What is good traffic for a domain of a non-existing website?

_For existing websites, there are already very good answershere. This question is about the ability to measure the "strength" of a domain **prior to the actual site being published._** I have several domains in which I haven't yet placed any content at all, eg they lead to a blank page or to the generic 404 of my hosting company. Non of them is listed on google or anywhere else. I do get some traffic statistics on these domains, including a count of unique visitors - people or bots who just typed in the domain name. Naturally, this kind of traffic varies between different domains - which seems to be a demonstration of the difference in these domains' "strength". for example, drive.com (which contains only an "under construction" page) gets more traffic than asdgfkljhvcas.com. **Is there any method for determining how much of this kind of traffic is a lot in an international-website scale?** This could be helpful for determining the quality of domains in hand.


Why don't large popular sites such as SO use keyword and description meta headers?

Why don't Stack Overflow, Wikipedia or MSDN etc. include keyword and description meta tags in their page headers? For example Google indexes the first paragraph as a brief description. Is this a technical point in web design and SEO?


What are sources of free/cheap stock photos?

Need photos for a website and the client has zero cash, What are sources of free stock photos? And how do I understand what the terms and conditions mean? **UPDATE:** Changed the title from "free" to "free/cheap". I need an easy to use source of photos, meaning I they OWN the rights to the photos. Some stock photo websites disclaim that the have rights to the photos. Examples: SXC.hu, Bigstock (if you know of others, please comment. See comments to answers for details. Thanks!) **IMPORTANT:** SXC.hu DOES NOT own the rights to any of the photos in their index. You must get the media owner to sign a "new" contract just with you. That's a lot of overhead, and the only way SXC.hu gives you to contact the owner is a web-form that has no additional info on the owner than their username.


Complex Disallow pattern in robots.txt

I have a URL like this:               www.example.com/freelance-jobs-new-york      I had a problem and many duplicated pages have been created like this:               www.example.com/freelance-jobs-new-york-php-php     www.example.com/freelance-jobs-new-york-php-php-php     www.example.com/freelance-jobs-new-york-php-php-php-php      And so on, those pages have the same content as the main one, so what I did to fix it was redirecting all the pages with more than two times php keyword in the URL to the main URL. But I have did it late, so Google has to redirect maybe more than 20.000 pages that have been already crawled. So I want to setup a Disallow in robots.txt to block it for spending resources on those urls. So my question is, what pattern should I use to disallow pages with more than two times the keyword php in the URL? Will, `Disallow: /*php*php*` work as expected? I am asking this because I don't want to accidentally block good URLs.


SEO - Does order of html carry importance - text before images preferred over opposite?

I have a two column layout with text to the left and a slideshow to the right. In order that I may float the text around the right column I would need to place the right column first with a right float. This means that I have all my images before the page text in my html. It seems apparent that the search engine rank of a page for keywords is determined, at least mainly, by the text content of the page. Would the described order of html hurt my ranking? I guess a bonus question would be how to float around a right column, see reddit for an example, though I think I should ask this on another stackexchange site.


Firing an event on a particular page in Google Tag Manager

In Google Tag Manager I'd like to fire an event when a particular page is seen. This is for a completed signup page - a conversion. In Google Tag Manager I have my base UA tag fire on all pages. I then created a new UA tag "Subscriptions" to track events: track type events. I then filled in my category, action and label values for the event. However, it's the rules that seem to be tricky. When I went through the signup process in order to see the conversion page, here is all the info from Google Analytics debug in the JavaScript console:               Account ID               : UA-xxxxxx-2     Page Title               : Example Company | Your Account has been created | Premium     Host Name                : secure.example.com               Page                     : /secure/common/callback?`          https://secure.example.com/secure/common/callback?id=2c92a0fb41ee0b8c0142062c06fd6c89&tenantId=3415&timestamp=1390480077277&token=WByfk6aU4JX1EJSchx4XDMnp50XX8aL7&responseSignature=OTg2OWY4MTcwMDVmZmRiYzI3NWI2N2IxOWJmNTYxNGI=&success=true&refId=2c92a0fb43bdc33a0143bf122e6d3ebb&field_passthrough1=:Unmyname@gmail.com:Emmyname@gmail.com&field_passthrough2=P&field_passthrough5=%3Alnen%3ANmmeFirstNAme%20meLastName%3AA1123%20mainst%20Avenue%3AA2%3ACtPhiladelphia%3AStON%3APcM6G%202T8%3ACn&field_passthrough3=3a5e49b5-85ed-4c86-99af-761004f7db06&field_passthrough4=true&signature=OWM1NjY5MGZkMWVjNjI5NjJiYjk3MmVhOWU3ZjkzNjA=      I'd like to fire the "Subscriptions" event track tag. I tried the following rule but had no success: `{{url}}` contains: `/secure/common/callback?`.   `{{url path}}` contains: `/secure/common/callback?`. My questions therefore are:   1. How would I fire the submissions event when this page is visited?   2. Why is the event not firing now - isn't the logic sound? If the URL contains `/secure/common/callback?` then it should fire, right? ![enter image description here](http://i.stack.imgur.com/ajfkl.png)


One million redirects

What's the best way to redirect 1,000,000 unique URLs to another 1,000,000 unique URLs? These pages are all combinations of multiple search filters and queries. We're migrating the site to cleaner URLs and want to map old pages to new ones so that we do not lose visitors or send them to 404s. I believe a million line _.htaccess_ will slow down the site pretty significantly. Is there a better way that would maintain PageRank but not slow down the site? Maybe something I could put on each page individually?


Why does Google Analytics show false referrals?

Ever since Google revamped their Analytics interface I've been noticing a weird "bug" while viewing the "Real-Time" overview area. From this area I can obviously see live stats of visitors to my website but when I visit my website by opening a new tab (Chrome) and manually visit website the real time stats sometimes look like the image linked below. http://i.stack.imgur.com/mfniY.png Is there any reason why Google is saying that I was referred by Stack Overflow when I'm visiting my website from a new tab? Could this be something do to with how I installed the analytics on my site or could this be an issue with browser cookies? Have anyone else noticed this? I am mainly concerned about this because in the standard reporting area of my Analytics panel my referral stats are getting thrown off every time I visit my own website.


How to progressively display images on websites

I want to display images on my websites just like Facebook and other websites display images now - progressively i.e a complete blurred image first and then the whole sharp images loads. I am not sure about the technical term here but they seem to be pre-fetching a lossy version of images and then download the rest of data. How can I achieve this?


Using photoshop actions to decide if an image needs to be rotated

I have Photoshop CS3 and I need to do a batch on a lot of pictures before I upload them. The pictures need to fit in an 600x800 box, yet be as big as possible within that box. Some of them are much wider than taller and others are more tall than wide. I am trying to put together a photoshop action that will rotate, resize, and fill pictures as needed to make them as big as possible while staying within the 600x800 box. The only thing I haven't gotten sorted out is how to tell photoshop to rotate the image 90 degrees if that will allow the picture to be bigger within the constraints. Any ideas?


Most standard / Best way to keep the same top menu among different web pages?

What's the standard way to keep the same menu on top among different web pages without having to duplicate it on each page (I don't mean that it doesn't reload like when using frames and only loading the bottom part; I want the menu to scroll with the page when scrolling down, like this, this, this and pretty much every single web page that exists). I found this answer but the guy can't use Php and I can. Plus, I see several people giving different suggestions, but I assume there is a standard since pretty much every single web page in the whole web have a menu on top that stays the same among multiple pages . I'm just a newbie on web design (I can program Php and Html easily but I have no idea about standards and stuff like that since I'm self- taught guy ;)). What I would normally do is to include the menu with php but I'm not sure if this is the "standard".


How to solve duplicate contents over different domains?

I'm trying to create a big main site and many sister sites. They all will be hosted in a same server, but will be multiple domains. When a sister site posts an article, it is submitted to the main site. For example, if the sister site posts an article `sistersite.com/article/seo- optimization`, the main site will have immediately a new article page `mainsite.com/article/seo-optimization`. This can definitely lead duplicate contents across different domains. I have known that the search engines don't like the duplicate contents. The main site may have SEO penalties because of those duplicate contents. I want the main site winning over the sister sites in terms of SERP ranking. I'm thinking the following options:   1. Adding `noindex, follow` for the sister sites   2. Adding a canonical URL `mainsite.com/article/seo-optimization` in that page of the sister site.   3. Updating the content by a moderator for the main site before publishing once it receives a new article. All of these have some pitfalls:   1. May all of the sister sites not be listed in SERP because of `noindex`? I want them listed somehow in SERP.    2. Is it really a valid canonical URL if it is referring to another domain? In fact, I don't want the main site URL included in the source code of the sister sites.   3. It will have work-overloads for the moderator because there may be many articles submtting a day. And how does Google decide what are duplicate contents? For example, 80% of the contents is same, 90% of the contents is same, etc. What would be a best solution to solve duplicate contents over different domains?


Will rewriting your .htaccess to 404 to return search results from your site negatively effect your ranking in Google?

Depending on the type of site that you are running, it may or may not be advantageous to display search results instead of a 404 page, when someone visits a non-existent page on your site. I believe that the site I've been maintaining recently would benefit from this as it is the site of a publication. With a publication the more people you can get to read your site the better. But after reading up on how Google ranks the "quality" of your site, where you will appear in SERPs, based on how much the meta text of a page relates to the content of the page, I have to wonder if making a 404 page link to the search results would harm the "quality" of your site in Google eyes.


