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I typically use this in an .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[0-9]+(.[0-9]+){3} [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yourdomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Explanation: If it is an ip, doesn't start with www, or doesn't have the www, rewrite it to the http://www.
2 ways:
Hello Zack,
That is an issue that they are working on, I know this because I already discussed this with one of their help desk people. Here is the page that describes the changes: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/brand-new-open-site-explorer-is-here
In addition to that, here is some additional information I can share with you:
you may see “questionable” links with weird file extensions. This is due to the crawler reaching much deeper into sites where there are more download links. We are looking into fixing this bug as soon as we can so these won’t be counted as links.
A few other points.
site:templatemonster.com/flash-templates.php
Doesn't show anything, (except the few items which you have blocked by robots.txt, so that is normal) which leads me to believe you had an issue as Ryan said on July 19th. Luckily they kept you in the results for "Flash templates" even with a different page.
I would also advise to add descriptions to all pages at the same time you are adding canonicals. Why does the 'Problem' page flash-templates.php not have a description tag? Perhaps a coding issue that is causing this issue as well?
If you are doing it as a way of formatting the page and still offering an option or button that allows the user to see the rest of the text, then it is not the same thing that you are thinking of in regards to Google. Google states that you should not hide text on the page to purposely try and trick the search engine.
In E-Commerce situations it is very common to hide part of the text, for instance when you have 4 tabs for "description, features, specification, colors, etc." it is a good idea to use a 'display: none' so that all 3 of the tabs are not shown all the time. This is not considered Black Hat, it is considered good design.
Matt Cutts has said quite a few times, if it is good for the user it is good for Google.
It is when you intentionally hide a block of text on the page with no way for the user to view it that you are using Black Hat technique.
Nice catch. I agree it should be:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [R=301]
If you are doing this to all pages on the site you can knock it out with an htaccess file like this:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [NC]
The amount of juice you will lose will be made up in the long run by having the keyword in the page name.SEO should be a long-term goal, and having the keyword in the page name is the best situation.
I have, and would recommend, doing it.
I'm assuming that you are doing it on a new domain company and not buying old domain names, and these domain names are the same as the main company to make sure no one else has them or types them in wrong.
In this scenario lets assume we are using mydomain.com and bought mydomain.biz. I would, if using cPanel, use a parked domain which is an alias and use an htaccess to make sure that all incoming traffic are using or 301'ed to the correct domain.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
This will keep you from having duplicate content, and having to create a few sites and redirect them either through Javascript or other means like a php header("location: http://www.mysite.com"); .
Hope that helps.
As Ryan said, do 301's. You don't want to have the old versions up and canonical them if you don't have to.
Imagine the confusing surfers that land on something because of an old link, and then click around and end up on the new version.
Aside from checking out the Yoast plugin, make sure your sitemap is up to date. There is a reason the bots are going to those pages, the question is why.
Without actually seeing the site I would say that if you have product pages that are identical to canonical them to one main place. If they are listed in the SERPS 301 them if you are removing them. Even having a few different words can still show up as duplicate.The last CMS option might work, but again without seeing the site it is hard to judge.
Since I do a lot of url rewriting I ran into a similar issue and did 301's and canonical to the pages I wanted to show and things are much better.
I have Rank Tracker set to fire off every morning around 4 to do my bidding, er checking. It works great if you use paid proxies, but using my own IP it just asks me to fill out captchas. I imagine I could set it to run slower to avoid that. I do have the whole suite, but only found that Rank Tracker was the only tool I had a use for.
Updates seem to be fairly regular, about every 2 weeks. As for pricing, the amount of time it saves me on a weekly basis had it paid for itself in about six weeks.
Use a rel='canonical' and use the non index.html for the href;
also don't link to the index.html from anywhere.
I think this is a great topic and wish I found this post sooner.
As a person new to the SEOMoz community, not SEO, I am proud that I can start giving back. I too notice that some of the questions are as Steve put, 'not the right questions', but feel that many times if you know the correct question to ask, you will know where to find an answer. Personally I have spend hours looking for and testing different things, just so I wouldn't have to ask a question, it's just my inquisitive nature.
I try to judge, based on the question, whether the person is looking for just the answer and not the means to find it, or is looking for how to find the answer (teach a man to fish), which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. I am striving towards being able to answer some things in the in-depth fashion that EGOL does.
As Dunamis pointed out, some (read most in regards to SEO) of the information on the internet is old and outdated, and the droves of new people just getting started don't know which is current and why something they tried from a 1998 webpage doesn't work. Since my focus has mostly been On-Site, technical, & server based, those are the only ones I work to answer.
I certainly appreciate that this is a paid forum and not one of the others that have people answering questions with, "I don't know", just to get their post counts up.
As for sticky items, I do see that a majority of the questions are repetitive, but that is just the nature of a Q & A forum. If everything had an answer I wouldn't have a chance to put those braincells back in to action to answer a question I found the answer to years ago. A big thumbs up for the SEOmoz Staff getting involved and adding additional thoughts to questions.
With rel='canonical' you want to point all existing pages that have the same content to 1 page. Having a rel='canonical' on the page with itself as the href will not hurt, can only help verify that it is the preferred page.
If you are doing it as a way of formatting the page and still offering an option or button that allows the user to see the rest of the text, then it is not the same thing that you are thinking of in regards to Google. Google states that you should not hide text on the page to purposely try and trick the search engine.
In E-Commerce situations it is very common to hide part of the text, for instance when you have 4 tabs for "description, features, specification, colors, etc." it is a good idea to use a 'display: none' so that all 3 of the tabs are not shown all the time. This is not considered Black Hat, it is considered good design.
Matt Cutts has said quite a few times, if it is good for the user it is good for Google.
It is when you intentionally hide a block of text on the page with no way for the user to view it that you are using Black Hat technique.
I would venture to say GWT for a few reasons:
Nice catch. I agree it should be:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [R=301]
In regards to SEO I completely agree with EGOL, however there is something else you can do to continually get traffic to pages, and that is to use twitter and retweet your posts. If your posts are not specifically date based, and you can provide valuable information to people, it can work in your favor.
An example of someone doing this is @jeffbullas ,he uses SocialOomph to send out a tweet with an interesting title and link every 15 minutes. Some of them are a year old, but still have interesting, if not valuable, information.