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Recently there has been a lot of hype about URL Shortening. I guess some URL Shortening services even offer tracking stats. But, doesn't adding one more level of look-up to the original URL affect page ranking in any way? Just curious to know.
IT depends upon the implementation from the URL shortener service. If they use HTTP 301 and/ or HTTP 302 in their redirects then Google are quite good in interpreting these correctly in accordance to Page Rank. However other parameters might be affected by URL shortening.
Most Search Engines uses anchor text and URL texts as a parameter to what to give hits for for a specific URL. And if the URL changes from http://example.com/some-article-about-C to http://example.com/234432 then obviously the first one carries more information for the search engine which will make it perform better for "article" and "c"...
It might, right now, but I wouldn't expect that to last for too long. SEO and PageRank are subjects where a lot of guesswork is passed off as wisdom.
If you're that obsessively worried about your PageRank, here's what you do. Take that energy, and put it into creating content that people want to link to. You'll get better results.
People buy stuff. Robots don't.
Well, I can tell you one thing that won't affect your PageRank - URL shorteners using DNS.
The vast majority of URL shorteners use clientside redirection - either via scripting/meta-refresh, or via frames. Those might affect your ranking as they change what Google sees - you never know. Examples are anything from Dot.tk to PopNIC, Smartdots, JoyNIC, HomeNIC, EuropNIC, Tipdots, DuoNIC, UnoNIC, Cydots, FreeNIC, Mediadots, Ulimit, kurzURL, co.nr and de.be/de.vu/ch.vu.
A few services are using proper DNS for forwarding, though. Those include Afraid.org, co.cc, No-ip and Da.ru. This is fully transparent to visitors and spiders, so you can be sure it doesn't affect your rank.
The criticisms of URL shortening have reached near hysteria. Combine this with SEO guidance that borders on superstition if not outright voodoo and you'll find a lot of (mis)information out there. URL shortening is a storm in a teacup. Don't expect it to make any difference to search engines.
No it does not affect page ranking. But the url should not link to a bad neighbour hood like porn, viagara etc. URL shortening is mean to shorten and place it instead of placing huge url. You can try zxc9.com and also its API for your services.
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I have searched but not really found anything clear on the matter from what I have read so far, what impact does having your domain name across multiple tlds (e.g. mycompany.com and mycompany.fr and mycompany.es) have on your rankings?? I'm being told having them point to the same content is likely to get the site shot down by google.
Google doesn't have a parked domain detector according to Matt Cutts, so if the domain names simply all point to one location it won't hurt you.
However, if you have duplicate content that's another story. In your example it sounds like you might have multiple sites that all have the same content, but are different domain names.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team, claims that duplicate content will not hurt your ranking. You can watch that video here
He gives the disclaimer that it can hurt if it's "spammy" without going into very specific detail what that actually means. In my experience (I've had about 5-6 clients that did this) Google would typically look at one of their domains and ignore the duplicates, but not hurt their main site. The only exception to this is if one of the sites that isn't your main one starts getting more backlinks or traffic and then Google sees it as more relevant and then ignores your main site's content... Google's going to favor the duplicate that appears the most relevant.
I'm pretty cautious about duplicate content though because it has the possibility of hurting your site if Google thinks it's "spamy" and they change their algorithm so frequently now that its hard to keep up.
My recommendation is set up the other domain names as parked domains instead of duplicating the site. As you build up any backlinks focus on linking to just one domain name too.
Yes, if these serve the same content, it will sooner or later trigger a content issue or some kind of manually penalty. If Google finds out you own all those domain names (or they belong to a small network of owners), then they will take action for sure. The penalty will sink you in SERPs.
It is not natural to have many domain names sharing the same content. It does not happen by accident and there is no good reason one would need to achieve this.
I would never recommend using different ccTLDs for the same content in the same languages.
