Page Rank not showing correctly everywhere?

Okay, so I checked the page rank again, and http://www.namhost.com's page rank is now 4. But I get this warning:               Google Pagerank for: http://www.namhost.com  4/10     Pagerank is valid!     Attention! This domain has a very little quality backlinks and you run the risk of the domain losing it's page rank on the next Google pagerank update!      I used: http://www.checkpagerank.net I then used a few other checkers: http://www.whatsmypagerank.com/pagerank- checker.php This one found my page rank to be zero. So my questions are   1. which one is correct?   2. why are they different?   3. should I attempt get rid of the +- 40 000 BAD backlinks I have, or should I focus my efforts on getting 40 000 GOOD backlinks ? i.e. Will the good backlinks trump the badlinks (copyright pending)?


Does displaying rss feeds in different blogs help get indexed and increase page rank?

I have a number of blogs that I run. One of them is old and gets good traffic so what I did is that I have placed the rss of all of the blogs onto the sidebar of each. I was wondering if this is good for SEO in terms of getting indexed faster and getting more page rank as my page rank of the old blog will flow through them into the new ones. Please help out. Thanks


Redirect a URL to another URL with IIS 7.5

I have no idea why this isn't working. I've tried creating map rules and then rewriting and redirecting the URL. I've tried just redirecting it with a simple rewrite rule and no matter what, the only time I can get it to work is if I set the match URL to match this regex `.*`. I'm trying to redirect `webmail.example.com` to `mail.example.com`. Seemed like it would have taken but a couple seconds; boy was I wrong. I'm thinking I must be doing something wrong with the regex, but I'm not sure what as when I test it it seems to work fine.                           <rule name="webmail" patternSyntax="ECMAScript" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url=".*webmail.*" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="https://mail.example.com:8000" appendQueryString="false" logRewrittenUrl="true" />                 </rule>


Looking to create a website ... need assistance on what technologies to use!

First off, My group and I don't have any experience with databases or anything of that sort, only programming (not web-programming), so this post is just me wondering what things I should start researching and possibly some referral to a hosting company. The abstract idea is to have a list of things, each categorized, and each item with user-submitted reviews (made by users who are signed up with the website). Would absolutely everything be stored on a SQL database? (the long text reviews for example) Does anyone have any suggestions on some 'web frameworks' we could use to jumpstart us? What should our absolute first step be? (I was thinking about first designing the basic database? so we have something to work around...?) Should we worry about which host we choose right now, any recommendations? (would it be a trivial task to switch hosts in the future?) Thanks again, any help is appreciated!


How to display a directory without looking like spam

I need to list every city in a state (for instance, California), along with a huge list of automotive dealers per city. How do I do this on one page without looking like a link farm/spam page to end users?


PDF conversion on website using ASP.NET platform

I want to give users an option to download the web page of my website they are currently viewing. I have searched and found 3rd party windows software which convert the pages, but I am looking for an app that I can have on my website. I am using C# on a ASP.NET platform.


Schema.org Microdata appears in testing tool, but does not appear in Google

I have created a simple test page to test Schema.org Microdata. See here When tested in Google's Structured Data Testing Tool it appears as it should, displaying the address and job title below the green url in the search result. See here Now when I test this in Google, the address and job title are not displayed and it's as if the Microdata is not there at all. Has anyone else experienced this issue?


Risk of Plaintext Email Addresses on Websites

What are the risks of putting a personal email address (Gmail, in case it matters) on a personal website? A glance around any forum will show many people using "address [at] domain.com" instead of simply writing the address out, but it would seem to me that nearly any scraper would be able to detect and counter that tactic. What are the risks of simply putting an email, in plaintext, on a webpage (spam, phishing, etc.) and how likely/realistic are they? Are there any methods to prevent those risks?


I'm seeing a lot of a new format for title elements for major sites: a few tags, and only then the title of the site itself, is this now optimal SEO?

I'm seeing a lot of sites go to a format similar to the one now in use by stackexchange sites (i.e. short topic - maybe a long topic - only finally the site's name). Is this optimal SEO? It seems kind weird both because I'm only begun to notice changes in this direction recently, and because it seems like it would make it harder to tell in search results which actual site you're visiting, even if the topic is one that matches. Still, sites like Facebook, StackOverflow, etc probably aren't wrong, so I'm wondering if I should try to make my sites use that format, going forwards... **Edit:** Found a more-fleshed-out duplicate: Does the order of keywords matter in a page title?


UI library for website layout designing

Is there any UI library for website layout designing like form elements, banners place holders, scroll bars etc...


Challenge a .name registration?

