "/something_new.html";
break;
case "something_also_old":
window.location = "/something_also_new.html";
break;
}
}
</script>
I'm using pretty URLs in my web app, one example is 'forum/post/1' which invokes PostController in Forum module, which loads a post with id=1. This is what I need but that post is also accessible from 'forum/post/view/id/1'. That's bad, because search crawlers don't like when same page is accessible from several URLs, right?
I'm using Yii framework which supports 'useStrictParsing' option, which tells that incoming request must match at least one "pretty" route, otherwise request fails with 404. However it's not a perfect solution, because I don't have pretty URLs for every controller/action.
Ideally, framework should redirect 'forum/post/view/id/1' to 'forum/post/1' with a 301 status code. How did you solve this problem? It's not Yii/PHP specific question, how does your framework/tool deal with it?
The best way to make sure search engines only rank one page the pretty url over another, if there are multiple ways to view the content is to your a canonical tag within the header of your document
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/nice-url/" />
This is very useful with windows based system as IIS is not case sensitive with its web pages but the web standard is case sensitive.
So
www.maydomain.com/Newpage.aspx
www.maydomain.com/newpage.aspx
www.maydomain.com/NEWPAGE.aspx
These are all seen by Google as different pages, and you are then marked down for having a site with duplicate content, but not so with a canonical as each page in the case above would have the same canonical meta tag and the that url is the only one which will be used by the search engines.
Provided that no one links to your non-pretty urls, the search engines will never know that they exist.
If you do want to eliminate them, you could bypass your web framework by adding an alias in you web server's configuration file; the url will be redirected before it ever reaches the framework.
Frameworks like Django, which don't provide 'magic' routing, don't face this issue, the only routes which exist are those which you define manually. In it's case, you could define a view for the non-pretty url which returns the appropriate redirect.
I have recently started using Google Webmaster Tools.
I was quite surprised to see just how many links google is trying to index.
http://www.example.com/?c=123
http://www.example.com/?c=82
http://www.example.com/?c=234
http://www.example.com/?c=991
These are all campaigns that exist as links from partner sites.
For right now they're all being denied by my robots file until the site is complete - as is EVERY page on the site.
I'm wondering what is the best approach to deal with links like this is - before I make my robots.txt file less restrictive.
I'm concerned that they will be treated as different URLS and start appearing in google's search results. They all correspond to the same page - give or take. I dont want people finding them as they are and clicking on them.
By best idea so far is to render a page that contains a query string as follows :
// DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. See edit below
<% if (Request.QueryString != "") { %>
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
<% } %>
Do I need to do this? Is this the best approach?
Edit: This turns out NOT TO BE A GOOD APPROACH. It turns out that Google is seeing NOINDEX on a page that has the same content as another page that does not have NOINDEX. Apparently it figures they're the same thing and the NOINDEX takes precedence. My site completely disappeared from Google as a result. Caveat: it could have been something else i did at the same time, but i wouldn't risk this approach.
This is the sort of thing that rel="canonical" was designed for. Google posted a blog article about it.
Yes, Google would interprete them as different URLs.
Depending on your webserver you could use a rewrite filter to remove the parameter for search engines, eg url rewrite filter for Tomcat, or mod rewrite for Apache.
Personally I'd just redirect to the same page with the tracking parameter removed.
That seems like the best approach unless the page exists in it's own folder in which case you can modify the robots.txt file just to ignore that folder.
For resources that should not be indexed I prefer to do a simple return in the page load:
if (IsBot(Request.UserAgent)
return;