How To: Advanced rel="canonical" HTTP Headers. On February 12th, 2009, Google began to support the link rel="canonical" tag, which was later adopted by Bing and Yahoo, for specifying a preferred version of a URL. It wasnt until June 17th of 2011 that Google announced the support for rel=canonical in the form of an HTTP Header, giving webmasters yet another avenue to provide a preferred URL for non-text/html content-types such as PDF files, that were otherwise unable to have a specified URL using the link tag.
In retrospect, this was relatively important news for SEOs, helping to minimize potential duplicate content issues, especially in wake of content penalties waged against site owners in recent years. This nontraditional method to this day is underutilized, and I believe that, now more than ever, SEOs should start leveraging and considering the power of this method for non-text/html content-types. There are a lot of reasons that the link HTTP header has not had a ton of traction in the SEO industry: Check Your Headers Caution. How to redirect all visitors except your IP to another website? Redirect Visitors To a New Page or Site - Htaccess & PHP Redirection. Method 1 - .htaccess 301 Redirect The smoothest way to redirect your visitors is to use an .htaccess redirect. This has no delay since before a page is served to the browser the server checks first for an .htaccess file... if it sees this the old page never loads, instead visitors are sent directly to the new page.
These are a few .htaccess redirect codes that I've used that might come in handy for you. This is not a complete list by any means, but it took me ages to find how to do these so I'll save you the hassle and list them here. Oh, and please don't email me with questions about how these work, like I said, I found these with the help of others.. If you're more technically minded than I am and want the information straight from the source, check the Apache Tutorial: .htaccess files for more detailed info. Important notes about htaccess redirection 301 Redirect Examples To Move a single page Quick, easy and seamless for your visitors. To Move an entire site Changed file extension? Fixing 5 common SEO problems with HTML5... today! - distilled.
Google Sitemap Generator for Windows :: GSiteCrawler. Using multiple sitemaps to analyse indexation on large sites. One of the easy wins in improving search traffic to a large site is to improve indexation. Indexation isn’t about the raw number of pages indexed, it’s about increasing the percentage of real, high value pages, that are indexed. Forcing Google to index useless pages that won’t get any traffic isn’t going to help things. Indexation is quite a straightforward issue, every site has an indexation cap based on a number of factors including: PageRankTrustSite / server speedDuplicate content The last one is hard to explain but basically if Google sees loads of pages that are the same then it probably won’t bother to do as deep a crawl of the site as if it found a lot of high value unique pages.
Monitoring indexing using the site: command every month is good and looking at the number of pages that receive at least one visitor each month is better but both of these methods just look at the site as a whole. Some ideas for the type of pages you might like to look at separately: Technical Site Audit Checklist. The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. We all want to deliver actionable site audits, but doing the research can be a bit overwhelming if you don’t have a process in place to systematically go through a site. I have created a site audit checklist that will walk you through how to do a site audit.
This will work for most sites - in many cases you will need to customize the checklist a bit as some aspects won't be relevant or are unable to be changed. Make sure to look at really important pages (high priority landing pages, pages with a lot of links, pages flagged by crawl tools, or pages that the client has specifically asked for help with) in addition to the template pages. At the end of your audit, don’t write a document that says what’s wrong with the website. Quick Overview Check indexed pages Search for the brand and branded terms Check Google’s cache for key pages Is the content showing up? Htaccess 301 redirect tutorial. Scenario You are upgrading your web site and as part of the upgrade, it means moving and renaming particular files. Danger Search engines have indexed your entire site and pages you're going to move or rename rank well. By altering these files, you run the risk of losing a lot of traffic and leaving visitors to your site who follow a search engine link with the dreaded "Error 404 - File not found".
A 301 redirect is the best way to go and I go into some detail on how to implement one in this tutorial, but first let's take a look at a couple of other strategies I often see mentioned around the web to get around the problem and why you shouldn't use them. Custom Error Page You could create a custom error page. A) You will lose ranking for the page as the file will appear to be non-existent next time it's requested by the search engine spider. B) Your web site visitors may be frustrated by the fact that they then have to dig through your site to find the desired information. Example: