Press releases have traditionally been associated with public relations. Over the past ten years there have been major changes in the field brought about by the development of the web. This has led to the online distributions of releases and so the function is now being increasingly associated with the technical skills belonging to search engine marketers. For many people in the search marketing field who are not experienced in public relations and have been approached to optimize press releases the field can be confusing. The basics of press release optimization are similar to keyword optimization for web sites; however there are some areas that demand specialized knowledge.… Read the rest

Dylan Downhill… Read the rest

URL Parameters, Session ID’s, Reserved Characters and Deep Nested web pages can make it harder for search engines to fully index your website. If your site uses any of the following you may find it hard to get indexed by the search engines:

Parameters

If your URL’s include parameters (end with ?a=1&b=2) then the search engines may not index these pages. This is because the spider can get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same page hundreds of times with exactly the same content.

It used to be that no search engines would index pages with parameters. This is now much improved to how it used to be, however to ensure your site is indexed by all the search engine spiders always limit to a maximum of two parameters, but if possible use none.… Read the rest

There are three articles dealing with redirects to handle redirecing one file at a time, redirecting one directory at a time, and redirecting multiple pages easily.

If you are going to move a page you will likely want to redirect visitors to the old page to the new in such a methd that the search engines don’t get confused. Some of the ways they can get confused include:

• Bringing up two copies of the same page. This is likely to trip a duplicate content penalty.
• Using a temporary redirect. This means ‘the page has moved but will be back shortly – don’t update your index’.

There are three articles dealing with redirects to handle, see related posts for more information.

If you are going to move a page you will likely want to redirect visitors from the old page to the new in such a method that the search engines don’t get confused. Some of the ways they can get confused include:

• Bringing up two copies of the same page. This is likely to trip a duplicate content penalty.
• Using a temporary redirect. This means ‘the page has moved but will be back shortly – don’t update your index’.

A 301 permanent redirect is the redirection method recommended by the major search engines.… Read the rest

There are three articles dealing with redirects – see related posts for more information

If you are going to move a page you will likely want to redirect visitors to the old page to the new in such a method that the search engines don’t get confused. Some of the ways they can get confused include:

• Bringing up two copies of the same page. This is likely to trip a duplicate content penalty.
• Using a temporary redirect. This means ‘the page has moved but will be back shortly – don’t update your index’.

A 301 permanent redirect is the redirection method recommended by the major search engines.… Read the rest

By: Nathan Johnson

Recently, I was asked to help automate some time consuming database update tasks for one of our Real Estate clients. They needed to ensure that their MLS listings were always up to date, but also couldn’t afford to take their site down while they were manually updating the database (imagine the data entry headache brought on by 1000 new MLS listings every day!). To further complicate matters, their hosting only supports ColdFusion, and can’t parse ASP or PHP pages. Thankfully, the concepts presented here are relatively straight forward and translate to PHP and ASP easier than the other way around.… Read the rest

By: Nathan Johnson

Setting up automated scripts on Windows can be difficult. The built in scheduler is hard to set especially if you don’t have console access. An easier way is to set up the site so that the first person to navigate to the site each morning causes the script to run. This is actually really simple to do, and can be completely seamless for the end user. Simply use the script page as the source of a little 1px by 1px image hidden somewhere at the bottom of your site’s footer:

	<img src="http://www.mysite.com/dbupdate.cfm" width="1" height="1" border="0">

Even though the SRC of this “image” is not a real image file, the server doesn’t know that, so it still runs the page to accommodate the request, and doesn’t require your user to navigate through the page or require you to dump large blocks of code into each of your site’s pages.… Read the rest

Duplicate Content Penalties

By: James Peggie and Dylan Downhill
Originally Published: Jan 18, 2005
Updated: Jan 30, 2005

Fact: Google penalizes page rank when it determines that content is duplicated by other sites.

If your rankings have slipped then it’s possible that your page contents have been duplicated causing a duplicate content penalty. Google doesn’t want multiple copies of the same content cluttering their results pages so they will devalue all but one of the copies of the content based on the age of the page.

Don’t Let Other People Benefit From Your Hard Work

Writing good quality content for your site is hard work!… Read the rest

Date created: 22 August 2004

If you’re having problems getting your whole site indexed then you should add a search engine friendly site map to your site. You’ll need a site map when:

• Your site menu is flash or pure javascript (most rollover scripts are OK if they use ‘<a href’ links).
• Your menu structure is more than 3 levels deep.
• Some of your content is not getting indexed and it is publicly readable i.e. not behind a fire wall, login isn’t required, etc.
• You want to provide some ‘Spider Bait’ i.e. optimized link text.

Whatever your reason (or for no reason) a site map will not hurt your search engine position and may help.… Read the rest