Dynamic Site Topics Archives

Now that Google admitted to crawling JavaScript and forms SEOs and Webmasters need to be aware of how to manage even more duplicate content issues.

In the past, a good strategy was to build out filter pages (filter by color, size, price, etc.) using JavaScript pull down menus. Google would typically stay away from such forms and you would not necessarily have to worry about Google seeing the same content filtered or sorted by color, price, size and so on.

But now with Google crawling JavaScript and forms, Webmasters need to take an extra step towards preventing Google from crawling and indexing such content. Why? Duplicate content.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on this topic and offers tips on what to do, to help you with this problem. Some of the advice includes:

• Include the duplicate content in an external Js, assign it to variables, and do innerHTML to some divs.
• Use XmlHTTPRequest (GET) to retrieve the data in XML format and then put it into the page.
• Use an Ajax POST and retrieve the XML content with this.
• Use robots.txt to block specific files and/or page naming conventions.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A discussion at Cre8asite Forums goes into a lot of questions about what a search engine prefers to see in a homepage. Is dynamic content preferred, or does a static homepage do just as well? For instance, the big contenders (eBay, Amazon, CNN) are updating their homepages constantly. Should we follow their example?

As Bill Slawksi says, it varies per site. A hybrid of dynamic and static features may be the best solution for most. Too much dynamic content may lose a familiar feel to a regular user.

Old stuff that doesn't change too much or too frequently that gives people a feel for the personality of the site, and a glimpse of what makes them unique while providing some stability.

But it really depends who your competitors are, according to Pittbug. If you're challenging these big sites, then sure, you'll want to emulate them as much as possible.

Ruud, however, says that search engines don't take preference over any particular homepage presentation. It all depends on your business.

Finally, EGOL says that you can view your analytics and see what kind of activity your users are doing on your website to see if it necessitates change.

An interesting read indeed. I personally like some dynamic elements. It makes the site feel like it's being attended to more often.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks how can he generate unique robots.txt files for each domain he has, when each of those sites are sharing the same local files through a form of IIS mirroring?

There are several ways to do this, however, member Pittbug, said he had the same issue. He explained that he wrote domain specific rules in isapi_rewrite to define a unique robots.txt file per domain. He explains that you can set it up as, "robots1.txt will appear as www.domain1.com/robots.txt, robots-b.txt will appear as www.domain2.com/robots.txt" and so on.

Of course you can also dynamically generate your robots.txt file on a per domain basis via your database, I would assume.

The bottom line, as Ammon Johns explains,

I'd simply tell the developers what needs to be done, and let them figure out their own preferred method of achieving it, as they'll know the limitations of their system better than I can.

I agree a 100%, just understand what solution they come up with and how ti will impact the spiders and crawling process.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks what are the search engine optimization implications of switching from ASP to PHP?

This is a fairly basic SEO question but it is a good one. This question applies to changing any URLs, not just from ASP to PHP. It is also from HTML to CFM or CFM to ASP and so on. It also includes changing a file name from abc.html to cba.html.

Search engines index pages. Pages are determined by their file name and extension and domain name. If you change any of them, it is considered a new page. So if you have a page at domain.com/filename.html and change it to domain.com/filename.php - it is a new page in the eyes of a search engine. If you have domain.com/filename.html and change it to domain.com/newfilename.html - it is a new page in the eyes of a search engine. If you have a page at domain.com/filename.html and you change it to domain.net/filename.html 0 it is a new page in the eyes of a search engine. By now, I assume you get my point.

What can you do? I would follow the same steps I laid out in Version 2: Relaunching a Site: SEO Considerations. You must set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages, with dynamic sites, it may be easier, since there may be some database logic that you can set these 301 redirects up dynamically. You must set up custom 404 page not found error pages up for those pages you simply can't 301 or for the pages that you forget to 301.

Those are some of the basics when it comes to switching page extensions or pages in general.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

An interesting Cre8asite Forums thread talks about an old topic on determining user intent based on search results, and then serving up a customize page to that user, based on his or her intent.

G-Man asks, without "search engine data" but with scraped results, can you still deploy this tactic of customizing based on user intent?