The Wikipedia page on .name says the following: > **Registration restrictions:** No prior restriction on registration, but > registrations can be challenged if not by or on behalf of individual with > name similar to that of domain, or fictional character in which registrant > has rights But there's no further info on how this actually works. Can a .name domain registration be challenged, and if so, how?


Working with Google Webmaster API

I'm just start working with Google webmaster API. I have a need to mark a site for removal and found nothing of doing that. How do I do that?


iPhone site optimization: Custom viewport size

I've got a site that should max out a 575px on the iphone and wanted to know what the best method is for defaulting the viewport to this size. Currently I am using this meta tag: `<meta name="viewport" content="width=575; user-scalable=no;">` This displays some odd behavior in that it loads fully zoomed out and then, once the page is loaded, zooms in to 575. What are the best methods to ensure that my site will surely display at 575px wide in mobile browsers?


Wordpress Multisite (Subfolders) - Google Analytics Tracking

I have a Wordpress multisite subfolder instance that I would like to track via Google Analytics. I guess optimally this would be a plugin which I could track each site in two places   1. The Main Tracking Code which totals all traffic from the Multisite instance   2. The Individual Site tracking code to see how each site specifically is doing. I think this plugin would have worked for me if I had a subdomain multisite instance: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-multisite- async/installation/ I know I can manually place the dual tracking code (http://www.markinns.com/articles/full/adding_two_google_analytics_accounts_to_one_page) but that would involve editing a theme and I have multiple sites using TwentyEleven template. I don't think I can edit the theme and not have it wreak havoc on the rest of the sites using TwentyEleven. So has anyone done this? Is there a a technique I'm missing? Is there a plugin available to do this in Multisite Subfolder installations? Is there a way to manually insert GA codes into themes which are used by multiple sites? Any insight is appreciated.


Is It Possible To Find Shortened URL Versions of a Long URL?

I'm wondering if I have a URL like: www.watermintstudios.com and I want to know if anyone else has made use of a bit.ly, goo.gl or other such URL shortening service to point to that URL is there a way to find out?


Significant number of non-HTTP requests hitting my site

I'm seeing a significant number of non-HTTP requests hitting a site I just launched. They show up in the server (nginx) logs as non-ASCII and get rejected (correctly) with a 400 status. Here are some lines from the log:               95.132.198.189 - - [09/Jan/2011:13:53:30 -0500] "œ$A\x10õœ²É9J" 400 173 "-" "-"     79.100.145.126 - - [09/Jan/2011:13:57:42 -0500] "#§i²¸oYi á¹„\x13VJ—x·—œ\x04N \x1DÔvbÛè½\x10§¬\x1E0œ_^¼+\x09ÜÅ\x08DÌÃiJeT€¿æ]œr\x1EëîyIÐ/ßýúê5Ç¸" 400 173 "-" "-"     79.100.145.126 - - [09/Jan/2011:13:58:33 -0500] "¯Ú%ø=Œ›D@\x12î½‰¼\x1C†ÄÀe\x015mˆàd˜Û%pÛÿ" 400 173 "-" "-" What should I make of this? Is this some sort of scripted attack? Or could these be correct requests that have somehow been garbled? They're not affecting the performance of the site and I'm not seeing any other signs of attacks (e.g., no strange POSTs) so at this point I'm more curious than afraid.


HTML5 and facebook Graph API

In order to use the "og:" meta tag of Facebook Graph, I need to add the following to the tag:               xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"           xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/"           xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"      Since I am using HTML5 and not XHTML, do I still need to use the `xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"` part? Thanks, Danny


Webmaster Tools - Preferred Domain and Google entries

Our client has two websites with the same content:   * `example.com`   * `somethingelse.com` When a user searches in Google for "something else" the `example.com` site appears in the top 10 results on Google. What would happen if we switched the preferred domain in webmaster tools to `somethingelse.com`? Our client is hoping it will replace the "`example.com`" result with "`somethingelse.com`" but I assume this is not the case.


How can I detect links which point to domain squatters?

I know how to find dead links which go to 404 pages. However, these days not many links actually go dead, but instead they end up going to a domain squatter. I realise this is a tall order, but is there any way to find out whether a website is actually a domain squatter without actually going to each site with my browser and examining it to see if there is a picture of a girl with a rucksack etc.?


How to download an MP3 or ZIP file onto mobile devices

I want to be able to download digital goods to smartphone users (music in format .mp3 or .zip). But iPhone and iPad do not allow direct forced downloads. **How can I provide mobile users with digital downloads?** I use PHP. The only way I can think of to do this is to use the Dropbox Web API to transfer files to the user's Dropbox account, which then synchronizes with their mobile device. Any other suggestions would be appreciated.