However, if the websites are localized, you can use hreflang and "connect" each version of a page with appropriate language. Check this link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
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I am charging SEO of my company's SEO, which I really hate. I believe a web site with decent web design and semantic code(structure), spiced up with attractive content is the best thing we should do. Yet, we are still far from there, in me case especially. So usually I take a very close look at other sites, their design, code, etc. And I suspect I got paranoid on this.
Today, I find a highly respected site which is using absolute internal links while we are using relative links. As far as I know, it does not matter, but I can not help asking you guys to make sure about this.
If this is a ridiculous question, then I am sorry. As I said I become a paranoia.
Taken from the Search Engine Optimisation FAQ at the SitePoint Forums:
Should I use relative links or absolute links?
Absolute links. It is recommended by Google as it is possible for crawlers to miss some relative links.
If I can find the link that Google states this I'll update this post.
EDIT: This might be what the post is referring to, but I've stated my reasons as to why this might be correct in the comments.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35156
I never heard or seen anything that indicates it matters. All you're likely to do is complicate your development. The "highly respected" site is getting good ranking because it's popular, that's all.
It's pretty well a given that search engines store the full path at some point, it's unlikely they wouldn't perform this conversion during the crawl process to remove duplicates.
I don't really follow your logic anyway. You know good structure, relevant content and popularity are the key to ranking so what makes you think you'll gain anything by spending even a minute on random optimisations like this?
I highly doubt Google will be missing any relative links. Apparently the latest version of their Crawler will even execute some javascript. Don't bother with absolute links, instead, great a good sitemap and submit it to google through webmaster tools. Yahoo and Microsoft also allow you to submit your sitemap so it might be worthwhile to look into that too - google it.
I don't think there is an answer to this question, but I will weigh in anyways. Personally,
I think that using absolute URLs is the best. The web is full of crappy content scrapers. Many of the people who wrote these scrapers forget to change the original URLs (in absolute links) before they post the content onto their own page. So, in that regard, absolute URLs can turn into a really dodgy way to get a couple extra links.
If I follow that, it seems logical that absolute links would also be a great indicator of duplicate content caused by content scrapers.
A couple of years ago, I did some research into what happens to a page's search rankings when you dramatically change content/navigation (ie - in the case of a dramatic re-design). At that point, I found that having absolute URLs seemed to spook Google a little less. But, there were some problems with my research:
a) The 'absolute URL bonus' was barely quantifiable (an average of less than two positions of difference)
b) The 'absolute URL bonus' only lasted a few weeks before Google settled down and started treating both pages the same
c) The research is two years old and the Google algorithm has changed dramatically in that time
When I add a and b together, I'm left with a very unsettled feeling. Google gets a little weird from time to time, so the bonus may have been a fluke that I attributed to absolute URLs. Good old experimental bias.....Either way though, the difference was so slight and lasted for such a short time that I don't think it is worth spending a whole lot of extra time making absolutes!
Best of luck with your site
Greg
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I've been thinking a while about disallowing every crawler except Ask, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! from my site.
The reasoning behind this is that I've never seen any traffic being generated by any of the other web-crawlers out there.
My questions are:
Is there any reason not to?
Has anybody done this?
Did you notice any negative effects?
Update:
Up till now I used the blacklist approach: if I do not like the crawler, I add them to the disallow list.
I'm no fan of blacklisting however as this is a never ending story: there are always more crawlers out there.
I'm no so much worried about the real ugly misbehaving crawlers, they are detected and blocked automatically. (and they typically do no ask for robots.txt anyhow :)
However, many crawlers are not really misbehaving in any way, they just do not seem to generate any value for me / my customers.
There are for example a couple of crawlers that power website who claim they will be The Next Google; Only Better. I've never seen any traffic coming from them and I'm quite sceptical about them becoming better than any of the four search engines mentioned above.
Update 2:
I've been analysing the traffic to several sites for some time now, and it seems that for reasonable small sites, 100 unique human visitors a day (=visitors that I cannot identify as being not human). About 52% of the generated traffic is by automated processes.
60% of all automated visitors is not reading robots.txt, 40% (21% of total traffic)
does request robots.txt. (this includes Ask, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!)