Sitemap file entries for blog and main php site

I'm creating a sitemap manually. It's a PHP site with a WordPress blog. Here's the main site: http://wordfruit.com And here's the blog: http://blog.wordfruit.com   1. Can I put the blog URL in the same Sitemap file as the main site urls?   2. And can I just place the feedburner URL in the Sitemap instead of all the blog urls? -- this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/wordfruit   3. And if I place the feedburner url in the Sitemap file, will all new blog posts be taken care of without making any changes to the Sitemap? Thanks,


How to find out the url of a popup?

I'm creating a Sitemap by hand. I want to add in the url of a popup -- I presume it has a url. At the top of this page: http://wordfruit.com -- there's a yellow-highlighted link with the text 'How does it work?' Is there a url of that popup? How do I determine what that url is?


Google Adsense Impressions Not Matching With Analytics

I'm using woopra and google analytics on one site. Both are reporting 100 unique visits to one site. Browsers - 70% Firefox, 10% chrome, 15% IE and remaining are others. My adsense stats are showing only 20-30 visits for this website. Even though analytics and other stat programs are showing more visits, adsense counting only 20 or so impressions out of it. What seems to be the problem here ?


Google Places like services

Registering with Google Places seems to give a free good quality link for a website for a local business. Are their similar other other free local listings for which every local business should be listed?


Code for sitemap -- 'weekly.?

I'm creating a Sitemap manually. If I want to specify a url to be crawled weekly, is this the right code:               <url>       <loc>http://wordfruit.com/</loc>       <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>     </url>


Importance of frequency of keywords for SEO

> **Possible Duplicate:**   >  keyword stuffing in SEO I've seen a few posts on here and elsewhere that talk about the amount of unique keywords used, or aimed, for in a text. But how important is the frequency of keywords for SEO optimized copy, the higher the better? Is there a certain percentage to aim at? For example, I currently have copy aimed for a specific keyword. The rate of this keyword is that it makes up 2% of all words. Is this too low? Too high? The higher the better?


Are there any security considerations if users are allowed to upload flash files

Lets say I have a website where users are allowed to upload files which will be displayed publicly as a portfolio gallery. For example, users might upload screenshots of a website they designed, or a MS Word document of some PR example text, or a PDF of their CV, etc. Some files will be blacklisted for security reasons, e.g. `.zip` files, `.exe` files and `.php` files. What about flash files? Is there any security concerns if I was going to host `.swf` files and automatically play them?               <?php     if ($extension == 'swf') {         echo '<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0" width="640" height="430">            <param name="movie" value="/'.$urlToFLV.'" />            <param name="quality" value="high" />            <param name="wmode" value="transparent">            <embed wmode="transparent" src="/'.$urlToFLV.'" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="430"></embed>         </object>';     }     ?>      I guess the flash code is executed in the users browser, so if there was a security issue, it would be on their machines, not our server?


Googlebot can't access my site when crawling from rootdomain

I can't explain why I get this message for my rootdomain result in Google : > trocmalin.com/ > > A description for this result is not available because of this site's > robots.txt – learn more. Here is my site specifics :   * vide-greniers.trocmalin.com is the site address   * www.trocmalin.com redirects (301) to vide-greniers.trocmalin.com   * trocmalin.com redirects (301) to vide-greniers.trocmalin.com too...              User-agent: *     Disallow: /orga/          User-agent: *     Disallow: /sitemap-update      Google results for vide-greniers.trocmalin.com are well rendered, as well as sub pages allowed for bots. But the result for my rootdomain (trocmalin.com) gives this message... Can you help me ?


Odd/faulty page links being served to Googlebot

Yahoo recently bought Tumblr, where I write fairly long form scientific pieces. I noticed recently that a new script had been added to the end of pages, and it seems to be interacting badly with the Google search bots. A hit today came to `/post/:id/:summary` where this is clearly just some sort of site scheme. It came from a page on _What is a gene, post-ENCODE?_ and when I searched for this title specifically for my site I also pulled up a second seemingly identical hit at               /page/:page      Searching for `site:<siteURL>/:page` comes up blank, presumably due to the punctuation but `site:<siteURL>/post/:id/:summary` confirms that it is just for this one article page. I went to use the 'remove URL' page on Google Webmaster Tools but it says the page is still live, i.e. it's either seeing my article or my entire homepage (when you go `/post/:id/:summary` you actually just get the root URL, and I don't want to remove that from Google!), advising I get the content removed before requesting it be cleared from their cache. I can't see how this site scheme is being generated (at least /sitemap1.xml doesn't give it like that anyway), but searching for `"/post/:id/:summary"` brought up code similar to what Yahoo are adding to sites:               (function() {                     var s = document.createElement('script');                     var el = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];                     s.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://s' : 'http://l') + '.yimg.com/ss/rapid-3.14.js';                     s.onload = function(){                         var YAHOO = window.YAHOO;                         if (YAHOO) {                             YAHOO.i13n.beacon_server = 'nol.yahoo.com';                             var keys = { pd:'/post/:id/:summary', _li:0, i_rad:0, i_strm:0, b_id:66209497 };                             var conf = {                                                                 spaceid:1197719230,                                 client_only:1,                                 yql_enabled:false,                                 keys:keys                             }                             YAHOO.rapid = new YAHOO.i13n.Rapid(conf);                         }                     }                     el.parentNode.insertBefore(s, el);                 })();      It's pretty hard to see what this is doing, and all I'm wondering is whether   1. I've done something wrong in my page Javascript that is interfering with these variables in some way   2. How might I fix it?   3. Should I maybe contact some part of Google or Yahoo? If so where would I even start? I was going to put this on SO thinking it was a Javascript issue but assuming **1.** isn't the case I'll leave it here unless anyone here suggests otherwise. Likewise if this isn't suitable for a "pro webmasters" forum (it's a personal/professional development blog albeit using a custom domain).


Are there any stats for local Google v. Google.com usage?

Are there any stats for web usage which have attempted to measure how many users in a given country use Google. **com** and how many use the local Google (e.g. Google. **co.uk** )?


In a URI, what does the suffix ".do" stand for?

I see URI ending in ".do" on some enterprise websites. I've always been curious to know what that stands for, but my Google searches have so far not turned up an answer. Here is an example from ATT customer portal: https://www.att.com/view/displayFullBill.do What does the ".do" mean?


Is using divs instead of new HTML5 tags considered a bad practice?

I've found a website that uses `divs` with classes that are names of new `HTML5` elements. At first it looked really ugly and silly, but then I gave it a secound thought and after all it's kind of smart and doesn't require older browsers to download `html5shiv.js` (which is IMHO quite important as IE6-IE8 machines are often older/slower pcs on slow networks). For example: Supports all browsers:               <div class="section">        some content     </div>      Doesn't support IE6, IE7, IE8:               <section>        some content     </section>      I've checked Twitter and Facebook and they're doing similar thing too, do you think it's worth sticking to the first (`div`) style of coding and wait IE8 to drop way below 1% or I'm overreacting and a few kilobytes won't change that much?


Will Google preserve URL parameters when indexing my site if the explicit in the site and/or site map

I have written some functionality that opens tabbed content on page when visiting a page via a URL with certain parameters. What i have been asked is that will Google, or any other search engine, preserve these URL parameters once my site has been indexed? Therefore when a user that receives said URL as a result visits the site the functionality will be preserved.


Is "no-index" necessary with extensive, white-labeled syndication?

For the purposes of this discussion, consider the following scenario: You have written a fair amount of quality, unpublished content that third- party websites wish to license from you and white-label on their own sites (i.e. you are ghostwriting for these third parties). In other words, there will be no attribution or links referring to your name, email address, or website at all; it will appear to readers and search engines as if the article were written by the third party instead of by you. Consider that 10,000 of these third-party sites were created independently, without any association to each other (they are absolutely NOT part of a blog farm network). From your collection of 100 articles, you plan to license the white-label publishing right of each article to 100 of these sites (again, on a per-article basis). So, while each of your 100 articles will be published 100 times, it's fair to assume that no site will host all 100 articles. The most any one site will host is 30 articles. **Now for the question** : Given this scenario, and that your intent is not to game search engines at all (but rather to provide quality content on established websites), do you need to include "no-index" meta tags on the pages that display your content? Clearly, you wouldn't want your customers to receive the wrath of the Google Duplicate Content Penalty. However, at the same time, if they can benefit from any Google juice deriving from your content, then that would be a nice benefit. I suppose a more concise question may be, "Would this behavior cause Google to penalize the third-party websites? Or, would Google simply choose one of the sites as hosting the "best" version of the content on a per-article basis?"


How can I buy my own personalized Top Level Domain (TLD)?

Starting fomm tomorrow January/12/2012 I heard it's possible to apply for your own TLD i.e. `.whatever` in place of `.com` `.org` etc. I thought it would require a huge amount of money (I heard stories about paying $185K for one) but I found this company who seems to register a new TLD for just $1000. Here is where they show the price: > The price to register a TLD including the unlimited number of domains that > belong to it is: $1000.- only. Do you think this is a scam or for real? Do you know about any other places where I can go to apply for personalized TLD?


Rich snippet error: "Price, review or availability needs to be present" But it is

I'm having problems inserting Rich Snippet code for a product. I literally copied it from some Google page and edited it to my product. The Google Webmaster's Rich Snippet tool gives the error: > In order to generate a preview with rich snippets, either price or review or > availability needs to be present. But it does have the data about price: !["Offerdetails: Item 2 \(...\) Item 2 property price: ..."](http://i.stack.imgur.com/ZDVqH.png) So, will Google still be able to find the price given for the product in the snippets? Or is the error real? The code is used:
Ten Cate Katoensatijnen dekbedovertrek Beoordeling: 4.5Normale prijs: €49.95 Vandaag voor:<meta itemprop="currency" content="EUR" />€24.99Aanbieding loopt tot <time itemprop="priceValidUntil" datetime="2014-05-19">19 mei 2014!</time>Vandaag nog verkrijgbaar!