How to connect to database on remote server

Where there is VPN to remote server and then access to the database via local network interface, **how can one establish a remote link between one's computer (with a programme such as Visual Studio 2010) and SQL Server (e.g. 2008 R2)** ? Any attempts to create a direct link to the SQL Server are blocked. Whilst the SQL Server _can_ be configured to allow external access, this provides its own host of problems. Any help would be much appreciated.


Modify and Intergrate a custom MP3 Player

This is a Flash MP3 Player I have found on internet, and I was looking for his .fla file so I can modify it and add some text on it. Do you know where I can get the source of this flash player. ![MP3 Player](http://i.stack.imgur.com/kFvrW.jpg)


What's the proper way to handle Allow and Disallow in robots.txt?

I run a fairly large-scale Web crawler. We try very hard to operate the crawler within accepted community standards, and that includes respecting robots.txt. We get very few complaints about the crawler, but when we do the majority are about our handling of robots.txt. Most often the Webmaster made a mistake in his robots.txt and we kindly point out the error. But periodically we run into grey areas that involve the handling of `Allow` and `Disallow`. The robots.txt page doesn't cover `Allow`. I've seen other pages, some of which say that crawlers use a "first matching" rule, and others that don't specify. That leads to some confusion. For example, Google's page about robots.txt used to have this example:               User-agent: Googlebot     Disallow: /folder1/     Allow: /folder1/myfile.html      Obviously, a "first matching" rule here wouldn't work because the crawler would see the `Disallow` and go away, never crawling the file that was specifically allowed. We're in the clear if we ignore all `Allow` lines, but then we might not crawl something that we're allowed to crawl. We'll miss things. We've had great success by checking `Allow` first, and then checking `Disallow`, the idea being that `Allow` was intended to be more specific than `Disallow`. That's because, by default (i.e. in the absence of instructions to the contrary), all access is allowed. But then we run across something like this:               User-agent: *     Disallow: /norobots/     Allow: /      The intent here is obvious, but that `Allow: /` will cause a bot that checks `Allow` first to think it can crawl anything on the site. Even that can be worked around in this case. We can compare the matching `Allow` with the matching `Disallow` and determine that we're not allowed to crawl anything in /norobots/. But that breaks down in the face of wildcards:               User-agent: *     Disallow: /norobots/     Allow: /*.html$      The question, then, is the bot allowed to crawl `/norobots/index.html`? The "first matching" rule eliminates all ambiguity, but I often see sites that show something like the old Google example, putting the more specific `Allow` _after_ the `Disallow`. That syntax requires more processing by the bot and leads to ambiguities that can't be resolved. My question, then, is what's the right way to do things? What do Webmasters expect from a well-behaved bot when it comes to robots.txt handling?


What is the BCSI-CS-**** cookie for?

I'm undertaking an audit of the cookies we use on our external sites. There's one cookie that's used by all the sites, and by different domains within the sites. It starts BCSI-CS- and has random numbers and letters. It's the same cookie on different PCs on our network. Our own sites use it and Bing Maps, Google Analytics and Google Maps on our sites use it. This cookie does not seem to appear on PCs not on our network. We've figured that it's a cookie that our proxy server uses and therefore only an internal cookie, not one that our external site users will encounter. However, googling that cookie shows a lot of sites have listed a similar cookie in their "About our cookies" page with the same BCSI-CS prefix. Would we be right in thinking that these sites have got it wrong, that they don't have to list this cookie? After all, when I visit these sites, the cookie that they have listed does not appear on my PC. Can anyone confirm this, or explain what the BCSI-CS cookie actually is?


In search of open source alternative to Sharepoint

Looking for suggestions on a platform whether paid or open-source that would provide a intranet-like solution for document sharing, blog, events posting, etc. Google Apps/Doc is not an option, needs to look somewhat professional and hosted on our domain. Any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.


Remove a site in upstream sites in Alexa

Alexa has a list that's called upstream sites ("Which sites did people visit immediately before this site?"). Does anybody know how remove a site from this list?


How to configure DNS for hosting a domain with 000webhost.com when purchased from whois.com?

I purchased a domain from `whois.com` (`juleex.com`) and I'm trying to host it on `000webhost.com` because I'm just learning and don't need tons of anything. I changed the name servers to:   * `ns01.000webhost.com`   * `ns02.000webhost.com` From:   * `ns1.whois.com`   * `ns2.whois.com`   * `ns3.whois.com`   * `ns4.whois.com` However now when I scroll to the DNS management section of the myaccount part of `whois.com` it says "your DNS management service is not configured correctly. To use this service, you must first configure your domain name to use our name servers." With what I changed it to in red and what was there in green with a button that reads "fix server names automatically". I'm so confused, I thought that's how you point a domain to the hosting services.