Ammon Johns believes you can. Just like you would with your own search referral data, you can use the scraped results to determine user intent. Ammon explains, "It is perfectly possible to determine a lot about intent, and motive, from a user by the method they use, either in keywords, or even by other referral data. It is simply about context and empathy at heart."

Classifying the types of keyword phrases into buckets of user types. User types might include ready to buy, just browsing, looking for best price, looking for best customer service, and so on. When you determine your users, typically through user personification, you can then associate keyword types to each persona. Then you direct each landing page to each persona based on the keyword search.

The thread goes into this in more detail.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

One of the common issues faced when designed a database-driven content management system is how to structure URLs in a friendly manner. Unfortunately, this is often the time when "Jack SEO" the search engine optimization expert clashes with "Joe Sitback," the site designer. It is sometimes in these stages of a project when various parts of the team forget that everyone is involved in the same internet marketing effort. Coming to an agreement, however, doesn't mean that either side has to settle for less than they want. If the time is spent to properly plan every aspect of the design, both Jack and Joe can move on feeling happy.

A thread stared this week at Search Engine Watch introduces a specific example of questions that arise when the first URL and directory structure is put forth by a database designer. Unfortunately this is most often the way it happens, instead of the designer and the SEO engineer getting together prior to the site or CMS being developed. The question the poster asks is valid and important, dealing with how to remove additional parameters from a DB-driven URL.

Immediately, "ExposureTim" provides a very insightful answer to the poster's scenarios, when he states:

Any of what you mention is possible. It all just depends on getting the programmers interested enough to use well-planned (less lazy) methods. Best approach is to convince them of the value of what you're asking, buy them a beer, then ask again. They probably already know it can be done but prefer the easier and more-flexible/forgiving method.

Join the thread at Search Engine Watch's SEO Forum and help this person define what he should approach his developers with.

As I reported recently, Google Recommends Using Meta Description Tag but why?

This Search Engine Watch Forums thread shows the perfect example of why a unique meta description is slightly important.

If you ever do a site: command, i.e. site:www.seroundtable.com and you see:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

That is a sign you do not have unique meta descriptions.

So then you click the "repeat the search with the omitted results included." You are then presented with unique title tags (if you have them) but shown the same description snippet for each result.

Why? Because it is pulling your header information.

For this reason, Google and other search engines like when you have a unique meta description, so they have something unique to put there. Typically, a normal search would show content from the page - and not use the meta description - but in these types of cases, the top of the source code, most likely the navigation, will be shown.

So in the case of the thread:

When I enter my URL in Google I get the following result.

For example my website is http*//www.xyz.com

Results

"http*//www.xyz.com
About Us, Contact Us, Links, Sitemap Copyrights 2007 http*//www.xyz.com All rights reserved."

Yea, but is it such a big deal? I don't think so, because who searches this way? In any event, it is fairly easy to do one of two things or even both of them.

(1) Add unique meta descriptions
(2) Use CSS positioning to make your body content come up as high as possible in the source code.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Here are some takeaways from Adam Lasnik's latest post at WebmasterWorld, see post number 3208854 or post # 70 in that thread.

• Boilerplate content is "huge swaths of text repeated on every page, such as an obnoxiously long legal footers"
• Product pages that are the same but only differentiate themselves by color may be filtered out (Google will show one of the several colors you have)
• Typically Google won't penalize you for linking from your .de site to your .com site; "penalties for country-domain cross-linking isn't something I have seen"
• Go with the country specific TLDs, using index.de.html or de.example.com won't make a difference to Google. TLDs and language used on the page does.
• Is the sandbox effect time bound? "No, it's not a universal truth that all domains take a year (or [insert time period]) to get indexed. As Matt and I have both noted, there are many variables at play and while some sites will indeed take longer to be more comprehensively indexed, many will not."
• "Our algorithms take a look at their pages and (computerwise) ask, "What value is this site providing that users can't get from other sites or even the 'mothership'? (originator of content)"
• Google may add a tool to Webmaster Central that is a sort of "Duplicate Content Filter Meter" (I doubt it), since he said, "The fact that duplicate content isn't very cut and dry for us either (e.g., it's not "if more than [x]% of words on page A match page B...") makes this a complicated prospect."
• Similar / Identical content on .com and .mobi should not be an issue of duplicate content

I think we got some good tips from that post.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The big take away is that the question people ask me a ton, what is the percentage difference between page A and page B for them not to be seen as duplicate content.