Why are the custom campaign parameters in Google Analytics so long?

Adding several Google Analytics custom campaign parameters can make URLs very long.* For example, in Google's own examples:               http://www.example.com/?utm_campaign=spring&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=exampleblog     http://www.example.com/?utm_campaign=spring&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter1     http://www.example.com/?utm_campaign=spring&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter1&utm_content=toplink      Are there shorter alternatives that GA will pick up? * In some implementations, this can be bad for user experience, and could even decrease the likelihood of being shared.


Need help with understanding IP blocks

I'm trying to troubleshoot some problems with users being blocked from our website by CloudFlare. We run a Joomla 2.5 installation with RSFirewall. I have the list of IP blocks that CloudFlare uses, but I'm not versed enough with IP block math to figure out whether several of the addresses that are currently showing in the blacklist are actually CF servers. For example, the following IP is in our blacklist: 103.22.201.147 And CloudFlare uses the following block: 103.22.200.0/22 Based on what I read here it looks like that address is indeed a CloudFlare address and I need to remove it from the blacklist. Can anybody confirm whether I'm understanding it correctly or not? Thanks for your help.


Find the user and date a filter was created in Google Analytics

How do we find out which user created a filter and on what date within Google Analytics? Google search results are sparse on this very specific topic.


Redirect domain.tld to www.domain.tld in Parallels Plesk Panel

I inherited a website which has been set up in Parallels Plesk Panel as `www.domain.tld`. Now the problem is that `domain.tld` shows the default Parallels Plesk page and doesn't redirect to `www`. I've read in many places the solution for the opposite problem but can't find anything for this! Is there a way to correct this? Or do I have to recreate the website?


How to download database of wordpress from another server?

I am writing a script to take backup of WordPress database through another server If I know ftp and wordpress login details, then how can I download wordpress database from another server. This is what I am thinking:   1. As I know ftp then I can see my database setting in `wp-config.php` .   2. But my db-host is `localhost` so how can I connect to database? I just need a direction to solve my problem.


Google Adwords: What is the difference between automatic pricing and manual pricing?

Do you use the Google adWord automatic pricing (provide the upper limit you would like to spend), or do you manually adjust and set the the bid price = first page bid min. price? According to Google, the automatic pricing will use the lowest bid price already, so the cost of running ads manually can only be greater than the automatic pricing, right?


Virtual hosting on CentOS

I have a CentOS machine running Apache. I have a few virtual hosts set up and they run just fine. An example of a setup that's working fine is:               <VirtualHost 10.10.10.38:80>         ServerName site.domain.com         DocumentRoot /var/www/html/site         <Directory /var/www/html/site>             Options -Indexes             Order deny,allow             Deny from all             Allow from {IP address list}         </Directory>         ErrorLog /etc/httpd/logs/site.error_log         CustomLog /etc/httpd/logs/site.access_log common     </VirtualHost>          <VirtualHost 10.10.10.38:443>             ServerName site.domain.com             DocumentRoot /var/www/html/site             <Directory /var/www/html/site>                 Options -Indexes                 Order deny,allow                 Deny from all                 Allow from {IP address list}             </Directory>             ErrorLog /etc/httpd/logs/site.error_log             CustomLog /etc/httpd/logs/site.access_log common             SSLEngine on             SSLCertificateFile    /etc/pki/tls/certs/localhost.crt             SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/private/localhost.key         </VirtualHost>      This is in > /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf I have another entry almost exactly like that except that > site.domain.com becomes > site1.domain.com and points to a different folder in /var/www/html/. I cannot get the browser to locate site1.domain.com. The > site.access_log file is empty. I assume that means that the browser is not able to resolve the DNS. What am I missing out on?


Google analytics set up with wrong domain

I have recently embedded Google Analytics into a site using the default embed code.               <script>         (function (i, s, o, g, r, a, m) {             i['GoogleAnalyticsObject'] = r; i[r] = i[r] || function () {                 (i[r].q = i[r].q || []).push(arguments)             }, i[r].l = 1 * new Date(); a = s.createElement(o),             m = s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0]; a.async = 1; a.src = g; m.parentNode.insertBefore(a, m)         })(window, document, 'script', '//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js', 'ga');              ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXXXX-1', 'MYDOMAIN.COM');         ga('send', 'pageview');     </script>      However I had MYDOMAIN.COM set to an incorrect domain. The views for the site seem very low, however, I can see myself there as a visitor in the real time scanner. What effect would setting the domain incorrectly have had? How does Google use this parameter?


Dedicated IP address from 3rd Party Services

I'm using hostgator reseller panel with limit to the number of dedicated IPs. I want to use dedicated IP for each account under control panel. Unfortunately hostgator restricts me with an upsell of SSL+IP for 50$. Which i think a bit costly and packed with unnecessary SSL package which i don't want to use. So is it possible to get dedicated IPs from another hosting service or host keeping the files hosted on different server ? or we're restricted to use dedicated IPs from the same host ? So to frame question in this situation, is it possible to buy IP address from 3rd parties or anyone other than your host ?


How does Wikipedia handle URL's such that "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP" is possible?

Notice the slash in "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP" How does it not misinterpret TCP as a subfolder?


Pros and cons of replacing images with canvas drawings in template?

I am going to redevelop a beautiful but heavy theme. I try to make it as light-weight and performant as possible but still eye-catching. In order to minimize the http requests needed to get images and hence save rendering time and bandwidth, I am going to replacing as many images as possible with html5 canvas. So I am wondering what are the pitfalls as well as advantages of this approach.


Google: On Everything : Why does google shuffle/change images, news, videos section periodically?

Google: On Everything : Why does google shuffle/change images, news, videos section periodically ON THE SEARCH RESULT PAGE? **And what basis does it shuffle?** Hope you people have observed this, that they shuffle the positions of images news videos


Recommendations on how to auction a domain name

We've a domain name that's okay, though hardly brilliant, that we no longer need. How would you go about auctioning or selling it? Has someone a recommended site where to put it up? I'm assuming this is fair practice, we had thought we'd a real use for it and we're certainly not squatting the name.


Install PHP5 with Tomcat 7 on Windows?

Can't find anything on this, what are the steps or instructions for installing PHP with Tomcat 7 on Windows?


What are reasons of latency for a HTTP request to load HTML?

I would like to know what are reasons of latency for a HTTP request to load HTML part of a webpage. I think about:   * loading webpage with proxy   * not having a good web server (apache vs nginx)   * having a bad configuration of web server   * having a bad internet connexion (bad ping) Any other ideas?


Brute force SEO software

Can brute force SEO tools like SENuke help in rankings or somehow get you penalized by the search engines? Can search engines even "see" that anonter tool has been used to do the SEO? Is, for example, SENuke worth the money?


Does using an author's real name (vs just a company name) typically improve the ranking of blogs/articles?

Is there a general rule of thumb for authorship of company blog posts or articles? Specifically, is there any possibility of hurting the _search ranking_ of a website (or its blog posts) by not attributing them to a named individual? (I.e. just saying: "- _By CompanyName_ " instead of "- _By John Smith_ ".) I read about the ever-increasing importance of "Google Authorship" (attributing articles to authors with verified Google+ accounts, ideally with a photo) but I would much rather keep business and personal separate in that regard. As far as I can see, associating an article with a Google+ account seems to increase the CTR (as people are generally more interested in reading an article when they can know what the author looks like) rather than the ranking itself. Is it best-practice to always attribute articles/blog posts to named individuals, or can I safely continue to attribute authorship to a generic company name, without being concerned that search ranking of these articles could be penalized in some way?


Static domain to serve cookies indexed by google

I have made a subdomain, `static.example.com` to serve my asset files (images, CSS, etc) from. It shares the same webroot as my main site, `www.example.com`. I don't want it to be indexed due to duplicated content concerns. I need to know   1. how to block Google from crawling this subdomain   2. how to remove any URLs from the SERPs that may have already been crawled


How can I version-control and deploy a website's static files while preserving timestamps?

I'm using NanoBlogger to generate a website that consists entirely of static files—no PHP or anything similar. I'd like to place the site under version control, which means managing both NanoBlogger's data files and the other non-generated files (stylesheets, images and whatnot) that make up the site with one revision-control system or another. I'd also like to automate deployment of the website from the RCS. What I've discovered is none of the modern revision-control systems (git, Subversion and Mercurial) preserve timestamps on files they manage. This means a deployment script on the server that checks out a fresh copy of the repository and copies the files over to the webserver's public folder will end up resetting the timestamp on every file, even things like images that haven't changed. This defeats any attempt to use caching effectively and ends up wasting users' time and bandwidth. So my question is, **what tools and workflow do people actually use for versioning and deploying static websites?** Specifically, how you get around the timestamping issue? Do you   * simply keep a "permanent" checkout of the repository on the server which just gets updated before each deployment (arguably a bad practice),   * use a "classic" RCS like CVS that does preserve timestamps, or   * ignore the problem and accept a bit of bandwidth will be wasted? Or is there some completely different kind of system or workflow people use instead? (There's no shortage of information on the mechanics of using revision control with a website, but I've yet to see anyone address the timestamp issue or say much about static websites specifically.)


