I had a post the other day about how to make search engine friendly URL’s using coldFusion. I had a comment that asked “Is it still necessary to remove the “?” and other symbols from CF code so search engines can read them?” Instead of answering with a comment I thought I would create a post about it. The simple answer is no. Google and the other top search engines have figured out how to do deal with dynamic URL’s. There are many sites that rank well using them. Having a “?” or “&” in your URL is not considered a negative or a positive by the search engine algos. What they do have a problem with is session ID’s. Do not use those. Read more…
UPDATE: I don’t want anybody to think that I am saying it is wrong to have a client link to your site. My only point is that it should be done with permission and that when people are looking to hire an SEO they should not consider an SEO good just because they rank for SEO terms. I am mostly talking about local SEO terms.
One thing I have noticed is that a lot of SEO’s and web designers put a link on all their clients’ sites to themselves. They then turn around and try to claim to be good at SEO because they rank locally for seo or web design. That is not SEO. Most of the time it is not even ethical because they do not tell their clients what they are doing. They also then turn around and send a link to their clients to help them rank. I’m not saying that putting links on your client’s site is wrong I’m just saying it does not make you good at SEO. Some of the people that rank for top SEO terms suck at SEO. It is not hard to rank for a term in your own industry specially if you do a lot public speaking and write a book. It is hard is to get a client in a different area than you are and get them to rank for a hard non-local 2 word phrase. When choosing an SEO do not be impressed by the fact that they rank for SEO terms. Check their back links and see if they have a ton of links just from clients.
I have a client that has a site in coldfusion and I needed to fix their URL’s so they are search engine friendly. I don’t have access to the server so I needed a coldfusion solution. What I wanted was to make it so there were no ?, &, or = signs in the URL and convert them to /’s. I also wanted to 301 redirect the old URL’s to the new URL’s. Here is what I came up with
<cfset urlstring = cgi.path_info>
<cfloop from="1" to=#ListLen(urlstring,"/")# index="i">
<cfif i mod 2>
<cfset paramName = "URL." & ListGetAt(urlstring,i,"/")>
<cfelse>
<cfparam name="#paramName#" default="#ListGetAt(urlstring,i,"/")#">
</cfif>
</cfloop>
<cfif cgi.QUERY_STRING contains "=">
<cfset moveUrl = #rereplace (cgi.QUERY_STRING,"[=?&]","/","ALL")#>
<cfset newUrl = #cgi.path_info# & "/" & #moveUrl#>
<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<cfheader name="Location" value="#newUrl#">
</cfif>
About a month ago I needed to do some work on a site where I needed to change a lot of code on every page. I set up IIS on my machine and copied the site to it. I then set up Dreamweaver so that I would work on the site locally. When I opened Dreamweaver I had all the files for my site listed on the left side. I found that when I did a search and replace in Dreamweaver I had the option to do it to the entire current site. That was real cool and I was using for some simple things. I got to a point where I needed to switch out some tags with tags. I like to use normal HTML whenever I can especially header elements.
The problem was that I need to find a string but leave the stuff inside the tags alone. Dreamweaver allows the use of regular expressions. I know very little about regular expressions so I was looking everywhere on how to do this. I finally found one document online that told me how. I can’t remember what that was but here is what I learned. I use (.+) in the search and $1 in the replace. If I want to find <span class=”HeaderL1″>My Heading</span> with <h1>My Header</h1> I search for <span class=”HeaderL1″>(.+)</span> and put <h1>$1</h1> in the replace field. I then tell it to search and replace the entire site. Make sure to have “use regular expressions” checked.
I did a post the other day about how Digg allows you to get past the adult filter on youtube. Somebody submitted it to Digg. I did not get very many diggs but I noticed that I was starting to get traffic from the digg search. If you know some good keywords all you have to do is submit your site to digg and it will show up in their search. Just keep doing that to keep yourself at the top.
I was doing some looking around at the data centers and started noticing 2 different algos.
64.233.163.107
and
64.233.161.107
I am getting a third one from www.google.com. It looks a lot like it has for the past week.
I was looking at the Digg video section today and decided to click on the play button next to one of the videos. I watched a little bit of it and for some reason the pause button did not work. I then closed it and tried to click on the video title to go to the Youtube page. Youtube wanted me to log in because it was NSFW. It looks like Digg somehow gets past this. I tried it logged off of Digg just in case that was the deal. I could still watch the video on Digg.
Here is the digg link.
I new website called Review Back has launched that allows people to swap reviews. They are releasing it into Beta today. It is designed to be an alternative to ReviewMe and other Pay Per post sites. I think it is a good idea. Just make sure you trade links with people in the same area you are in. It does not have to be a competitor. It can be a site that offers something in the same area but a different vertical than you do.
By the way this is not a traded review. I just did this on my own.
I have done some local SEO work in the past and keep tabs on terms that I did work on in the past. I have noticed that Google is returning a lot more local results than it used to. The big thing that I noticed is that they are now showing up for small city searches. I expect them to show them for Houston Dentist but this is the first time I have seen them show up for Friendswood dentist. I asked some people in other states and they see the same thing so they are not just showing it to the Houston searchers. Friendswood is a very small town of 34,000. It really is a suburb of Houston.
I think somebody is 302 hijacking my site or some new way of hijacking.
I was doing a search in Google to check how my site is doing in the supplemental index to day and ran into some strange Google behavior. The first thing that got my attention was that all of a sudden I went from 7 pages in supplemental index to 17. I then noticed that I have several results that have a snippet that is not on any pages of my site.
David Ogletree – Web Site Marketing Blog. How to be successful at search engine optimization. KeywordDiscovery.com Keyword Research Tool …
I then realize this is some text that was on my site back in march. I was very confused. How can Google be putting very old text in my snippet? I thought maybe it was just something weird when you do a site: search. I did a search for “ogletree KeywordDiscovery.com” and got the weird snippet again. I then went to yahoo to do a search. I did a search for “David Ogletree – Web Site Marketing Blog” (with quiotes). This is when it got interesting. The 2nd result from www.fashionoptic.lk has the same title and description my site had back in early march. I click on the link and none of that stuff was on his site. I clicked on the cache and it was very different. It was an exact copy of my site. This does not happen in Google by the way.
My question is how are they doing this? Why can I see it in Yahoo and not Google and how is this site affecting my snippet?
I was doing some research last night and came upon a search result that brought up a press release
http://www.google.com/search?q=Electronic+Discovery
I had never seen this before. I guess press releases have got a lot more important to search.
