I was trying to submit this hunting video to digg today and was told
“Your URL appears to be redirecting a bit too much for our tastes.”
This is just a normal ASP.NET webpage that uses web parts. ASP.NET does not work like most web programming. They do a lot of things for you. They really like to use 302 redirects to show pages.
Digg has decided that a site using ASP.NET web parts is spam I guess. This site has worked hard to make a video and picture sharing community for people into outdoor sports like hunting and fishing and now their members can’t share things they upload to digg. I think what digg did was try to stop spammers but what they did was block legit websties.
I have been working a lot with Google analytics a lot lately and I like it a lot. Before I used it I had asked some friends what percentage of their site visitors were dial up. They gave me these real low numbers like 3-5%. I thought that was real low. Specially in the niche they were in. Now that I have my own stats I see the same numbers. Right now I have 5.32% dail up users and 63.5% broadband. The rest goes to unknown. When you have 27% unknown those numbers are almost worthless. I would imagine that all broadband providers are known so there is very good chance those are dial up. Also T1 users could be dail up. Anybody can start an ISP with a t1 and some modems. These numbers are pretty much worthless.
I am noticing that a lot of web developers consider HTML old school and something to avoid. This is a very bad trend. People need to realize that web pages are documents that need to be cataloged and searched. If you don’t use a universally accepted standard to mark them up companies like Google and Yahoo will have a harder time figuring out what a page is about.
HTML is a standard to define the elements in a text document. An HTML only document looks very ugly and plain in a web browser. Using HTML to design your web page is very old school and does not look very good. At the dawn of the Internet HTML provided 2 roles one being markup and the other design. We now have CSS that takes over the job of defining how something looks. People are so caught up in how a web page looks they forget about the markup side of a web page.
Any good SEO should know this. Part of the job of an SEO is to educate developers about this topic. We are document markup experts. Companies need to have an SEO on staff to make sure the developers don’t lose site of this.
I mentioned in an earlier post that my asp.net website was showing up in Google with some very weird URL’s. I could not figure out why this was happening. I was using online spider simulators and could not figure out how Google was getting these weird URL’s. With some help from some people at www.webmasterworld.com I found out it had something to do with cookies. So I went to my site with Firefox and turned off cookies and there was the weird url. I did the same thing in IE and it did not.
I mentioned yesterday that I found a flaw in IIS. It turns out it is a flaw in .NET framework. This flaw allows you to create as many URL’s as you want on somebodies website. All you have to do is link to them or submit a bunch of different URL’s to a zillion directories all linking to the same page. You can do even more damage if the site is using relative URL’s because this trick will change the base URL for that page. I have already seen sites listed in Google this way.
The trick is that you can put (X(aBc-123_ID$=1234)). This is not just some random thing. There are rules. The X has to a capital letter and can only be one letter. The 2nd part can be just about anything. You can’t use star, ampersand, or pound sign. This means you can use equal sign, period, underscore, dash, exclamation point, or comas. Percent sign can only be used when used with URL encoding like %20.
http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/(X(aBc-123_ID$=1234))/default.aspx
I can not find a way to turn this off. I don’t know enough about .NET to know how to catch it with programming. I am in the process now of finding out. I will post when I find a fix. One quick fix is to turn off .NET. If you are using classic asp there is no reason to have this installed.
I have a new site that our company is working on. I noticed that in google all of a sudden we have all of our pages listed in Google with very weird things added to our URLs.
http://www.mysite.com/(A(XobqNFPtxwEkAAAAMzk3ZTU
4NzQtZGFjZS00OGUxLWExYzYtZDBiYjc1Mzg1N2YwP7fq1em0HKYJ5
vYMP8lm4NCf3241))/subdirectory/Default.aspx
I found out that this works on any IIS server. Even on www.microsoft.com. I have no idea what this is. I do know it is a bad thing for SEO and any site hosted on IIS needs to address this. This goes back to what I say about site architecture. Your site needs to have a URL policy set up and enforced. Nobody can go to any page unless that URL is already known to the site owner. This means no page can be access from 2 or more differnt urls. The site owner needs to redirect any rogue URL to the correct one and 404 anything you can’t predict. What this does is create duplicate content that the search engines do not like and can even hurt a sites rankings.
Read more…
I was telling a buddy about SEO the other day. We got to search engine friendly URL’s and he pointed out that what I was saying could be considered a security feature. When you have the question mark, period, ampersand, and equal sign in your URL you are giving people information about your system. Hackers can try to exploit your system if they know the syntax. It won’t stop them but it might stop the stupid ones. Kind of like an alarm does not stop a good thief. I always recommend removing those symbols for SEO reasons. This just gives me another reason to convince somebody to switch to search engine friendly URL’s.
If you want to find your back links you can go to www.yahoo.com and type in linkdomain:www.mysite.com. If somebody has put your link all of their pages or just several pages you can remove that from your linkdomain: search. What I will do is linkdomain:www.mysite.com -site:mysite.com -site:othersite1.com -site:othersite2.com Keep adding domains until you get rid of all the extra junk. I found I had to add -site:yahoo.com because my Yahoo directory link was put in quite a few different yahoo directories.
This also works the other way to only show links from one site or links that contain other words like type in “directory” to find all sites that link to you and have the word “directory” on them. You can play around with the other advanced searches like intitle: inurl:. I like to try linkdomain:www.mysite.com inurl:”edu” to see if I have in .edu links.
I was looking at a clients logs today and saw a referrer from a site named www.rankmon.com. I went there and it showed keywords that I rank for and where I rank on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I then realized “hey I just got referrer spammed”. Oh well at least this time it was something interesting. It seems the site spiders the internet reading keyword meta tags and then scrapes the search engines and gives a ranking report. I really like this. The site does not have an about page or anything that mentions who they are or how it is done or how you can work with them.
This weekend I noticed an update at Google. I watch a lot of SERPS and they all jumped around this weekend. Since July 4th was on a Wednesday I think this weekend counts as a holiday update. I have watched Google for over 4 years and they have changed a lot over time. Back in the old days they would have there once a month update. Then they went to what they call a rolling update. Google does make changes all the time but one thing I have noticed is that they make changes on weekends. They seem to be consistent about making changes on holidays. There was one back on memorial weekend. Here are a few that Barry over at www.serountable.com has kept a record of.
www.seroundtable.com/archives/012469.html
www.seroundtable.com/archives/013672.html
www.seroundtable.com/archives/013293.html
www.seroundtable.com/archives/006384.html
www.seroundtable.com/archives/012394.html
I am currently setting up a forum for a client. The client wanted me to take out post timestamps because he did not want people to track when he made posts. It was also for other users so nobody got in trouble for making forum posts at work. I could not find much on the web on how to do this so here is what I did. There may be more files that need this done. These were all I could find.
#
#—–[ OPEN ]——————————————
#
index.php
viewtopic.php
search.php
viewforum.php
#
#—–[ FIND ]——————————————
#
$post_date = create_date(
#
#—–[ AFTER, ADD ]——————————————
#
$post_date = substr($post_date,0,11);
#
#—–[ SAVE/CLOSE ALL FILES ]———————
#
# EoM