Google Plus website not linking

I'm getting below error when trying to link Google Plus page with my site:               Check that the line of code was added to your site's homepage and that the modified homepage is live on your site. Then try testing again.      I have got correct link set up like below (obviously {pageId} is replaced) but I'm still getting this error. I have got this link across all pages in the sidebar.               Google+      I got this working on other sites but somehow this site is not linking. Is there a reason why? Other sites also have the Google Plus link on sidebar of every page


What is the best size to use to display full screen size of an application screenshot?

I want to maximize the size of the screenshot and avoid scroll bar or overflow for the maximum too. What size do you recommend ? I'm using lightbox.


sitemap.xml : shall I put all my URLs including the ones that have "empty result" for a dataset?

Here's my problem: on my website, you can click on all the regions, and the new web page is the result of the search of the region. Thus the result may be empty. Shall I include all those "empty search result" pages in the `sitemap.xml` or not?


I made a 'login with OpenID' page and I had a error when OpenID provider return to my page: > You don't have permission to access /index.php on this server. Additionally, > a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument > to handle the request. If I remove parameters which are returned by OpenID provider, the page run well. How can I fix this problem? The login page that cause error is: `http://bryox.com/login`


Internal links in Google Webmaster Tools showing unrelated data

In Google Webmaster Tools under _Search Traffic_ --> _Internal Links_ , for some pages it's showing too many internal links. Is there any effect on my site due to these internal links. How these internal links works? For Example: ![screenshot of related links](http://i.stack.imgur.com/2lt4o.jpg) Under `/musical-instruments-2` it has "Top 82 links" and "Total links 470". I observed that it contains unrelated links (other than musical instruments). Why has it linked unrelated data under musical instruments?


Canonicalization for www/non-www URLs and IP/domain on a Windows server

I have checked my website using this SEO tool and the results report 2 issues: > _Test your site for potential URL canonicalization issues. Canonicalization > describes how a site can use slightly different URLs for the same page - for > example: if www.mydomain.com andhttp://mydomain.com displays to the same > page but do not resolve to the same URL. If this happens, search engines may > be unsure as to which URL is the correct one to index. Learn more about > canonicalization issues._   1. `www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com should resolve to the same URL, but currently do not.`   2. `Your site's IP xxx.xxx.xx.xxx does not redirect to your site's domain name. This could cause duplicate content problems if a search engine indexes your site under both its IP and domain name. Consider using a 301 re-write rule in your .htaccess file so that your site's IP points to your domain name. Read more about canonical URL issues.` How can I configure my website to solve the 2 issues above? My website uses a Window server (ASP.net). I want to optimize for SEO, but first I must solve this.


Does this SEO practice have a name and is it "cloaking"?

So I Google search for a dictionary term, and none of the sites' Google snippets actually defines that term. Instead they are presented in this format: ![enter image description here](http://i.stack.imgur.com/x1oOo.png) Here's the actual page it links to from The Free Dictionary. The term is used a lot in a block of text that teases the user into clicking the link, but the page doesn't visibly appear to have this content at all. It entices the user and requires a click through for them to find the actual information they want. What is this called? Is this considered cloaking or is it otherwise a violation of SEO best practices?


Google Analytics report is showing URL parameters that look like session ids

I am noticing some weird URLs in the Google Analytics content report. The parameters in the urls appears similar to php session ids (not sure though). Just want to make sure it is not something that is caused by any misconfiguartion or such on the site, as the urls doesn't make any sense and the normals urls on the site are quite different. Here are examples of the urls               /index.php?____pgfa=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5hcHBhbmNlLmNvbS8=&s=tshirt          /index.php?q=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5hcHBhbmNlLmNvbS9jYXRlZ29yeS9hbmRyb2lkL2Rlc2lnbi92aWV3cy8=      If there was one or two entries like this I would have normally ignored, but I am seeing too many entries like this to be a bit concerned. What is the reason behind this? Thanks.


WordPress XML-RPC attack

Yesterday I suffered a **DDoS attack** on a WordPress site. I had **21,443 hits** with HTTP Status code 404 and a Bandwidth of **711.85 MB**. Also, CPU usage went to 100%. Logs show a lot of this entries:               ...     119.71.5.44 - - [03/Sep/2014:18:34:57 -0700] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 34826 "-" "-"     197.149.17.195 - - [03/Sep/2014:18:35:01 -0700] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 404 34826 "-" "-"     210.206.226.130 - - [03/Sep/2014:18:35:04 -0700] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 34826 "-" "-"     ...      I'm trying to understand this log.   1. This was only a DDoS attack or they were trying to hack my site?   2. Was I under attack or they used my site to attack others? (all IPs entries are different)   3. What is the best way to stop this? Modify .htaccess file or Add a filter in functions.php * * * **Update: Background information**   * I had WordPress 3.9.2. Now, I've updated WordPress to the latest version (4.0).   * The site is on a shared hosting (with cPanel X).   * The attack started on 02/Sep/2014 18:06:57 -0700 and ended 03/Sep/2014 21:22:24 -0700 Also, an hour before the attack the log shows this:               82.27.195.149 - - [02/Sep/2014:16:50:52 -0700] "GET /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 200 42 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0"     82.27.195.149 - - [02/Sep/2014:16:50:54 -0700] "GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2663 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0"      And two hours after it started I've found this:               184.176.42.181 - - [02/Sep/2014:19:58:18 -0700] "GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2663 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36"     184.176.42.181 - - [02/Sep/2014:19:58:18 -0700] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2843 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36"     184.176.42.181 - - [02/Sep/2014:19:58:18 -0700] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2843 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36"     184.176.42.181 - - [02/Sep/2014:19:58:19 -0700] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2843 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36"     184.176.42.181 - - [02/Sep/2014:19:58:19 -0700] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2843 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36"     184.176.42.181 - - [02/Sep/2014:19:58:20 -0700] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2843 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36"     184.176.42.181 - - [02/Sep/2014:19:58:20 -0700] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2843 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36"     184.176.42.181 - - [02/Sep/2014:19:58:20 -0700] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2843 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36"     184.176.42.181 - - [02/Sep/2014:19:58:21 -0700] "GET /blog/wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 404 34107 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36"      So, I guess they were trying to hack my account through XML-RPC.


How To: Buy a Domain From a Private Seller

I'm buying a domain name from a private seller, and obviously I don't want to get scammed. What is the appropriate method of buying a domain name from a private seller. Do we go through the domain registrar (godaddy, network solutions), and how do I know the domain is mine? What certifies that I own it?


How to prevent table borders from disappearing while printing?

I'm just working at a website that is supposed to be printable. One problem I'm running into is that some table borders won't be printed, although they are correctly displayed on screen. I tried both Firefox and Chrome. Both display all table borders on screen, but omit some of the borders when printing. What do I need to do to get them printed?


Ditch cPanel / WHM in favour of manual seup

We currently use cPanel / WHM on a reseller account but are looking at getting a dedicated server. My first thought was to duplicate this set up on the dedicated box to allow us to quickly create new accounts. I'll be a managed server so they'll have set up the LAMP stack. I'm curious if I actually need cPanel and WHM. We don't use many of the features from cPanel / WHM, just creating accounts and databases, clients do not have FTP access. I'm no sys admin and come from a Windows / GUI background but have some knowledge in setting up development servers. **WHM: Creating accounts** I presume this sets up the Apache virtual host, FTP access and DNS settings. I've some knowledge of editing the Apache files to create virtual hosts. Am I correct in thinking as long as the DNS is pointing to the server IP and the virtual host is configured the server can serve the (php) pages? I'm not sure I need per site FTP access as only we will have access so I could have a server wide/htdocs only access to view all the site. The company who supply the dedicated hosts would also provide the own DNS management tool so I'm not need to cPanel one. **MySQL: Creating users and databases** We use cPanel to create the MySQL users and databases. As it's a dedicated box and I can have root access I think this could be replaced by SQLyog for db management and phpMyAdmin for user management. Do you I need cPanel or can I get by editing a few text files for creating the accounts, then use the MySQL tools for databases? Or am I missing something major with how the sites are configured?


Who Is Against CSS and JS?

I know there is a group which promotes very basic HTML. They advocate against CSS and JavaScript. Does anyone know the name of this group? Just to be clear this was a website, or a foundation, or a society, or some kind of group. It wasn't a person or a browser maker. They were advocating minimal HTML as sufficent to express web content. They were against CSS and JavaScript on principal that they were extraneous and bloatware. The web pages on this site rendered using whatever built-in styling your browser had for things like H1 and OL tags, which looked like crap compared to what we're all used to. They had a page for "Friends Of..." which linked to sites that used very basic HTML markup, but with maybe a dash of basic CSS. The idea was to promote this way of designing pages and to avoid just about any styling or scripting. I found the site when it was picked up in various technical news aggregators, like Digg, Hacker News, DZone, etc. Does anyone recall the group's name or url?


Comment spammer IP list?

Is there a public list anywhere on the web of IP addresses that have been identified as comment spammers?


Is my client's domain in "limbo"?

About a year ago I created a website for one of my clients. They already had a domain name and hosting through Vistaprint, so we changed the nameservers over to my server as Vistaprint would only let us use pre-made templates. They told my clients that they had to unlock their domain to change the nameservers, so they paid to unlock it, forwarded us all the details, then we logged into `OpenSRS.net` and changed the nameservers accordingly. Unfortunately the domain expired there in November, and has about 10 days left now before it gets released back into the public. They have contacted Vistaprint but there is nothing they can do apparently. Who owns the domain, where is it, and is it in limbo somewhere?