The fact that duplicate content isn't very cut and dry for us either (e.g., it's not "if more than [x]% of words on page A match page B...") makes this a complicated prospect.

There is no exact percentage is what I have been telling people.

Forum discussion on this specific quote at Cre8asite Forums.

I love the advice admin, tedster gives one member in a WebmasterWorld thread. The member describes that he has several pages, all with the same content, but sorted differently.

For example, he has a page on pineapple chairs (love going back to my Big Blue Pineapple Chair example). You can view the main pineapple chair landing page, you can then sort the page by price either highest to low or lowest to high, you can also sort by popularity, sizes and colors. So you have several pages, the same content, just displayed differently.

Check out tedster's response:

For a site that is just now instituting sort pages, I agree that restricting which urls get indexed can be wise, especially if the site doesn't have really strong PR. However, your site already has the sort pages in place, correct? I've seen lots of people try to 'fix' something because of something they read, and they end up hurting their business.

So I was wondering if you see some signs that your sort pages are in some way problematic. In other words, Google may already be handing your urls quite nicely for you. If so, you might cause a problem when you're just trying to make something better.

On the other hand, if there are symptoms of trouble -- then yes, I agree that a simple title change is probably not enough to fix things and you will want to exclude the sort pages from being indexed to see if that helps.

Often people have a set up that would be considered duplicate content. But often the search engines handle those pages fine. Obviously, if your pages are suffering due to duplicate content, you should fix the issue. How? Duplicate content tips here, which was a great thread and conversation on itself.

Don't fix what ain't broken, or what others (search engines) don't perceive to be broken.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It seems like we can not get away from the topic of duplicate content. A recent post at the Google Webmaster Central blog named Deftly dealing with duplicate content by Adam Lasnik, gives more insight (possibly) to what is duplicate content in the eyes of Google. Yes, I know we just wrote about it; Duplicate Content: What Is It 12/2006 but that was based on hearsay.

FYI - I believe the first time we ever wrote about duplicate content, with the terms "duplicate content" was on May 6, 2004. Aspen, a guest author back then, wrote What is Duplicate Content based on a lot of discussion about it back then. Yes, the discussion continues, but we do have a clearer picture of what it is and what it is not, now.

In short, Adam gave some tips, most we should know already, on how to prevent some duplicate content issues, they include:

• Block appropriately
• Use 301s
• Be consistent with your URLs
• Use TLDs for language specific content
• Syndicate carefully
• Use the preferred domain feature of webmaster tools (easy, so why not)
• Minimize boilerplate repetition (sometimes hard to do)
• Avoid publishing stubs (empty pages)
• Understand your CMS (common sense)
• Use the DMCA form when needed

Some of these answers went into question in a WebmasterWorld.

The first was "Minimize boilerplate repetition" where they ask about navigational elements and quoting other sites. Adam responds that those areas are typically not a major issue, he says;

I wouldn't worry about a 40 word snippet of that sort, unless it's the primary content on many of your pages.

The next question was on using country specific TLDs. Should I or shouldn't I. Again, more practical advice from Adam.

If you already have German language content that's indexed / ranked decently in search engines, then I'd hesitate starting over, but otherwise yeah, I think putting German language content (or, more specifically, Germany-audience-targeted content) on a .de domain is a good idea.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A huge topic at the SES conference last week was duplicate content. The definitions and how search engines handle duplicate content has changed a lot over the past few years. So that is why I dated the title of this post.

A Cre8asite Forums thread discusses just that.

In short, duplicate content is not a penalty. It hasn't been that way in years.

When you have 20 pages of the same page of content, a search engine will do their best to pick the best page on your behalf and filter out the remaining pages.

Why? The search engines do not want the same page in their index more than one time because it wastes resources and provides a bad search experience (showing the same result twice is not good).

So search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com) all try to pick the best page (one with cleanest URL, most links, etc.). But if they pick the wrong URL (not the best page, in your opinion) then you may consider it a penalty, when it is not.

This is why you should help the search engines out by using 301s and robots.txt files to tell the search engines which pages are the important ones. With Google you can also use Sitemaps and increase the priority score of the important pages, relative to the others.

So it is your choice: Let the search engines choose for you or you make the choice.

Forum discussion Cre8asite Forums.

In the past, having a dynamic site caused issues with most search engines. If your site has weird parameters in the URL, they were known as stop characters, and search engines would stop crawling them - in fear of getting thrown in a loop. For example, if you had a dynamic calendar system and the spider can just keep clicking next until year 3405, that is dangerous for the spider, indexer and your bandwidth and server. We have tons of articles on dynamic site topics.

As I reported yesterday at SEW Blog; Google Removes Dynamic Parameter Clause From Webmaster Guidelines. Google has removed the line that reads;

Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.

It doesn't mean Google will index all dynamic URLs. If you have around five or more parameters, the spider still may be wary of crawling those URLs. That is why Google still recommends "rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions" as good practice.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks how can one prevent scraping of his site's content by a non-authorized spider, while not hurting his rankings in search engines?

This is a serious issue, serious enough that there was a session about this named The Bot Obedience Course at SES San Jose 2006. In that session, Bill Atchison from CrawlWall.com gave an excellent presentation.

Robert Charlton at the thread notes that Bill will be releasing a software tool that helps do just that. He said there is a "Beta version coming soon." The crawlwall.com/technology.html page has details of the technology developed by CrawlWall.com.

CrawlWall uses the following technology to secure your website and protect your content. All of the various methods are designed to work together in harmony to make sure that all of the spiders with permission and legitimate visitors get into your website without issue and all of the rogue crawlers get stopped and never gain admission.

Tactics such as dynamic robots.txt files, whitelist opt-in permissions, "second pass filters," ip banning or/and address banning, proxy blocking, creating certain obstacles, and a quarantine list for those uncertain IPs.

I am looking forward to seeing how it works in the real world.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there are any issues with using hotlink protection for your images and the same images suffering in image search. Hotlink protection, if you do not know what it is, is when you want to dissuade others from pulling your images directly from your server. You can use hotlink protection, such as with htaccess, to either block or serve up a different image, to those pulling the images from you. But does this affect your search rankings in image search engines like Google image search?

Most of the folks in the forum discussion say there is no issue with Google and hotlink protection. Some recommend that you allow certain domains to display the images properly, such as your own domain (duh) and the shopping search engines (if that applies), news engines (if that applies), blog engines, image search engines and so on. But that list can get long.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Sometimes you may notice a URL listed in the search results page that may look like www.domain.com/?tracking=5 or something like that. You normally do not want to see your pages with URLs listed in the search indexes like that. It is bad for a few reasons, the two most obvious include (1) you are tracking results (clicks/conversions/etc) from a different source (Google is most likely the source you did not want to track those clicks from, in this case) and (2) the link popularity of that page is somewhat off according to the search engine.

This use to be a bigger issue with search engines, today it seems to be slightly not as big of an issue.

So what remedies do you have?

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses 301 redirecting the tracking "URL to the same page URL but without the parameter." The other solution given is to add a noindex meta tag to the page with the extra variables (make sure it is only on that page and not on the version without the extra variables (often harder to implement).

Best solution of the top two? 301 redirect.

Best solution? Get the main URL indexed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are services out there that allow you to buy a site for your company, with the content already provided. You see this often with insurance brokerage sites, as well as many other industries. Often, these services are provided via a HTML frame technology. Let me explain, you have your domain name at www.domain.com, at the top of the page is your header that says "My Company, LLC." Under the header is a framed window with content provided by the third party company, hosted on a domain outside of yours. This is an SEO nightmare, and is a current issue at a thread in our forums named A major seo headache. Donna describes the problem;

1. They completely changed the site, so that now the 30,000+ pages that were indexed now show as 404's.

2. Their new site is in frames.

3. The frame with the content is located on a different domain.

4. The frame with the content is on a secure server (https://), but as far as I know, there are no cookies, session id's or password protection involved.

