Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Dan,

Yes, you're partially right, the "" is part of the problem, but there is also something else. I went and took a look at your website and you seem to be using the asynchronous version of Google Analytics code so the pageTracker won't work for you.

If you were still using the old version of Google Analytics, the code should be :

http://www.portlandmaine.com

Now, with the new version of Google Analytics tracking code :

http://www.portlandmaine.com

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Tyler,

It's a good thing to use the HTTPS version of the badge on your HTTPS pages because otherwise, the page would be reported as unsecure by the browser to the user.

On the other hand, displaying HTTPS ressources on a HTTP page matters. Downloading and decrypting the secured ressources will use more bandwidth and CPU on the server and client side. In other words, HTTPS is slimply slower than HTTP so it will be detrimental to the user experience.

The difference might not be signigicant, but it's always good to keep that in mind. So, I simply suggest you match the protocol of the ressources with the one of the requested URL. HTTPS with HTTPS and HTTP with HTTP.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi AzGuy,

Aaron Wall just did a great review of it on his blog : http://www.seobook.com/complete-review-wordtrackers-link-builder

I did not try it yet, but I'll definitely take the free trial and I think you should also see for yourself, it's the best way to know if it fits your needs.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Maria,

Your menu is not optimized, but the real problem is not coming from there. Your home http://www.medixschool.ca/ has a meta refresh leading to http://www.medixschool.ca/Home/index.php instead of a 301 redirect.

You should remove this meta refresh and replace it by a 301 redirection.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Olivier,

Here's FaceBook API policy : If you exceed, or plan to exceed, any of the following thresholds please contact us as you may be subject to additional terms: >100M API calls per day.

Source : http://developers.facebook.com/policy/

So, are you planing to have over 100M API calls per day?

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi,

The answer to your main question is yes, do a search on google for filetype:doc or filetype:txt and you'll see tons of doc and txt files indexed.

The answer to your second question, if they offer any SEO, is a little more complex. You should try and see if you can get a page to be indexed if it is only linked from doc files.

Judging by my experience, I rarely see doc or txt files in the SERPs and even more rarely click on them if they show up. I'd rather do a HTML version of the page with a link to download the doc file in a directory blocked to spiders to avoid duplicates.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Olivier,

You will probably find the answer to your question in this blog post :
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/make-facebook-comments-box-indexable-by-search-engines

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hey Michelle,

Short answer is contextual link.

Regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Rory,

That's not the default tendency of apache. If the file doesn't exist, it would normaly return a 404 error. You might have a .htaccess file on your server with some rewrite rule that allow such thing to happen. I might also be a misconfiguration trying to show a wrong default 404 page.

Also, to fix your broken css/images/links when the page is in a subdirectory, you should use urls relative to the root of your domain, so instead of simply using href="css/main.css" you might want to use href="/css/main.css".

Finaly, have you looked at your HTTP headers to see if this page was returning a 404 or a 200 code? For your default 404 page, you might want to look at this : http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#errordocument

Regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Richard,

Might be because your server was down at the moment their crawler tried to reach your website.  By using the http://www.seomoz.org/term-extractor tool, I'm able to extract the keywords for barbedshop.co.uk so the problem is probably solved now.

Regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Conradh,

The redirection is a 301 Moved Permanently, so it does pass link juice. You can find out using different tools like the followings :

http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers
http://web-sniffer.net/
http://www.g-force.ca/referencement/entetes

But, to know if a link pass any link juice,  there are also multiple things to check. First, check if the page is indexed in Google using site: or cache: command.

If the page is not indexed, it might be only a question of time, but it might also be because it is blocked by robots.txt, robots meta tag or by X-Robots-Tag.

Also, check if the link doesn't have the rel="nofollow" attribute. Any of those variable can prevent the juice to pass other than the type of redirection.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi HomeFinder,

You could export your data to CSV and then use Excel or an other spreadsheet program to put all OSE updates in a different column and then compare the colomns to see what are the new links and the vanished ones.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Barry,

As I said in my response, I used tools to check for the headers returned by the URL, the same information that is returned to search engine spiders.