PHP and Javascript

I am a good C programmer. I have recently studied a bit of JavaScript and I plan on developing my skills by also learning PHP. Can I learn both these language in 3 months and after that build a site of mine like a small social network or something in a month.


How are spambots registering on my website?

I have a forum that's getting a bunch of spam bot registrations. Here's what's happened:   * lots of spambots   * added static logic question (as a picture), static math question, honeypot field   * still lots of spambots   * added a built-in CAPTCHA   * still lots of spambots   * banned a bunch of known spam domain emails like @spam.xxx    * spam cut in half, but still lots of spam from spambots on other domains I don't want to block (like gmail, yahoo) I'm really, really baffled at how spambots are still getting through my measures and registering. How is this happening? Here's my registration page: ![registration page](http://i.stack.imgur.com/7CyrX.jpg)


Links Pages - Useful or Harmful?

What is the current thinking regarding having a links page on your website? I understand so many outgoing links on a page with little other content will be hellish for that page's page rank, but what about the site in general? I am constantly getting asking to take part in link exchanges and recently adopted a policy of just saying no, should I rethink this?


Is Use of keyword instead of preposition good?

i would like to know if we write articles using the fixed keyword instead of using the preposition for it good for SEO keyword density?


High traffic by "doin' nothing"

We have set up on a VPS a WordPress blog. But, after we work a while, if we leave the tabs open in our browsers, there is upload traffic, in small chunks but quite often. We thought that it might be the WordPress's AutoSave feature, but we disabled it and the thing still continues. Here you have a small snippet from the log (the real domain URL replaced):               [06/Oct/2010:12:41:06] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 53692 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:41:07] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 2925 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:41:07] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 24279 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:41:08] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 2301 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:41:08] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 2269 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:41:09] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 37459 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:41:09] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 6220 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:41:09] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 4140 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:41:09] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 16508 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:41:09] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 5148 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:41:09] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 6268 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:43:03] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 34056 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:43:03] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 42002 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:43:30] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 2381 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable     [06/Oct/2010:12:43:31] "CONNECT connect://fooURL.com:443/" 0 8775 "-" "Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.62" - "- -" "clean-sites,CONNECT,uncachable      It is normal? If not, why? How can we get rid of it?


Confused: When does Google use Title vs description? Misleading results possible

Search for jamaica tourism on Google. You get a search result with the text **Jamaica Tourism: 578 Things to Do in Jamaica | TripAdvisor**. Nowhere on the displayed page does the phrase **578 Things to Do** appear. Google has chosen to show it in search results even so. It comes from the `<title>` tag of that page. Now take a look at results for the Google search for ebay bidding. One of the first results is for a business called Auction Sniper. The search result includes the text **Auction Sniper is a free ebay sniper...** That text is a misleading trick (Auction Sniper is not a free service) but this time the text comes from description meta tag. Nowhere on the Auction Sniper home page does the phrase "Auction Sniper is a free service" appear. How does Google decide when to use the title tag and when to use the description meta tag? Both results seem misleading to me, yet they have been stable for quite some time. Is such a apparently misleading technique considered kosher by Google?


SEO: adding your company signature with link to all websites you make?

I saw many webdesigner companies adding a small signature on each website they make. Signature could be masked by words like _credits_ , _design by..._ , **but they all contain a direct link to the webdesign company that made the website**. This can be obviously good to drive more traffic to the webdesign company by direct visitors that might click on 'credits'/'design by...' link. **But what about SEO:**   1. Is it good for Google? (Or is it seen as spamming bad SEO technique)   2. It should increase the webdesign company's website Google PR, shouldn't it?! And in some way push the wbsite up on Google search results? * NOTE: obviously I'm supposing the webdesign company's website is also a site with interesting and decent contents, not just an empty idious site, I know Ggoogle looks 1st for contents, but besides that...


Registering a domain name for someone else with my billing information

I want to register a domain for someone using my billing information (credit card) but all the contact information are the ones of this person. Once I get the domain, I will transfer the logins of the registrars setting page of the domain to this person, I am concerned about if the person will be able to check the billing information or even use them to purchase other domains/services. Is there a way to buy a domain name while keeping the billing information not registered in the registrars setting page, or even buy a coupon that the person can use to register the domain name for itself. EDIT: I just found an interesting option on Godaddy : Moving a Domain Name out of Your Account > You can use these instructions to move a domain name from one account with > us to another. Has anyone tried this before whether it just transfers the domain or the billing information too?


Directing crawlers to content in language per language sub-domain

I have a site with multilingual website with many pages (40M). The site has UGC, and each translation is actually for the titles. Each sub-domain points to the same content with different titles per language. As far as I understand, each sub-domain should be indexed by search engines, meaning they will actually need to crawl 40M x supported-languages. So I thought it might be best to direct each subdomain crawler, to pages that are fully in that language (titles + UGC). Is there a way to do this? Should search engines understand this on their own?


How does IPv6 and AAAA DNS records affect my visitors?

If I set up a web site and the web server only has IPv6, and my domain uses a AAAA DNS record instead of a A record, how does this affect my visitors? Can only end users that have IPv6 on their client access my web site? if that is the case, is there any work arounds?


Web hosting options for Ruby on Rails applications

What hosting options exist for Rails applications? The goal of this _community wiki_ question is to get a feel for:   * what options are available   * advantages/disadvantages/cost of each   * overall opinion of each option, in the form of votes for each answer Guidelines for answers:   * Please provide _one_ option per answer.   * In the answer, elaborate on the factual features, advantages, and disadvantages to each option. If possible, include information about costs in relation to traffic (preferred) or hardware.   * Answers can be options for Rails-specific hosts, general hosts, and 'rolling your own host'.   * If you have utilized a solution on the list and approve of it, show your support by up-voting that solution. If you had a bad experience with that method, show your dissatisfaction by down-voting that solution.   * Please keep the answers factual and without bias in the editing process. Keep subjective thoughts to comments/voting on answers. There will not be an 'accepted answer' to this question. Many web hosts cannot accommodate Rails apps, and others do so weakly. I've seen this question tossed around and discussed a good bit and I think it's time we had a definitive reference maintained by a community of webmasters.


Recomendation of Ruby on Rails hosting

> **Duplicate:**   >  Web hosting options for Ruby on Rails applications Hi, We're looking for a good Ruby on Rails hosting. Basically we need the following features:   * Unlimited disk space and monthly bandwidth   * Unlimited domains   * Full SSH access   * Support various versions of Rails (2.3.8 and 3.0 for ex.)   * Passenger and capistrano deployment support   * EXCELLENT client support: We're new at Ruby on Rails, so currently we have several problems when deploying rails app. Our current hosting (RailsPlayground) offers awesome support, but we are looking for a new one because of the disk space and bandwidth limits.   * A nice panel (cPanel or similar).   * Basically we need to focus on application development and not worry too much about deployment and related stuff.   * Fair price We need a truly Ruby on Rails hosting, with people that have expertise in deploying and hosting Rails apps., not just a normal hosting that someday decided to install ruby and rails just to support it, if you know what I mean. We don't need high performance, we need to host several rails applications. If one application is getting lots of traffic and needs better performance, then we'll move it to a VPS or some high-scalable and performance hosting. I'll create some answers with a few hostings that I've been recommended. Please feel free to vote and add comments about them or reply with another. Thanks!


Hosting for a Ruby on Rails application

> **Possible Duplicate:**   >  Web hosting options for Ruby on Rails applications I am a Ruby on Rails developer and I am planning to purchase an hosting space in order to publish my web application (I'm developing a small Social Network). This is my first time that I try to deploy a Ruby on Rails application, so I am not expert on the matter. I would like to find a "compromise" between performance and price. I think that for now a shared server it is enough (maybe) for my needs (suggestions are appreciated...). In localhost I am using   * Ruby on Rails 3.0.9   * ruby-1.9.2-p136   * Apache   * Phusion Passenger   * MySql so the hosting server should satisfy the above requisites. More: in my application I am using the Paperclip gem so another requisite should be Image-Magick. What hosting service do you advice for my needs? What should I have to care when I purchase a hosting space for RoR? And, most importantly, which hosting service do you advice? P.S.: if you need some other information just ask and I will update the question.


Does seperate marketing website and main web application make sense?

I am working on a website that offers a service to customers. As part of this, there is obviously lots of informational, marketing and news information, as well as a regular "backend" where actual customers signup, login and then make use of the service. The informational site requires fairly frequent updates from marketing. Marketing is constantly concerned with SEO, news updates, PR etc. The main backend site still requires a lot of development, but this is a "registered" user only area. It doesn't need SEO and such frequent updates. The two seem fairly distinct to me. For this reason, I am thinking of splitting out the informational website into www.example.com and the regular backend into user.example.com or another similar subdomain. Are there any problems with this approach?


How do I create styles for IE7 (and below)?

> **Possible Duplicate:**   >  What are the best ways to implement cross browser css? I have a site that looks more or less the same in all browsers except Internet Explorer (version 7 and below). How do I create styles that only IE7 and below will recognize?


How can we secure our web application codes?

I have a web application written in the Struts2 framework. I want to host the application with another company. Is there any way to hide the code which is hosted on the server? What I want is to hide the code from anyone who has access to the server. Using the application would be allowed, but viewing the code prohibited.


Can different properties be on multiple domains or should everything be centralized on one?

