I wrote a blogging system from scratch (http://seanhess.net). I have the last 10 posts displayed on the index page /, and each post has it's own page /post/a_simple_post. I'm getting a good rank in google when I search for specific info from my posts, but google links to the index page instead of the post page. How do I get the search engine to drill into those post links?
<div class="blog_post">
<div class="info">
<span class="tags">
Framework
PHP
Tutorial
</span>
<span class="date">August 03, 2009</span>
</div>
<div class="content">
<h1>Example Post</h1>
<p>Paragraph</p>
</div>
</div>
The search engines already do it, unless your robots.txt file specifies otherwise, or some special attributes in your <a> tag (which it seems you are not using).
I think the only problem you are having is that your index page ranks much better than your sub-pages. This might be because people link to your index page.
Google probably displays your home page because it thinks it is a relevant answer to the search the user did...
One way that would help making your "post" pages more important is to display the full-content of the post on the home page for only the last post ; and, for the next ones, only display some excerpt, or a summary, or something like that.
It would make your post pages more important... But that would also mean having a "less important" home page... Which may or may not be good.
Google also uses links from other websites : if many important sites link to your homepage, and only a few link to your post pages, google will think the home page is more important than those.
As your blog is about PHP, one nice thing could be to be syndicated on http://www.planet-php.net/ : it allows many people to see your blog entries -- and is nice for visibility too (both to users and to google, as it has a high pagerank, I suppose)
Still, google is probably already exploring your whole site : if there are links to your post pages (there are on the home page, at least), google will visit thoses one day or another...
One thing I just noticed, though : your first post was in june, and you've been active only for a something like a month and a half ; it is not that long, especially if not many websites have links to yours...
In the end, there is only one secret : the more you'll write interesting stuff, the more people will find your blog interesting, the more they'll talk about it and include links to it, the more google will see about it too, the higher you'll be in results, and so on ;-)
But, yes, it takes time... Especially if you want to only write interesting posts -- and you should not post crap just to have lots of content !
I just saw you have a first blog on http://code.seanhess.net/ and that you now have another one on http://seanhess.net/ ; do you think it would be wise (depends on your content, on what you want and all that !) to move all blog-posts from the first one to the new one, adding permanent redirections on the old pages to the new ones ?
You might also want to take a look at some articles on the net, as well as some questions/answers here on SO, that could give you some useful advices. For instance :
Is SEO knowledge important for web developers?
Using SEO-friendly links
What kind of SEO Technique need to apply for my website…
SEO URL Structure
and probably lots of others -- provided you know what you are searching for, you'll find lots of interesting "tips/techniques"
And if you search with... google for instance... you might find many interested articles on the net about that too...
It helps to have a descriptive title tag and meta description in each of the content pages. Google has a useful section and starter guide I refer to frequently on this topic: Google SEO site.
I recently finished this book on SEO which has a lot of useful tips on technique and online tools to help increase search rank: Kris Jones SEO book
What I've seen is the quickest way to move up in search rankings is to get pages linked to from other sites considered to be an authority on the topic the page is focused on.
Related
My friend started a blogging website using wordpress for students to write on topics like world affairs, british politics etc. He is a philosophy student so himself doesn't any coding or web development and hence asked me since I'm doing a computer science degree to help him modify the search on his website. Basically the issue is that the search works normally except when you want to use it to search by articles written by a specific author. For example if you write the name of a person, all the articles written by him/her should be displayed. I have no experience in web development but watched loads of videos on youtube on how to customise the search but most of them just show to change its position on the page or just how it looks and none the way I want to specifically customise it. Are there links to any videos on youtube or articles that explain how to do it or what should I do to customise the search in this way?
I have been telling him for the past week that I will help in because I was confident I would have solved the problem but since I actually started trying the past couple days, I've seen so many ways it could go wrong from ftp to messing up the whole website. I'm sure if it's not clear enough or my question is stupid, I thought for a while before posting this on stack overflow.
MODIFY YOUR THEME’S SEARCH.PHP FILE
What we want to do is first take a look at the current search results page. If your theme is not presenting a search bar to make an actual search query, then you can simply append the following to your site’s URL : yoursite.com/?s=your+search+string.
Passing this query will send you to the search results page. Ideally your query should actually produce results so you could try to use a general search phrase that you know will produce multiple results.
Once you have a good idea as to how the results looks now, you can visualize a clear direction as far as how you want it to look. The search.php file usually starts with the following link :
this link
I have a Joomla! website with rewrite rules activated. My article URl is mysite.com/category/ID-alias.html. The only thing which is important (from this url) is the id, because when I can access the article with any text at "category" and any text at "alias".