There no way to know how the PHP script is made, for me, or for a search engine spider, as the PHP is executed server side and all you get back are the HTTP headers and content.

The url doesn't contain any id, it's simply the redirection url that is passed to it so the script probably look like this :

header('Location: '.$_GET['url'], true, 301);
?>

If the redirect.php file was receiving an ID instead of a direct URL, it would probably look more like this :

// stuff to connect to the database here
include('connect.php');
//a long line not well constructed that does a lot of stuff
$url = current(mysql_fetch_assoc(mysql_query("SELECT url FROM urls WHERE id=".(int)$_GET['id'])));
//redirect to the URL from the database
 header('Location: '.$url, true, 301);
?>

It could be a way to trick user into thinking that the link is passing juice by doing a 301 redirect but blocking the file using robots.txt wich is not the case, there's also no Set-Cookie.

It is more likely to be a way to get statistics about what are the most popular links. For example, redirect.php probably add an entry to a database each time the url is reached to track the number of visitors sent to a particular website.

I hope my answer will help you understand the use of the redirect.php and the way it works. If you still have questions, do not hesitate to reply to my response.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Paul,

When you say that you willl change "host", do you mean web hosting provider, domain name or ecommerce platform? If you meant :

Hosting provider : you shouldn't have to do any 301 redirect as all the Urls will remain the same, only the IP adress of the website will change, but this is not a big deal.

Domain name : If you have a apache server, you could create a .htaccess with single line of code that will redirect any pages or images on the old domain to the new one, without having to create a single 301 for every file.

Ecommerce platform : This one is the hardest one.  If you are to switch to a new ecommerce platform, I suggest you try to keep as much as possible the same Url structure as you had if possible as it already looks good.

Depending on the type of move you do, please specify the kind of change you will be doing so we can help you better.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Dennis Lees,

I had to deal with something similar in the past, the website was about online donations and wanted to look secure.

All pages were 301 redirected to the https version and it didn't seem to affect their rankings.

If you are to force sitewide https, I suggest to 301 redirect all http pages to their https version and search engine spiders will do their jobs at crawling the new urls and replacing them in the search results.

Don't expect this to happen overnight! It will take some time, you might see some rankings greatly fluctuate, but things should get back to normal and definitely better than having duplicate content all over the place.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi,

Short answer : Yes.

Long answer : You can also use the Google Webmaster Tool or Bing Webmaster Center to tell these engines to ignore this url parameter.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Josh,

I don't think this question has anything to do about ASP.net itself. Crawlers look at the rendered html code, not the server side script, so no matter what language was used to code the website server side, you should look at the client side.

There are numerous ressources on SEOMoz that will guide you in making your website architecture "yummy". You might want to look into these, but there are others (use the search feature like I did) :

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo

When it comes to linking, be sure to stay consistant with the way you link to your internal pages. Use Google Webmaster Tool and Bing Webmaster Center to manage URL parameters, use rel="canonical" tags and 301 redirects when needed.

I hope these links will help you,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Gret,

After further research, it might not be considered as cloacking that much as the Google First Click Free for Web Search system works the same way and check the HTTP referer.

For more details, read the official Google Webmaster Central blog post about it here :
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Olivier,

Here's FaceBook API policy : If you exceed, or plan to exceed, any of the following thresholds please contact us as you may be subject to additional terms: >100M API calls per day.

Source : http://developers.facebook.com/policy/

So, are you planing to have over 100M API calls per day?

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Martin

Using the following tools, I can see that your website does in fact has a pagerank of 2 out of 10.

http://www.prchecker.info/
http://multipagerank.com/
http://www.g-force.ca/referencement/pagerank

But, I suggest you don't focus too much on Google Toolbar's PageRank value and instead on backlink metric tools like SeoMoz OpenSiteExplorer.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.