In my case, I have a web design project for a funeral home. On their property they have a funeral home (for services, offices, ...) and a large cemetery also. Additionally, they own three more cemeteries across the state. I can either incorporate each location (including the funeral home) into one website, or... Create a main domain name for the funeral home and then buy a separate, unique name for each cemetery (including the cemetery on the funeral home property). The funeral home location is considered the headquarters of operations for their company, so it makes sense to make the funeral home the "portal". Then for each cemetery, I'll purchase a unique domain name. I mostly want to do this for design; to separate the business of funeral homes from the beauty of cemeteries. However, from an SEO standpoint, I'm clueless. Is this recommended? Does Google hate this kind of thing?


Multiple IP addresses to a server

I am trying to figure out the best option for web hosting of a startup business. I want to get a VPS hosting for this business and one factor that affects the price is the number of IP addresses. I was wondering what would be the advantage of having multiple IP addresses for one server. I have read the other questions and I know if I am going to use SSL for multiple websites on my server I would need unique IP address for each one but in this case I only would have one website.


Adding a Forum to my site: build one from scratch or use existing open-source platform?

_Note: I posted this originally to stackoverflow.com, had it closed, and was told to post it on programmers.stackexchange.com. So I posted it on programmers.stackexhange.com, had it cloased, and was told to post it on webmaster.stackexchange.com. Here's my last attempt to get some help and direction on this nerve-racking problem._ I've been pulling my hair out for weeks trying to decide which way to go. One of my LAMP sites is several years old and my users have requested a forum. My site is custom-built by myself, and the forum would have to integrate fully with my site so that it actually looks, feels, and behaves like my site. For example, I have a site-wide messaging system on my site that alerts users whenever they receive a new message no matter where on my site they are on, so this feature would have to be extended to the Forum. I would also like to be able to limit access to certain sub-forums based on criteria from my site as opposed to criteria from the forum. I don't need a full-featured forum as it will not be the main focus of my site, just a feature of it. **The question is, do I use an existing forum platform and integrate it with my site or do I just build one from scratch?** The pros/cons are relatively obvious, but I can't decide which way to go and it's crunch time. The pros of using an existing open-source platform is that they are tried and tested, secure, have a lot of built-in features, community support, and would save me a lot of time. The cons are that they seem to severely limit how tightly and well I can integrate it with my site and my site's features, not to mention that most are overkill for what I need (bloatware). All the forum packages I have looked at (and I've looked at MANY), are all front-end solutions that will behave like an external add-on to my rather than an integral part of it. I have not found any fully-customizable "backend" forum solutions. This means that I will need to customize the forum to fit in with my site, but if that means altering core files, it will make the forum difficult to upgrade. Building the forum from scratch means I need to re-invent the wheel with all the potential problems that might raise, but on the other hand, I can program the forum so that it does everything exactly the way I need it to, making it an integral part of my site rather than an external add-on to it. So, what do you recommend and why?


Website still displays deleted files

I went to update a website's CSS today and noticed whenever I uploaded the file with my changes nothing would happen - no changes would appear on my site. This was the same with any of the images I wanted to change. Experimenting, I changed the actual file name, uploaded it and changed the link to the external style sheet - it worked as expected. I then deleted the the CSS file completely...but still the website behaves as normal. I've cleared my browser's cache of course and that made no difference. Would anyone know what's going on? Is there something caching the entire site somewhere? (I am using FileZilla. All other sites I have are behaving normally. There are no errors appearing in Filezilla's log when I upload or delete)


How to know if a domain belongs to a person or not?

We're almost done on creating a hosted CMS solution (something like Weebly). We offer people to create a website with 3 different options:   1. If they don't have a domain yet, they can create a sub-domain   2. If they don't have a domain yet, but they don't want to have a sub-domain either, they can buy their own domain (we're a re-seller of a big registrar)   3. If they have a domain already which has been registered by another registrar, we want to offer a feature, so that they can use that domain with our CMS.   4. If they have multiple domains, they can park'em on the same CMS instance, so that they can see their websites with many domains. However, they should follow some steps, so that their domain name would be resolved to our servers. For example, one step is that they should change their name servers info. But a business requirement has been posed by the stakeholders and product owner, and that is, we want to get sure that people are true owners of the domains registered by other registrars. In other words, when a user wants to add another domain to his/her CMS instance (parking a new domain) and this newly added domain is not registered by us, we want to get sure that the domain really belongs to him/her. What options and solutions do we have? How can we get sure that Bob for example is the owner of **second-domain.com** domain, when he's parking this domain on his CMS (which is already accessible via **first-domain.com**?


Which webserver to use for multiple sites?

Which webserver should I use if I'm going to host about 30 sites and all are using Wordpress. Each site receives about 1k+ visitors daily. Which webserver should I use apache or nginx? I only have 1GB RAM on the vps


Bingbot Crawling URLS Like Folders, Causing Thousands Of 404 Errors

I first started seeing this a little over two months ago on a site I run but now I am seeing it on several others I manage. It appears the bot is trying to parse the URL into folders and this is what's causing the issue. For instance this URL is correct: http://amgoa.org/Proposed-Alaska-Gun-Law-SCR6/State-Law/8895 But then Bing tries to access this URL: http://amgoa.org/Proposed-Alaska-Gun-Law-SCR6/State-Law And then this URL: /Proposed-Alaska-Gun-Law-SCR6 (sorry cant post more than 2 complete links) The second two of course throwing a 404. This site has over 67,000 pages and this error on their part is driving us nuts, loading up the error logs with tens of thousands of 404 for URLs that are incorrect. About a month ago I built an xml sitemap script hoping that would solve the issue. I submitted it to Google and Bing via the webmaster tools section. Google correctly indexed all 67,000+ pages while Bing is sitting there trying to parse these non existent URLs. Has anyone else seen this and more importantly does anyone know how to either stop this or contact Bing to get them to stop?


Google Analytics page views and page hits

I have Google Analytics tag in my site and it seems that GA (4-10 views) is much lower in reporting page views as opposed to my web app which reports around 350 views. Is there a reason why this is happening? Is Google Analytics page views reliable source?


Website starts showing 404 after 301 redirects via .htaccess

One of my clients websites started getting 404 messages on some pages after doing 301 redirects via _.htaccess_ file. I don't understand why that happens, could someone tell me what went wrong? The website is published using Wordpress.


Track exit link and ads with PHP

I want to track exit links on my website and also exit ads like Google Adsense etc. I mean by exit ads is that when click on add I get ads dimension and ads type like Google or other ads. In short I want this: Google Adsense _160x600_ like in `statcounter.com`.


Does HTML5 video cache the entire video before playback or does it stream?

I have an HTML5 page that plays a small video (1.5MB) with autoplay and loop enabled. The problem is, sometimes it takes up to 10 seconds after loading the page before the video starts playing. I've seen this happen in both Firefox and Chrome. The only explanation I can think of is that the browser needs to download the entire video before playback begins. Is this normal, or have I perhaps encoded the videos in a streaming-unfriendly way? Edit: The video is 10 seconds of 25 fps video encoded by ffmpeg, here are the parameters I used to build them:               //OGV (Theora/Vorbis - used for firefox)     ffmpeg -i input -b 2000k -vcodec libtheora -acodec libvorbis -ab 160000 -g 30  video.ogv          //MP4 (Used by IE, Safari, Chrome)     ffmpeg -i input -b 1500k -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow -vpre baseline -g 30 video.mp4


Google Analytics track transfer to sister site as not an "exit"?

I have two domains (i.e. example.com and foobar.com) and I have **separate** Google analytics properties for the two domains, but since I own the two (and they link to each other), I would like to know how many exits from one are really transfers to the other (and have them not really be "exits" from GA's perspective). I know I can trigger an event on an outbound link, and I could do the math of "number of exits minus number of "sister site" events" to figure out the number, but it would be best if those transfers were simply not registered as exits at all. Is there a way to flag an outbound link as "this is okay, they're not really leaving my family of sites" so it doesn't get marked as an "exit"?


What is the critical user mass for a forum or Q&A?

If you start a forum or a Q&A site. At the begining you would create the content yourself. At some point you get visitors from google. What do you think: How many users du you need to run a forum or Q&A? I mean that the visitors start to register and to contribute. I hope to hear some real life examples or estimates. **Edit** : Maybe the question is not fully correct. Probably it is also important to know other parameters like: "How many active topics are on the site" ...


How to embed G+ reviews on my website

I've started collecting G+ reviews for my company. As reviews help build trust and increase conversion rate I would like to include them on my webpage. Does Google provide a way on how to embed the G+ reviews on my site? I need to embed the number of stars, name, date and text.


Dynamically sitemap

I submitted to google webmasters my sitemap. I'm creating sitemap dynamically every day, it is just adding new links every day. Cause my site is news portal and every day we are adding news. So I'm generating new links in my sitemap every day. Do I need to resubmit it to google or google will detect it on it's own.


Multiple fonts in a website

I have been creating a blog and now its almost done. I am thinking of adding fonts to it. I am curious if having more than 1 font in a website makes it look unprofessional? I understand that it is a personal opinion of a person how the site should look but my site is a blog so I want to consider how visitors might feel seeing multiple fonts on a website. Does it look standard? In short: How many fonts should one use so that readability does not get affected? Thanks in advance.


ad networks that let you run your own cookie targeting

We've got some proprietary cookie targeting software which we are developing to help deliver better targeted ads. We dont have a group of publishers, nor particularly want to go and build our own network as this is almost as difficult as building the targeting software. Are there any networks out there that will let us run our own cookie targeting script on their network / publishers.


How do i found developers groups to let they build my own startup?

As for the title, i would like to meet some developers groups to pay them to build startups, doesn't matter where they are located, just they should speak english. does anyone knows how can i found them and where? thanks!


Is Codeschool.com recommended in addition to Lynda.com?