So what can you do? I have seen the issue in the past, what we have done was deployed a spidering and scraping tool to pull the content the client is paying for off the external domain name. It then reposts the content on a static looking HTML page, under the client's own domain name. You may run into period issues with the site being slow or the scraper failing, but overall, this solution works well. You can do the content scraping manually if the page count is low but if it is a huge product database, you will need to deploy some automated solution to this technique.

Forum discussion at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Many sites have printer friendly versions. I have it on my corporate site, I do not have it on this blog. But what happens when these printer friendly versions get crawled and indexed by a search engine? You can then run into the duplicate content filter. It is not a penalty, but it sure can feel like one. You do not want your printer friendly pages coming up in the SERPs and your regular pages not.

What can you do to prevent this?

• Use JavaScript links to pop open the printer friendly page
  
• No index the page
  
• Exclude the directory for the printer friendly pages in your robots.txt file
  
• Use the nofollow tag for those pages
  
• Use CSS to produce a printer friendly page
  

Past articles on duplicate content in most recent order:

• Naming the Duplicate Content Filter
  
• What To Call Duplicate Content Washing in Google - GoogleWashing, DupeWash, SourceWash?
  
• New Duplicate Content Filter
  
• Duplicate Content - Resellers Ranking Higher
  
• Duplicate Content Penalty Not a 30 60 90 Day Time Span
  
• Duplicate Content Penalty Timespan
  
• What is Duplicate Content

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A High Rankings thread asks members what is a good non-open source, but commercial shopping cart software package that is search engine friendly. Three people in the thread tell the guy to build a custom solution, because that is the best option (of course I agree). One person recommended x-cart and an other recommended SecureNetShop.com . Also, mcanerin recommended that you use any shopping cart, but build the product and catalog pages from scratch so they are search friendly. All of these solutions are fine.

The High Rankings Forum has a whole forum devoted to Shopping Cart Discussion. I also have a basic article on how to construct your Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Catalogs.

Forum discussion at High Rankings Forum.

Commonly an issue with dynamically driven sites and sites that depend on session IDs, is that you have too many pages indexed. You are thinking, probably, how can I have too many pages indexed? The more pages I have indexed, the better off I am! Well not always. The issue is that when you have a site that isn't well optimized you can run into issues.

Trouble Sites:
(1) Session IDs in URL: A session ID would be dynamically generated and appended to the URL of every page. So a unique page about a blue widget might have hundreds of different URLs. For example; http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget.html?SESSIONID=5fd5ds14f56s1fs, http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget.html?SESSIONID=dsf45dsf54sd5s, http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget.html?SESSIONID=5dfs1651ssdffds, http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget.html?SESSIONID=jdfnkfjdsnfkjdfns55 are all the same page, but look unique to Google, because they are different URLs.
(2) The same title on every page of your site can sometimes confuse Google, especially when your content is not well indexed or not visible to the search engine spiders.
(3) Paginated category landing pages, so you have 10 pages of products within the widgets category, each page may contain the same title tag (i.e. widget).
(4) Paginated search engine forums, like WebmasterWorld, page one, page two, ..., page forty-four. All different URLs, but the same exact title tag, yet different content on each page.

But often this is not a major issue with the search engine. They all have built in ways to handle what they might call "duplicate content" and filter them out. I would be more careful with issues one and two listed above then the others.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A HighRanking Forums thread named Cookieless Sessions discusses one of the biggest issues with dynamically driven Web sites - the session id.

Including a Session ID in a URL, will cause the search spiders to run around like chickens without their heads. Think of it this way. I have a single page on the topic of the Big Blue Pineapple Chair. Now, I decide to serve up a different URL for each person visiting that page. Why do I do this? Sessions can be useful for tracking, up-selling, keeping track of users and so on. So by applying a unique identifier (session ID) in the URL, I can track that person throughout my site. So one spider might go to the site and get one URL, three others will get three different URLs and so on. Duplicate content disaster...