Let's show a concrete example:
My article URL: mysite.com/flowers/15-begonia.html
I can access the same by changing category name and alias directly from url:
mysite.com/tralala/15-anything.html //Shows the same article as above.
Is this SEO? If one of my visitors want to destroy my website SEO, can he open my articles with different addresses (like above) and Google will say that articles are duplicated? Does Google knows when a visitor goes to a webpage to which link doesn't exists anywhere?
Hope my question is clear.
Thanks.
Google do a good job of deciding which is the "right" version of a page - it is worth watching this video to see how they handle this situation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA
Since these wrong URLs should not be linked to from anywhere, it is unlikely they will be indexed by mistake.
However, should they index the wrong version of a page, setting a sitemap with the right one will usually fix it.
A visitor could not harm your SEO with this knowledge. The worst they could do would be to provide good links to a non-indexed page, which would cause the wrong URL to be indexed. However, it would then be very easy for you to 301 redirect that page and turn their attempts at harm into an SEO benefit.
I personally think Joomla should look into adding the canonical tag, but if you want that currently, you must use an extension like this:
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/url-canonicalization-/25795
(NB I have never used this extension so cannot guarantee its quality - the reviews are good, though)
As far as I know many websites add rel="nofollow" attribute to all outbound links inside their forum's posts. As I understand, that way they tell search robots not to use those links for ranking webpages. Also I've noticed that some forums use inside redirect (I'm not sure if this is the right term though) for outgoing links. Let's say the forum url is http://someforum.com. So when I post with a link
Hi this is [url="http://mysite.com"]my site[/url]
The link transforms to something like this
Hi this is my site
I suspect that the meaning of this is the same as adding rel="nofollow" atttribute.
Am I wright? If yes, is there any sense in using this kind of redirection and why not just use a rel="nofollow" attribute instead?
This kind of redirecting is used for several reasons. Here are some I am aware of:
tracking outgoing traffic leaving the own site
displaying a warning page that the user is leaving the site now with the ability to cancel within a few seconds and go back
The 2nd point gives you a chance to keep traffic on your site. And there may be legal reasons in countries like Germany here. In Germany you are responsible even for content when it is not your own but you are linking to it. So in Germany you must check the linked content on a regular basis and warn users that the linked content is not under your control. This can be done on such an extra redirect page.
I am not a lawyer but this is one of the most discussed internet-related legal issues here.
How the redirection is done will determine if ranking juice is past to the recipient.
A 301 Redirect will work almost like a direct link, with a little loss of ranking in the process.
I am planning an informational site on php with mysql.
I have read about google sitemap and webmaster tools.
What i did not understand is will google be able to index dynamic pages of my site using any of these tools.
For example if i have URLs like www.domain.com/articles.php?articleid=103
Obviously this page will be having same title and same meta information always but the content will change according to articleid. So how google will come to know about the article on the page to display in search.
Is there some way that i can get google rankings for these pages
A URL is a URL, Google doesn't give up when it sees a question mark in one (although excessive parameters may get ignored, but you only have one). All you need is a link to a page.
You could alternatively make the url SEO friendly with mod_rewrite www.domain.com/articles/103
RewriteRule ^articles/(.*)$ articles.php?articleid=$1 [L]
I do suggest you give each individual page relevant meta tags no more then 80 chars and dont place the article content within a table tag as googles placement algorithm is strict, random non related links will also do harm to the rank.
You have to link to the page for Google to notice it. And the more links you have the higher up in Google's result list your page will get. A smart thing to do is to find a page where you can link to all of your pages. This way Google will find them and give them a higher ranking than if you only link to them once.
If I search the word in Google is "twitter".
Google displays the first result like the below.
Twitter
Twitter is without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now.
twitter.com/ - Cached - Similar
Search How To Contest Account Suspension
Blog An API
Twitter_logo_header Twitter Status
More results from twitter.com »
How can they display Search, blog, Twitter_logo_header, etc.?
These links are called Site Links, and point to highly rated pages on your domain.
Usually these links are created automatically if your site is strong enough for a specific keyword, and you can tweak it a little by blocking pages you don't want to appear there from Google Webmaster Tools (http://google.com/webmasters) under 'Site Configuration', 'Sitelinks'.
More information on this topic available at the following Google help page - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334&hl=en
This page explains how search engines like Google work:
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/search-engine.htm
It's something google decides to do on its own. There is no way you can force them to do it with your site. They will do it if they find it appropriate.