Does Codeschool's ability to perform activity / test / game / training as their approach, offer something that achieve studying faster and more effectively than Lynda.com's exercise file / video structure doesn't.


Define page load time

Google Analytics reports our site to have an average page load time of about 4.5-6 seconds. Naturally, this sounds as a concern. However, we never see these page load times when the page is rendering, it feels like it takes around a second. The reason for the discrepancy here I believe is that GA measures every single request, even those that does not produce screen content. Such requests might be third-party scripts such as the GA-script itself and other resources. Thinking about web usability I'm really only interested in how the response times feel to the user. Am I right? Also, is there a standard way to measure the actual time it takes for the page to render? Using Google Speed Tracer I can see that there are 2 DOMContentLoaded events firing but these are at 4.83s and 5.36s respectively.


aligning 3 divs

I'm good at some things but html/css layout isn't one of them. I need to lay out a page with two divs on the left, div1 (height 30%, width 30%) on top and div2 (height 7% and width 30%) below div1. These 3 divs to be within a container div. Then I need to add div3 to the right of div1 and div 2. Div 3 to be width 70%, height 100%.               ***************************************     *   div1   *         div3             *     *          *                          *     ************                          *     *   div2   *                          *     *          *                          *     *          *                          *     *          *                          *     ***************************************      I've tried every combination of floating, clearing and black magic that I can think of but I can't get div 3 to line up where I want it. I'd appreciate it if someone could fill in the skeleton below with the correct stuff to accomplish this layout.


Use different .htaccess file based on set header from browser

I want to have the ability to test _.htaccess_ rules before saving them to the main _.htaccess_ file. Is it possible to set a specific request header and have Apache use a set of rules from a different _.htaccess_ file.


Domain registered with Fake info!

> **Possible Duplicate:**   >  Providing fake info during domain registration - does it matter? I have registered a Domain with fake info 24 hours ago (I didn't know its illegal! :() its still pending (not available yet) I'm not like, criminal or spammer but I don't want to show my real id, what do you suggest so I don't lose my Domain. Can I transfer it to a service like name.com because I heard they provide ID protection!


Would google consider this a "link scheme"?

I work for a County Government. In an effort to improve our search engine rankings I was considering contacting some of the other Counties in my state and seeing if we could setup an arrangement where we link to them and they link to us. It seems like a reasonable thing to have a "Other Counties" page with various links on a County website, but it also seems like it's bordering on a link scheme according to Google. When I read Google's article about link schemes it seems like we hit some of the right reasons for having links on another County's site but also some of the wrong. Does anyone have any insight into whether this is a good or bad idea?


How are the .cat TLD requirements enforced?

When registering a `.cat` TLD, one of the requirements is > Warning: the registration contract for domain names in this extension > require that you publish at least one page in Catalan within 6 months. How is this requirement enforced by the TLD owners? Do they have bots that scan for links going to pages in Catalan? I am trying to determine if this entails any restrictions with regards to the nature of the website itself. If, for example, a page used Javascript to populate the page, would the bots miss this (meaning, single page applications may be undesirable).


Installing a PHP framework to a host without public_html or www folders (ftp is DocumentRoot)

I've developed a PHP framework that operates with the directory structure of               /       /classes/       /templates/       /.../       /www/ (public_html)      But I've come across a host that only allows ftp to the DocumentRoot, so this imposes a security risk to my scripts. I don't want the root of the site to point to the root where my framework lies. I've asked a question over at stackoverflow with a question to an .htaccess rewriterule to potentially solve this Is there a better method to do this?


Can I detect the IP address and location of visitors to my web application who are behind a proxy?

I'm writing a web application and I need to make sure that I have the actual IP address and location of my visitors, since there are many users in Middle East and China using proxy services to bypass the restrictions there. Is there a way to detect this information behind a proxy?


What are the two different types of google search results called?

## Google SERPs have search results that appear in two different ways: ![Single Search Result](http://i.stack.imgur.com/j6C4i.png)   **Single Search Result** ![Single Search Result with Sitelinks](http://i.stack.imgur.com/junmR.png)   **Single Search Result withSitelinks** Are there official terms for these? I know that a "SERP" is Search Results Page, and I'm fairly certain that a single search result is just called a "search result". But what is a search result with Sitelinks called?


Will these tool tips get me penalized?

I have a page of 10 products. Each product has a list of (7) features associated with it. If a user hovers over the name of the feature, (ex. Moisture resistance), a tooltip description displays. The descriptions (a sentence or two), are loaded once on the page using JavaScript, but the titles are not, so I essentially have a bunch of redundant tool tip titles. I am concerned this will look like keyword stuffing to the bots. Anyone know about this? Maybe I should load the feature titles with JavaScript as well?


Google Experiments - can you run across the entire site?

Is it possible to run a Google Experiment A/B test across an entire website, rather than just a single page and a variation? thx


What does Google do with indexed pages returning 403?

I guess that Google removes already indexed pages that are now returning the HTTP error `403`. Unfortunately I can't find any definitive statement on that matter. Do you know the answer?


Using SEO to hide a website in a specific location?

A friend of mine wants to build a website, but doesn't want people in the West Midlands area of the UK to be able to see it, but wants areas outside of the West Midlands to be able to see it. Is this possible? I know SEO can be used to target specific countries to improve search results, but could it be used to target specific areas inside a country and to basically remove the website from Google listings for a specific area? Cheers!


Redirect does not work

I tried to redirect a broken link onto my site by redirect :               RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*$     RewriteRule ^domian_registration\.html$ "http\:\/\/mysite\.com\/domain_registration\.html" [R=301,L]      But it responds with error (404 Not Found) and redirects to following URL:               mysite/home/[Cpanel user]/public_html/domain_registration.html      What's the problem?


Blog suitable Adsense format

I saw blog which has nice formated Google Adsense ads, but I don't know how to generate them. Here is a screenshot: http://imgur.com/U0mzk (sorry for plain link but I'm too fresh here to use img tag ) Is it text link format or what?


Domain Redirect to another using CNAME Record

I have a Domain, lets say `maindom.com`, now I want to have another Domain, lets say `secdom.com` to point to `maindom.com` such that all the URL's leads to `maindom.com`. I want to do this with the help of CNAME records **only**. I can use third-party services also. Example:   `secdom.com/rand123` Leads to `maindom.com/rand123`   `secdom.com/ano2484/anot` Leads to `maindom.com/ano2484/anot`   `secdom.com/tesecqz?id=45` Leads to `maindom.com/tesecqz?id=45`   I tried adding a CNAME record to `secdom.com` with value `maindom.com`, but just din't work. Another point to note is that the IP of `maindom.com` host other websites also and not just this one, this can be a problem I guess. How to do this? Any help is appreciated.


how to start sendmail - WP email turned off

I have a WP site on a linux box. Our email was working fine in Wordpress but recently it stopped, I think because of a restart. All I could think of was to restart sendmail. I couldn't find sendmail in the normal directory (/etc/init.d/sendmail restart) but that didn't exist. I found another directory for sendmail in the sbin but every time I try running it it doesn't respond and I have to exit. This is all what I tried. Any ideas?               [root@li209-134 ~]# /etc/init.d/sendmail restart     -bash: /etc/init.d/sendmail: No such file or directory          [root@li /]# find . -name sendmail -print     ./usr/sbin/sendmail     ./usr/lib/sendmail     [root@li /]# ./usr/sbin/sendmail restart     ^C     [root@li /]# sudo /usr/sbin/sendmail restart     ^C     [root@li /]# sudo service sendmail start     sendmail: unrecognized service     [root@li /]# /usr/sbin/sendmail start     ^C     [root@li /]# /usr/sbin/sendmail     ^C     [root@li /]# /usr/lib/sendmail start     ^C


.htaccess port 80 to another port SEO impact?

I am using the Ghost blogging platform. By default to access the blog you go to `blog.my-site.com:2368` of course this makes for a ugly, unfriendly URL. I am using _.htaccess_ to change the behavior so when a person types in `blog.my-site.com` they see the URL. I used the following code:               Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews       # Turn mod_rewrite on     RewriteEngine On       RewriteBase /          RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.mywebsite.com$ [NC]       RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off       RewriteRule ^ http://blog.mywebsite.com:2368%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]        From my understanding this is not a redirect, but rather transparently sends the traffic from port 80 to port 2368. My question is this: Does this process have any impact on SEO or, in the views of SEO, it is the same as `blog.my-site.com`?


Googlebot getting "301 Moved Permanently" according to "Fetch as Googlebot" in Webmaster Tools

I launched a website four days ago, and now when I try to crawl the website like Google bot in "Google webmaster tools" I end up with a response like this:               HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently     Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 21:37:26 GMT     Server: Apache     Location: http://example.com/     Content-Length: 294     Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=29     Connection: Keep-Alive     Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1          <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">          <title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
Moved Permanently

The document has moved here.

     <address>Apache Server at www.example.com Port 80</address>           What is the problem ?


Website with a 30% non english content (70% english) can be accepted in Tribal Fusion?

I'm just wondering If a website has a 30% non English content, will the Tribal Fusion Ad Network still accepts it's application. My website has a 30% non english content and 70% english. I don't want to submit my application because if they reject my application, i'll be waiting again for the next 6-8 months for reapplication. This might be my 2nd time to apply to Tribal Fusion. The first time, i got rejected is because i dont meet the 500K unique visitors /month. As of today, I am hitting the minimum unique visitors per month. I just need to be sure and very careful. please understand... Can somebody shed some light here?


Where does the HTTP referer "applewebdata" come from?