What about using cookies, storing that unique identifier on the user's computer so you can identify the user. And not worry about adding an ID to the URL itself. Well, spiders do not accept cookies for many reasons. So if you serve up a cookie, the spider won't accept it and if you require a cookie for site navigation, the spider won't navigate.

What are your options? Make sure your homepage, product pages, category pages, brand pages, and so on, work without requiring a unique identifier of some sort. I have an old but still valid article on building dynamic sites that work well with search engines, specifically Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Catalogs.

Let me introduce to you, one of the developers at RustyBrick, Jaimie Sirovich. I took him to the SES show two weeks ago, and he has been a huge fan of SEO topics. Like me, he believes in the whole build it from ground up approach. Jaimie wrote an article he named Graphical, SEO Friendly Buttons. The article is a spin off of Stewart Rosenberger's Dynamic Text Replacement article.

Here is a quote:

Frankly, I got bored of creating buttons like this every day at work; I'm a programmer not a designer after all, and the product of my frustration is a basic PHP class that generates simple buttons based on a template. The template consists of a left-image, a right-image, and a tile image for everything in between.

This is more of a "how-to" article, pretty technical, hope it helps some of you guys. Any comments, feel free to post them here.

I am sure you have seen this, where you come from a Google search and land on a page and you notice the the keywords you searched on are highlighted within the context of that page you land on. If you haven't try this search phrase, click on this search phrase then click on the first result, it should take you to DigitalPoint's forum and highlight the words.

Now what if you used a variation of this and instead of just highlighting the keywords, you insert them into the headline of the page. Why would I want to do that? Well, there have been tests done that show when you have the keywords in the landing page, it will ultimately lead to a high conversion rate. If think deeper about this and maybe the dynamic insertion of keywords into the page will lower this conversion rate in the long term. Anyway, it can be done.

There are two issues that come to mind:

(1) What if the search query is not in proper grammatical sense? Your page will look weird. Misspellings, offensive words and so on.

(2) The second issue is that the page is, in a sense, cloaked. Because the search engines can not retrieve the same page, exactly with the same context, as the user.

These issues are now being discussed in a Search Engine Watch thread.

There is a member at the forums named seomike, he often comes to Search Engine Watch and gives some very clear and useful tips on how to improve a dynamic site's search visibility. Recently he posted 3 mod rewrite tips and tricks, and clearly explains how and what they do.

In his first tip, he details how to rewrite a dynamic URL with exact variables in the URL to a static looking URL. His example dynamic URL is: www.somesite.com/catalog.php?cat=widgets&product_id=1234. The new example static URL is: www.somesite.com/catalog/widgets-1234.html

The code used to make this possible:

#start .htaccess code
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^cat\=([^&]+)\&product_id\=([^&]+)$
RewriteRule ^$ /catalog/%1-%2.html [R=301,L]

In tip two he explains how to "Change a product name or change a mispelling and you've just lost all page scores to the static mod rewritten url."

And in tip three he explains how to "Make the unormalized, normalized for Yahoo!'s sake."

It is worth checking out this thread if you have a dynamic site and you can utilize mod_rewrite rules.

Some great news for those stressing over whether Google will be able to spider their very long dynamic urls. Appears in the last couple weeks Google has been pushing the envelope in terms of spidering urls that contain more than 5 variables and up to 6 variables in most cases. Who's to say search engines don't like dynamic websites? A trend that may be changing from what we originally thought Google could spider. There is a good discussion at Highrankings, where projectphp notices that some pages are now being picked up.

To illustrate here is an example of what Google is now picking up:

www.domain.com.au/Start.aspx?PageID=10150& ProductID=137474&menuId=0&MM=&icp=0&sti=1

There was some more reports of Google spidering 5 urls variables recently, and this week Google adds 6 url variables to the list. I am hoping its gets up to 7 variables, but here is hoping, and if they can do 6, it means they are close to 7 or more.