Drupal - after installation the website invisible

I just installed Drupal. But after installation I can't see my installed site. Upon visiting the URL `http://localhost/drupal-7.0/` in my browser I do not get the web page as expected but see files and directories similar to FTP file browsing. Can someone explain what I have done wrong?


Dreamweaver document settings

Is there a way to change document settings in Dreamweaver like changing document background to black and plain text to white? I prefer a dark background when reading code like the snippets here. Any suggestions?


How to remove %2F from the URL?

My Technorati URL shows as `http://technorati.com/blogs/www.financewalk.com%2F`. How to remove `%2F` from the above URL so that it'll start working.


Pointing a subdomain to Github Pages

I set up an Octopress blog on Github Pages at myusername.github.com. I now want blog.myusername.me (which currently has a Wordpress blog set up) to point to this Octopress blog. So I followed the instructions here on setting up a custom domain:   * I ran `echo 'blog.myusername.me' >> source/CNAME` in my Octopress repository, and then ran `rake generate` and `rake deploy` to deploy it to Github.   * I went to Namecheap, and added a new CNAME under my myusername.me domain: "blog -> myusername.github.com -> CNAME".   * Waited a couple hours. However, now when I go to myusername.github.com, it redirects me to blog.myusername.me (which is my old Wordpress blog), which seems like the inverse of what I want. (Going to blog.myusername.me directly still shows my Wordpress blog.) I checked http://www.whatsmydns.net/#CNAME/blog.myusername.me and it seems like my DNS has propagated (myusername.github.com shows up in the right-hand side). Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?


Are there security considerations with choosing shared vs VPS vs dedicated hosting

Are there security disadvantages to using a shared hosting environment instead of a VPS or dedicated server? Could using a shared server or a VPS be considered negligence in the event of a security breach on a client's software? For example, on some shared hosting I can see all the databases on the same server instance as me. I do not have permissions to access them, but I see their names in SSMS. Could a more experienced SQL Server admin use that as a good attack vector on my site that they would not have if I was using a VPS or dedicated server?


Will Google relate keywords to those listed?

Our company offers service in all of the surrounding areas but I don't want to "keyword hoard" so I can't list each location and each type of service offered there in the meta keywords. But, we do have our locations and service areas listed on the actual pages. So then if I were to list our services only in the meta area, would Google/SE automatically relate them to the locations shown on the page? If not, what is the best strategy in covering these geographic areas with a list of our keywords without being penalized for listing out every location attached to every keyword we want to rank for?


Which search engines prefer an HTML sitemap over an XML sitemap?

Is there a search engine out there that prefers a full HTML sitemap over an XML one? On a site with thousands of articles, does it make sense to include a page that has links to every single page?


Redirect to an affiliate using PHP or JavaScript redirect?

I was asked to introduce a unified self hosted URL- Shortener/Forwarder/Tracking Service for an website that earns money from affiliates. One example I found was one of the bigger german sites for bargains. (mydealz) So I had a look at their way of doing it, and I was quite surprised. From my point of view, the only sensible way to do the forwarding and tracking is using a PHP header redirect, if 301 or 302 in my eyes is mainly a question wether you want to double track double links or not. But they do the forward using a small page using javascript `window.location.href`. But why? ![Screenshot MyDealz forwarder](http://i.stack.imgur.com/JSSbA.png) Is there any advantage that I don't see? Are there any disadvantages of the PHP redirect? As far I as tested no referer are lost while using header redirect. Thanks in advance for your help.


Google Webmasters structured data errors

I recently updated a wordpress blog to my own domain and have been moving everything over and coming to grips with making the site look half decent. When I run the domain through Google's Webmaster structured data, I get multiple errors. in fact, an error for every single item!!! Every error seems to have the same problem- **missing Author** and **missing Updated.** And mentions something to do with Hentry? I googled that to try and figure it out,but it pretty much made my head explode!! FYI I know nothing about CSS etc.And I know I'm a bit over my head with it all, but I think it's too late to turn back to the regular wordpress account now. ugh. So, are these errors important? and... how do I fix them?!