My site uses a web stat service like Google Analytics, it uses a piece of javascript code to log what pages the visitor has visited and the refer url of each visit. I got some referer "applewebdata", wonder where is those visitors from?


Root Domain Redirects Incorrectly To Https instead of to WWW

Why do visits to my website work without "www", but not to specific pages on it? I recently moved my website to a new webhost, RedHat's OpenShift (a PAAS). It requires using Cname records to setup custom domains, something my domain name registar (1&1) does not support without a hosting plan. So instead I setup Cloudflare in-between my domain and web host, and setup a Cname record on it. I then pointed a 1&1 "www" sub-domain to CloudFlare, and then pointed my 1&1 root to "www" sub-domain. This works fine for visiting to my homepage, but for some reason it does not work when visiting a specific page without "www". Instead of adding "www", it goes to HTTPS, which is strange.


Safari HTML for Planck Constant/Reduced Planck Constant

I want to display the symbols commonly known as h and h-bar. This is for Safari and iOS. What do I enter into my html? If there is a table of such things somewhere, a reference to it would be great. Thanks!


Is the W3 standard a major factor when google decides SERP position?

I have a dynamic php website which index only has around 800 errors according to the w3 validator online. I have tried checking major websites like ebay, stackoverflow and others also, all with around 400 errors. So my first thought is, what good is that validator when it always displays errors? Secondly, will the errors affect my SERP ranking? ie, will me fixing these errors as good as I can increase my Google search position? Thanks


Wordpress website with slow response (only for the first request)

I've a weird issue with my wordpress website ( http://rohitnair.info/) . The "first request" takes ages to respond. Any subsequent requests behave normally. Things I've observed while debugging   * Clearing the browser cache and reloading works fine and the page loads fast enough   * Clearing the cookies and reloading reproduces the issue. I thus define "first request" in this context as a request with no cookies set for the domain. Another easy way to reproduce this issue is to use curl and not send any cookies. This is the output of curl -v               $ time curl -v rohitnair.info     * About to connect() to rohitnair.info port 80 (#0)     * Trying 23.21.171.95... connected     * Connected to rohitnair.info (23.21.171.95) port 80 (#0)     > GET / HTTP/1.1     > User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (i386-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.7 NSS/3.12.9.0 zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.2.2     > Host: rohitnair.info     > Accept: */*     >       **long wait** [response]               * Connection #0 to host rohitnair.info left intact     * Closing connection #0          real    1m0.518s     user    0m0.003s     sys 0m0.011s      As can be seen, the server takes more than a minute to return the response. The stack is wordpress + nginx and hosted on Amazon EC2. I've also noticed that the request does not show up in the nginx access log till the response is served or the request is cancelled (not sure if this is expected behavior) I'm completely lost as to what could be causing this issue. Any help would be much appreciated!


Google keeps indexing /comment/reply URL

With the new update of Google algorithm called Penguin, I think my site was being penalized due to webspam. But of course I don't create post which seems to be spam to Google. It is just I think how Google index my site. I found out that Google index the URL of my site like: http://www.example.com/comment/reply/3866/26556 So there are so many comment/reply URL index by Google. I have already added: Disallow: /comment/reply/ Disallow: /?q=comment/reply/ but still Google still index this URL. Any idea how to prevent Google from indexing comments?


Redirecting broken links (from external site)

In webmaster tools we found that a bunch of sites are linking to non existent pages on our site. So far I can see 50,000+ links. Is there any downside to redirecting all of these broken links to a working page?


Migrate content to new domain without 301 redirects

I have a domain name http://extreme-java.com purchased from one.com and pointing to my web hosting account at anhosting.com I want to move the content of this website to http://somenewdomain.com registered at godaddy.com by making the new domain point to the same web hosting account. Just planning to close the extreme-java domain as it has got a lot of spam backlinks. As per google guidelines about migrating content, they suggest 301 redirects from current domain to get the juice but is it necessary to use 301 redirect in my case as I simply want to dump the extreme-java domain Pls advise.


Getting around US law

Let's suppose that someone is interested in starting a website that might be in violation of some US laws (such as copyright, gambling, pornography, etc.). I know this question isn't in the best taste, so I can understand if it is closed or deleted. Please consider, however, that not everything against US law is considered immoral or unethical to some people. I was reading how many online poker services are based in the Cayman Islands to get around US law. Are there other countries with good hosting services to avoid prosecution by US law? Many laws enforceable in the US are also enforceable in many other jurisdictions (copyright for one), so it would be interesting to know if there are safe havens for sensitive websites.


Why is Verisign spidering my website?

In my logs, I keep noticing that `69.58.178.57`, which is Verisign, is spidering through every page on my website, excluding pages of forms. Does anybody know why they are doing this?


Make my website dynamically loaded data available to Facebook Open Graph Object Scrapper

Here is the design of my web site:   1. The user enter `myWebsite.com/a/1`   2. .htaccess rules redirect to `myWebsite.com/b`   3. Now the JavaScript ExtJS library is loading.   4. Extracting the value from the URL (in this case it is “1”)   5. Loading `./xml/1.xml`   6. From `1.xml` setting the Open Graph data (Title, type, image, etc)   7. Loading data that will be shown to the user from `1.xml` into the website. My question is: How can I make the Open Graph data available to Facebook? Facebook do not to load my ExtJS JavaScript Library before extracting the Open Graph Object values from the HTML. Is there an easy solution to this problem? The only solutions I found is to make statics web pages or dynamically pages rendered on the server side but I would like to avoid these since my web page implementation is already finished and I would like to avoid re working on it.


Page Speed Performance (shown in Google AdSense) on Blogspot Dynamic Template

In Google AdSense, the Scorecard complains the **Page Speed Performance** of Google Blogger is not good ( marked as Red ). Note: In my Blogger site, I'm using Dynamic Template. Is there anything I can do to improve the speed ? or it is a false alarm ?


How to add a link to the users sandbox as on Wikipedia?

The page MediaWiki:Sidebar allows you to change/add to the menu on the left. So how to add or change items in the menu at the top, (is there a MediaWiki:Topbar page)? Specifically, how to add a link to the users sandbox as on Wikipedia?


Is the google +1 button domain dependent or url dependent? Ie: If exampledomain.com has a +1 count of 20, will exampledomain.com/anotherpage also have a count of 20 ?


How do you get a user base like Yelp did?

I am working on a website that will be community driven by user generated content. I need people to write reviews and their experiences in similar way as Yelp. What's the best way to offer them value to get and how did Yelp get their initial user base when they started out?


How do I monitor if SEO tags on my site changed during active development?

I work for a website that undergoes active development, with many production pushes per day. We are heavily SEO-dependent, and as our pages are being changed frequently by devs, we're always worried that an accidental change occurs to our page markup that negatively impacts SEO. Are there tools out there that monitor this (changes to SEO-related markup), and notify you if a change occurs?


Is content inside a <noscript> tag indexed by search indexes?

Is content inside a `<noscript>` (HTML4, HTML5) tag indexed by search engines? ( _Inspired bythis question_)


Converting web.config from IIS6 to IIS7 format

I'm a bit stuck, kinda been lumbered with a website developed over a year ago. The company that designed it and the company that own it dont now speak so I have been lumbered with trying to get it to work. Bought the web space and have loaded it on to one of our sub domains while I get it working. Problem is that the Hosting provider is running ISS7 and the _web.config_ was designed in IIS6 so am getting an error500 cause the tags are wrong. Could anyone give me some pointers on how to migrate the current web.config file over to IIS7.


How to block malicious requests before they reach Apache?

I have a RESTful web service that gets hit by a large number of requests coming from various IPs with dummy logins and random inputs. I have already denied these requests at the HTTP level (using the Apache config file) so they get a 403 response. However, it's still an annoyance seeing them pop up in the Apache log file, and they also consume some resources. Is it possible to drop the packets completely? Do I have to do this using iptables? What other ways are there to alleviate this issue?


Preventing adult content in a forum

I'm working on a forum that allows images attached to the posts and **doesn't require registration**. Thing is, I'd like to provide a work-safe navigation option in which the posts with porn images attached aren't shown. The ideas I've come up with are:   * Making the work-safe option the default and treating _all_ posts with images attached as pornographic, and making them visible only if the user "unchecks" it.   * Making all posts with images attached not work-safe by default and   changing their status to work-safe _only after a moderator approved_   it. Only then they would be visible if the user has the "work-safe" option checked. Does anyone else have an idea? Also, how the big web services deal with this? (YouTube, CraigsList, even StackExchange). By the way, I don't think that "nudity detector" libraries are accurate and they give plenty of false positives and negatives. Thanks!


Geotargeting based SEO problem

I have a website and it redirects users to their corresponding U.S. states page if they are in the U.S. region. For example, if I am in New York and I go to the website the page automatically redirected me to `domainname.com/newyork`. If I am from India, it opens the home page and asks me to select the state. So for `domainname.com`, if I search for this website on Google, it shows `domainname.com/california` as a home page. How can I rectify this? I want `domainname.com` as the home page for search engines.


Forum vs Q&A system

I would like to know what are the parameters that I have to take into consideration before deciding whether I should incorporate to a website a "Q&A system" or a traditional forum ? I think forums allow better search capabilities (you can easily dig out old posts) over the "Q&A system", but the latter offer simpler / faster interaction between the users and the site owners. I should add that only a few people (site owners + authorized people) could answer the questions, the user will be on a read-only basis. Anyone can help me decide between the two solutions ? Thank you in advance NB: There is also the impact on the SEOs, are they the same for forums and Q&A systems?