Well Barry is on a plane bound for Sweden, lucky guy, I wanted to highlight an excellent post here started on SEW forums relating to designing search engine friendly e-commerce websites. Its an excellent must read for those that are considering opening an e-commerce site, or deciding to redesign there current site. Many of the tips and points mentioned apply to a wide range of websites, and Barry presents a case study from one of his clients with the things he thinks are "critical in the development of a search engine friendly, but at the same time, easy to use e-commerce site". He goes on to say that: "Arguably many e-commerce sites often overlook the most important and fundamental area to any Web site, the navigation." This is very true, and if you are struggling to discern a coherent navigation, then reading up on information architecture would be a good place to start. Check out: Card sorting a defintive guide for building categories and taxonomies for websites. (I recently did this myself, and found it an excellent exercise.) You might also check out Information Architecture for Everyone in order to familiarize yourself with the concept first. Without overloading the subject too much more, here is one diagram I had to post to give you an idea of the steps required to design a site from start to finish, where information architecture comes in, content inventory for building navigation, discovery & user research, interaction design, and finally visual design.

Now, the other option if you decide to skip some of these steps might result in what a member at Cre8asite forums today joked about, If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers. Funny post, befitting to the topic.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Will google ban portals with rotating content? caught my eye. It asks the question, will it hurt or help my rankings if I change content on a page dynamically. Let me explain. I have a page about a particular vacation spot. On this page, I might want to include; weather that is pulled from weather.com, updated movie listings, hotel information, useful resources that rotate in and out based on page reload. Will this hurt your rankings for this page?

There are two ways to look at it. If the page is targeting a competitive keyword phrase, then changing all the content on the page might prove to be detrimental to the successful and long term ranking of that page. One of the major factors of a page ranking well, when speaking about the 'on-page optimization side', is the content on the page. So if you change the content, the keyword phrase mix might not be optimal.

What is recommended, is to leave fairly static content on the page and then bring in dynamic portions of content, to support the other content. Hand write a two paragraph blurb on the page, optimize those paragraphs for the keyword phrase of that page. Then include helpful resources, such as weather, news, movies, bars and your favorite search engine and you should be set. Fresh content is rumored to be loved by the engines, I have my own theory on that - but that is for a different entry.

For those that know me, I am a firm believer that going the dynamic route, when it comes to site development and maintenance, is the best and most efficient method. Many web designers and seos don't share my passion. However, this is a dynamic web site issues forum, so I thought I share a challenge I came across.

My company has built dozens of e-commerce sites, all very dynamic. We empower the customer by allowing them to manage the whole site. So if they want to add a category, they can do it. If they want to add product, pictures, new sections, brands, and so on - they can do it without calling us. Actually, I recently and finally finished an article I named Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Catalogs which discusses many of the basics. Here I would like to touch on one area of the dynamic e-commerce site, the URL.

Our e-commerce sites use mod_rewrite to make search engine friendly and keyword rich URLs (not that I feel keywords in the URL make a big/any difference in rankings, but I feel they can be helpful with usability and click-through rates). So what we do is dynamically build the URL based on the name of the product. Let me give you a real life example; look at: http://www.smarttuxedo.com/Tuxedos-1/Sutton100-Wool-Single-Breasted-Tuxedo-1-Button-Shawl-Lapel-Available-1-Button-Notch-and-Peak-Lapels-45.html.

That URL is way long! Right? Well look at the product name in the h1 tag or the title of the page. My client gave that product a 17 word title! Now that is not good for usability, not good for seo and not good to look at. So I told my client to go into the products and shorten them to about 5 words. he said ok.

The problem is, when you would change the product name, the old URL (the one the search engines indexed) would work and the new URL would work. So the search engines would re-crawl and find the new URL, but also see that the old URL worked. My client would have two pages with exactly the same content on them. Not the best idea.

Solution: We built a dynamic 301 redirect which automatically redirected one from an old URL to the new URL. How does it work? Simple... If the URL does not match the title of the page, redirect (301 style) to a URL that matches the title of the page. For example try; http://www.smarttuxedo.com/OLD-CATEGORY-URL-1/OLD-PRODUCT-URL-45.html

I have posted this at Search Engine Watch, sorry for pointing out the threads I have started, but I really think it will be helpful for others.