So my thinking is, If I block all the well behaved crawlers that do not seem to generate any value for me, I could reduce the bandwidth use and server load by around 12% - 17%.
The internet is a publishing mechanism. If you want to whitelist your site, you're against the grain, but that's fine.
Do you want to whitelist your site?
Bear in mind that badly behaved bots which ignore robots.txt aren't affected anyway (obviously), and well behaved bots are probably there for a good reason, it's just that that's opaque to you.
Whilst other sites that crawl your sites might not be sending any content your way, its possible that they themselves are being indexed by google et al, and so adding to your page rank, blocking them from your site might affect this.
Is there any reason not to?
Do you want to be left out of something which could be including your site which you have no knowledge of and is indirectly bringing a lot of content your way.
If some strange crawlers are hammering your site and eating your bandwidth you may want to, but it is quite possible that such crawlers wouldn’t honour your robots.txt either.
Examine your log files and see what crawlers you have and what proportion of your bandwidth they are eating. There may be more direct ways to block traffic which is bombarding your site.
This is currently a bit awkward, as there is no “Allow” field. The easy way is to put all files to be disallowed into a separate directory, say “stuff”, and leave the one file in the level above this directory.
My only worry is that you may miss the next big thing.
There was a long period where AltaVista was the search engine. Possibly even more than Google is now. (there was no bing, or Ask, and Yahoo was a directory, rather than a search engine as such). Sites that blocked all but Altavista back then would have never seen traffic from Google, and therefore never known how popular it was getting, unless they heard about it from another source, which might have put them at a considerable disadvantage for a while.
Pagerank tends to be biased towards older sites. You don't want to appear newer than you are because you were blocking access via robots.txt for no reason. These guys: http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/ may be completely useless now, but maybe in 5 years time, the fact that you weren't in their index now will count against you in the next big search engine.
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SEO-friendly URLs are all the rage these days. But do they actually have a meaningful impact on a page's ranking in Google and other search engines? If so, why? If not, why not?
(Note that I would absolutely agree that SEO-friendly URLs are nicer to use for human beings. My question is whether they actually make a difference to the ranking algorithms.)
Update: As it turns out, the Google post that endorphine points to here has caused tremendous confusion in the SEO community. For a sampling of the discussion, see here, here, and here. Part of the problem is that the Google post is addressing the worst case where URL rewriting is done poorly and so you'd be better off sticking with a dynamic URL rather than a mangled static "SEO-friendly" URL.
There's no question dynamic URLs can be crawled by Google and can achieve high rankings. Maybe it would be easier to reframe the question more concretely: given 2 otherwise equivalent pages, which will rank higher for the search "do seo friendly urls really affect page ranking"?
A) Do SEO-friendly URLs really affect a page's ranking?
or
B) http://stackoverflow.com?question=505793 (a fake URL for comparison only)
I will let google answer to your question:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html
In the article:
Which can Googlebot read better,
static or dynamic URLs? [...]While
static URLs might have a slight
advantage in terms of clickthrough
rates because users can easily read
the urls, the decision to use
database-driven websites does not
imply a significant disadvantage in
terms of indexing and ranking.
Providing search engines with dynamic
URLs should be favored over hiding
parameters to make them look static
Even if search engines didn't give your pages a better rank, you should still do it for the users. Any benefit for SEO is just icing on your site.
SEOmoz had an article with suggestions for URL best practices along with reasons why each is helpful for usability or search engines.
I don't think this question is readily answerable except by anecdotal evidence, since no two pages are "otherwise equivalent" enough to measure in the sense you're asking. Beyond a Google search engineer emerging and divulging the answer, if one exists that's limited to only this property, you're unlikely to get a definitive answer; more likely, you'll get a long stream of most-likelies.
But I do like the suggestion that descriptive URLs improve the user experience; I think that's true with respect to short URLs, definitely (e.g., "/help", or "/ask", etc.). One just has to decide how valuable that benefit is to the project, when weighed against the cost of creating such URL schemes, which can sometimes be pricey; I've had a couple of clients who've spent thousands on exactly this effort, with no measurable effect in search ranking whatever.
