Need a good website URL to test against - testing

I need a URL to just test basic http connectivity. It needs to be consistent and:
Always be up
Never change drastically due to IP or user agent. (IE: 301 Location redirect/ huge difference in content... minor would be tolerable)
The URL itself has a consistent content-length. (IE: it doesn't vary from by 2kb at most, ever)
A few examples, yet none match all 3 criteria:
One example of always up: www.google.com (yet it 301 redirects based on IP location).
Another good one is http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en. but the problem there is that based on a given holiday, the content-length can really vary.

It might not be obvious; but http://example.com, http://example.net and http://example.org are actual, real sites; the might suit your needs.
Edit: I'm not sure about the specifics of their uptime stats and IP address, but I imagine these things, as well as the contents, are completely and utterly static.

Why not go to something like http://www.google.com/ncr? Then you won't be redirected

You could create your own website, at least then you will know that the content will never change and you you will know when its down?

Related

What does the host name "ww8" stand for in URLs

Very rarely, I see URLs with a host name of "ww8" instead of "www" (e.g. http://ww8.aitsafe.com, https://ww8.welcomeclient.com/). Though rare, this appears to be consistent enough for there to be some sort of logic or history behind this, but I have not been able to figure out what it could be about.
Does anyone know what the host name "ww8" stands for and when it is used? Or is this simply a random peak of arbitrarily chosen non-standard hostnames?
This is a subdomain system to identify subdomains. ww8 means that is the 8th subdomain. This system is used to balance load on the server side

How to direct multiple clean URL paths to a single page?

(Hi! This is my first time asking a question on Stack Overflow after years of finding answers here... Thanks!)
I have a dynamic page, and I'd like to have fixed URLs that point to different states of that page. So, for example: "www.mypage.co"(/index.php) is the base page, and it rearranges its content based on user choices. I'd then like to be able to point to "www.mypage.co/contentA" or "www.mypage.co/contentB" in order to automatically load base the page at "www.mypage.co" with the desired content.
At heart the problem is an aesthetic one. I know I could simply write www.mypage.co/index.html?state=contentA to reach the desired end, but I want to keep the URL simple and readable (ie, clean). I also, due to limitations in my hosting relationship, would most appreciate a solution that is server-independent (across LAM[PHP] stacks, at least), if possible.
Also, if I just have incorrect assumptions about how to implement clean URLs, I'd appreciate direction to a good, comprehensive explanation. I can't seem to find one...
You could use a htaccess file to redirect all requests to one location and then from there determine what you want to return to the client. Look over the htaccess/dispatch system that Tonic uses.
If you use Apache, you can use mod_rewrite. I have a rule like this where multiple restful urls all go to the same page, using regex and moving parts of the old url into parameters for the new url:
RewriteRule ^/testapp/(name|number|rn|sid|unii|inchikey|formula)(/(startswith))?/?(.*) /testapp/ProxyServlet?objectHandle=Search&actionHandle=drillIn&searchtype=$1&searchterm=$4&startswith=$3 [NC,PT]
That particular regex accepts urls like
testapp/name
testapp/name/zuchini
testapp/name/startswith/zuchini
and forwards them to the same page.
I also use UrlRewriteFilter for Tomcat, but as you mentioned PHP, that doesn't seem that it would be useful.

Proper url in address bar

I have got a site running on apache. Now I have a domain. Lets say: [www.mysite.com][1]. When I enter this it goes to for example to [www.sites/sitedirectory][2] this I see in the address bar.
How can I make sure (i think it shoult be done with .htaccess) that it will still show in my address bar [www.mysite.com][3] and not [www.sites/sitedirectory][4]
Thanks very much.
You cannot make a browser's address bar show a domain different from where the data was loaded from, for security reasons.
There are a few options:
You can set up www.mysite.com to be a proxy, which fetches content from www.sites/sitedirectory, and re-serves it, but I suspect that isn't really what you want.
You can put a web page at wwww.mysite.com which consists of one large HTML frame containing the real site at www.sites/sitedirectory. This is widely considered to be a bad idea, as (without a lot of messing about) it means that you can only ever link to the home page, and links to other sites have to be specially written to jump out of the frameset, etc, etc.
You can sort out your Apache configuration so that there is a proper vhost entry for www.mysite.com, rather than a redirect to the other URL.
Without knowing why you have got to where you are, I would strongly suggest investigating option 3.

stacks of domains, positive SEO?

I have a client who has brought a truck load of domains he wants me to redirect to his site.
A few of them are the same name with different top level domains (mysite.com, mysite.co.uk etc etc) but a lot of them are keyword related (mylocation-businessType.com etc etc).
I am wondering if either of these will be negative for SEO. I am thinking the top level domain changes will be fine, and expected by google, but the keywords might be views as a bit hacky?
What are the good people of stackoverflow's view on this?
If they are redirected properly then they'll have no effect at all. The only advantage will be if the name makes sense and a user might type it in. eg. identical names with and without hyphens.
For this situation all of the other answers are correct, you won't get any benefits in Pagerank, etc. and it wouldn't be useful except to pickup direct traffic to your domain names that you are then redirecting.
How would it affect your SEO though? That's a little trickier. Two ways of looking at it:
1.) Competitors could do this to you and it'd be completely out of your control. If redirecting a bunch of domains did any real harm to rankings it'd be a great way to do negative SEO, or "Google Bowling," and could be used to take down a site's rankings. That isn't the case though, so it probably wouldn't have too much of a negative effect.
UNLESS
2.) The nameservers for your redirected domains match the nameservers for your main domain. Pointing all domains to the same set of nameservers will help show that all domains are under the control of the same webmaster.
Even if you are using different nameservers and using 301 redirects as recommended, if the server with your redirects comes back to (at least) the same Class C IP address as your main site's server, a search engine would still be able to tie you together as likely being run by the same owner.
Either of these setups can identify you as the source of the redirects and devalue the ranking ability of your main site since there is a much higher likelihood the redirects are coming from you.
winwaed is correct. If you're doing a proper 301 redirect, the other domains are only valuable if people directly type them in. They won't rank, won't get any link juice, and won't get any inbound links. If you do seed inbound links, google will treat them as if they point to the target of your 301 redirect. It's a waste of time to just directly do that for SEO purposes.
The way to use each of those domains for SEO would be to build a bit of unique content on each one, get some inbound links, and then link out to your target page. Not really worth doing unless you really spend a lot of time at it, and google still tends to penalize obvious gaming of the system like that.
They won't contribute toward ranking, however keyword domains do get some amount of advantage for those terms. So, the way to use them is to build sites on all of them and funnel traffic to the main site.
Of course, they can also be used for extra backlinks, but you really want different C class IP addresses from the servers. For that reason you might want to go with SEO hosting.
Matt Cutts from Google explained it in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA
and here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a70ygsHgvMw
He also said if he was doing this, he would redirect each of sites to the target sites' different important pages. If the redirected domains had pageranks before, they will still flow pagerank (not exactly but a lower pagerank).

About what percentage of Internet users have referrers turned off?

I'm making something that requires me to pass information from one domain to a subdomain. The subdomain would be in an iframe on the domain. I know I can use cookies, sessions, or a database. But I'm trying to save processing time so I thought about using the referrer. I know that some people turn the referrer off for some reason, but exactly just how many. If they do, this won't work for them.
Oh and I can't use the URL to pass information.
I'd say < 0.001 % of all Internet users have ever heard about referrers. Even a smaller portion of them will be willing to switch them off. Even a smaller number of them will be able to.