Here I am plugging an other thread at SearchEngineWatch Forums, I am sorry, but the quality of threads over here are simply outstanding. A thread started by the famous Search Engine Strategies speaker and SEM expert from Denmark, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, discussed the benefits of using mod_rewrite to make a dynamic site search engine friendly. Post # 5 at this thread is where this discussion begins.

Mikkel is a huge fan of the mod_rewrite and so am I. As we discussed, its an easy way to convert dynamic looking URLs into search engine friendly URLs. This instantaneously makes more of the "hidden Web" visible to the search engines and searchers. Besides for the SEO benefits of mod_rewrite, you can use it for a dozen reasons. On some of my sites, we use it for authenticating traffic and access to files, so if someone tries to rip off stock photos from a client's site - it will mask the photo as stolen and strike it out. That is just one example of other uses for mod_rewrite, you can come up with really smart uses, depending on the time and ideas you have.

Ron Carnell tends to argue with this practice of using mod_rewrite or the other URL rewriting techniques on sites. In fact, he says that its a last resort action and should be considered a band aid like approach as opposed to a perfect solution.

If your CMS isn't SE-friendly, that's a problem with the CMS, not with the web server, and the best solution will be implemented at the correct level. Realistically, I know it's not always possible to solve the problem at the source, but I think that should always be the goal. At the end of the day, mod_rewrite is typically a Band-Aid used to cover up sloppy programming. Heal the wound, and the Band-Aid can be removed.

This makes for an interesting thread, feel free to join in.

Over at HighRankings Forum, a member brought up a comical example of his confrontation with Flash. He tried to click on a link from Macromedia's Web site (company that owns Flash) and received the following message "Macromedia Flash Player version 7,0,19,0 was detected. To view the Edge, you need the latest version, Macromedia Flash Player 6,0,47,0. You can download the free Macromedia Flash Player now."

But this is the comical part...On that page, there was a link to Jakob Nielsen's 117 design guidelines for Flash developers and presto, I got the following.

But this is a search engine related site, so what does this have to search engine besides for most hating flash? Search engines love text. Having said that, let me quote from Peter Da Vanzo.

Flash can be good for branding, in so much that someone looking at it might be impressed with your brand. But I don't think anyone visits a website simply to be impressed with the brand.

The site needs to inform. A flash website can inform, but most flash sites seem to have so little to say. I don't know why that is, but I suspect it is because too much emphasis is placed on form. This suits brochureware, of course.

A member at SEO Chat posted his test results for measuring the underscores versus hyphens both in the URL and in the title of the page. Does Google consider them to be the same? Well based on his early tests, the answer is NO.

The SEO Chat thread is is found at google underscore test results. You can view the test page here.

Notice the filename structure is (I italicized the text within the URL Google can read) chalcakloopy-cganveeeing_doreaivnically_phreanatoindment-bafdiadiiafy.html

Notice the title of the page is worded as (I italicized the text within the title tag that Google can read) teawufloppafomper-flevalitettaeilanvincely_capamafiandhfollicruxzst_audfivatrdatalnmafluzs-ahgonnvohunnytion

Now lets check Google results for those keyword phrases that match the URL structure:
chalcakloopy is a match!
cganveeeing is not a match.
doreaivnically is not a match.
phreanatoindment is not a match.
bafdiadiiafy is a match!

Now lets check Google results for those keyword phrases that match the title structure:
teawufloppafomper is a match!
flevalitettaeilanvincely is not a match.
capamafiandhfollicruxzst is not a match.
audfivatrdatalnmafluzs is not a match.
ahgonnvohunnytion is a match!

Nice test.

WebmasterWorld has a very interesting thread taking place named Award Winning Sites or Problem Sites?. A upset Web site owner saw a company build several sites that basically run off the same data set (probably same database) but have a different design and layout to them.

We have all seen examples of this while shopping online. One example is:
FootLocker.com & EastBay.com. See both their product landing pages for "Jordan Men's Air Jordan XII Retro Low" sneaker, FootLocker.com & EastBay.com. Not only do those pages look almost exactly the same, so do the homepages.

Brett Tabke, quickly defends the this practice as stating they have "done an outstanding job of building