Keyword frequency and pagerank are really the two main factors in SEO.
It follows, then, that including keywords in your URLs is desirable.
e.g. http://my_site.com/article/keyword is better than http://mysite.com/article/42
All else being equal, both pages will achieve the same pagerank. Pagerank is determined by how many people link to you and what their page rank is. So, it does not affect your pagerank.
But it does affect how high you will end up in the search results. In the search index, not only page rank but also keyword relevance matters. If you have the keywords in your url and someone searches for them, then your page will be more relevant and be higher in the search results. Also, when people link to you then the keyword-rich URLs they use to link to you will also improve your relevance.
Don't stare yourself blind at pagerank. It doesn't matter that much. What matters is that you get found by people. Pagerank is only a small (and ever decreasing) part of that.
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In SEO people talk a lot about Google PageRank. It's kind of a catch 22 because until your site is actually big and you don't really need search engines as much, it's unlikely that big sites will link to you and increase your PageRank!
I've been told that it's easiest to simply get a couple high quality links to point to a site to raise it's PageRank. I've also been told that there are certain Open Directories like dmoz.org that Google pays special attention to (since they're human managed links). Can anyone speak to the validity of this or suggest another site/technique to increase a site's PageRank?
Have great content
Nothing helps your google rank more than having content or offering a service people are interested in. If your web site is better than the competition and solves a real need you will naturally generate more traffic and inbound links.
Keep your content fresh
Use friendly url's that contain keywords
Good: http://cars.com/products/cars/ford/focus/
Bad: http://cars.com/p?id=1232
Make sure the page title is relevant and well constructed
For example: Buy A House In France :. Property Purchasing in France
Use a domain name that describes your site
Good: http://cars.com/
Bad: http://somerandomunrelateddomainname.com/
Example
Type car into Google, out of the top 5 links all 4 have car in the domain: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=car
Make it accessible
Make sure people can read your content. This includes a variety of different audiences
People with disabilities: Sight, motor, cognitive disabilities etc..
Search bots
In particular make sure search bots can read every single relevant page on your site. Quite often search bots get blocked by the use of javascript to link between pages or the use of frames / flash / silverlight. One easy way to do this is have a site map page that gives access to the whole site, dividing it into categories / sub categories etc..
Down level browsers
Submit your site map automatically
Most search engines allow you to submit a list of pages on your site including when they were last updated.
Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html
Inbound links
Generate as much buzz about your website as possible, to increase the likely hood of people linking to you. Blog / podcast about your website if appropriate. List it in online directories (if appropriate).
References
Google Search Engine Ranking Factors, by an SEO company
Creating a Google-friendly site: Best practices
Wikipedia - Search engine optimization
Good content.
Update it often.
Read and digest everything at Creating a Google-friendly site: Best practices.
Be active on the web. Comment in blogs, correspond genuinely with people, in email, im, twitter.
I'm not too sure about the domain name. Wikipedia? What does that mean? Mozilla? What word is that? Google? Was a typo. Yahoo? Sounds like that chocolate drink Yoohoo.
Trying to keyword the domain name shoehorns you anyway. And it can be construed as a SEO technique in the future (if it isn't already!)
Answer all email. Answer blog comments. Be nice and helpful.
Go watch garyvee's Better Than Zero. That'll motivate you.
If it's appropriate, having a blog is a good way of keeping content fresh, especially if you post often. A CMS would be handy too, as it reduces the friction of updating. The best way would be user-generated content, as other people make your site bigger and updated, and they may well link to their content from their other sites.
Google doesn't want you to have to engineer your site specifically to get a good PageRank. Having popular content and a well designed website should naturally get you the results you want.
A easy trick is to use
Google webmaster tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
And you can generate a sitemap using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Then, don't miss to use www.google.com/analytics/
And be careful, most SEO guides are not correct, playing fair is not always the good approach. For example,everyone says that spamming .edu sites is bad and ineffective but it is effective.