Web form losing POST values in a proxy environment

I have an ASP.NET form (a login page), when I POST the values to the server (windows, IIS 6), the request passes through a proxy and the POST pareameters end up getting lost and ultimately the page just refreshes as there are no POST parameters. The thing is that this is not a constant issue as sometimes you can log in fine and generally if you clear your browser temp files it then works ok. I ran Fiddler to check what's going on and basically I'm getting:   * A regular POST request containing session id, POST data etc. The response (HTTP 407) contains a Proxy-Authenticate: Negotiate and Proxy-Support: Session-Based-Authentication header.   * The next request to the server contains a Proxy-Authorization: Negotiate header containing a long string (base64 i think). This request does NOT contain the POST values. The response is another 407 and actually now that i look at it Fiddler displays 'HTTP/1.1 407 Proxy Authentication Required ( Access is denied. )' as the header.   * Then there's a third request that contains the Proxy-Authorization header and returns 200 OK, but of course the POST values weren't sent Subsequent requests result in a HTTP/1.1 407 Proxy Authentication Required ( The ISA Server requires authorization to fulfill the request. Access to the Web Proxy filter is denied. ) response followed by a second successful but empty request. The client won't let me bypass the proxy as it's intermittent and all other pages in the application (that include plenty of web forms) work fine. Any ideas on what I can try?


Basic tracking of conversion from Adwords using referrer, is it possible? (both Ads in SERP and in Content Network)

Reading in AdWords Help it seems the only way to track clicks to my site from AdWords is to use the Google code snippet. If I don't want to use such snippet, and simply track the `referrer`, can we say that clicks coming from Google AdWords (either Ads in SERPs and Ads in Content Network) starts all with a certain url in the `referrer`? In other words, can we say:   * when `referrer` is `http://www.google.it/search...` or `http://www.google.it/url...` then it's coming from organic seacrh    * when `referrer` is `something else` ( **tell me what** ) then it's coming from and Ad of AdWords It would suffice for me to distinguish between who is coming form organic SERP and who is coming form click on Ad (I don't need to know which Ad or what keyword). Is there something (even if non-official) that analyzed this and you could suggest me to read?!


Is there any difference between a 'slideshow' and a 'carousel'?

Are Web "slideshows" and "carousels" the same thing? If not, what is the difference? For "Web slideshow" or "carousel", I mean HTML image galleries like:   * Flexslider by WooThemes   * Nivo Slider™   * Juicebox


Drupal to Wordpress migration scope for SEO

I'm migrating a drupal site to wordpress and I was wondering what the concerns are with respect to preserving google rank, etc. while assuming the page content is somewhat similar. I've set up 301 redirects, and created a new site map, but the surrounding html / menus, etc are different. Is this considered a concern and are there a best practice for this kind of migration?


Are more pages in one site better for SEO?

I developed a site nearly 2 years (PHP, JAVA), but I am a new SEOer. My database has almost 1M articles. I have some questions I need help with:   1. Is it as a good idea to create static pages from all the articles?    2. Are more pages in the one site better for SEO?    3. If I created each article into a static page, that could be many GBs. How do I let the search engine crawler collect my database?


check when a page was first seen by google

Is there a way to see when a page was first published, by checking when it was first cached by Google (obviously its not 100% fool proof because there is a couple of days delay in some cases but it will give you a good idea.) The only other way I could think of checking it published date is if the page and post had a publicly viable time stamp on it, but in the case I'm looking for it, it doesn't have a publicly visible time stamp.


How to inspect if flash banner does not spread malware or is harmful to site visitors?

I would like to take a third party ad - flash banner on my site, I can place it as an iframe (to show a page with the banner, hosted on other domain), or I can host it myself. I have seen, when browsing other sites, that sometimes my antivirus/anti malware software blocks the ads for being harmful... I know that flash is quite shady thing as it is possible to use it for things of a dark side. **Is there a good way of checking if flash banner has vulnerabilities, security holes or ways for the owner of it to target visitors of a site and spread malware or harm their computers?** As I understand, if there is a 'hole' in it, the bad guy under control can target visitors just on a specific time, or for specific browsers, platforms, OS'es, mobiles, countries, etc.


Free web "caching" services for a web service

I have a web service on Google App engine whose data is updated on a daily basis. To minimize bandwidth utilization from mobile clients connecting to it, I'd like to instead have an intermediary site where the clients will be getting their data from, and minimizing hits to my service to once or twice a day only. Is there such a service I can use? I'd like to explore this "pull" option first, before considering "push" options such as publishing to a blog site or a free website host that doesn't have bandwidth caps.


Using Local Network Users in MacOS X to customise access to webpages

Is it possible to use Mac OS local network users in a web application to be able to show/hide some pages according to users privileges?


why google ignore my links page?

I have a website, where I'm loading all the data via AJAX. Since Google doesn't work with AJAX and the ways to make it AJAX-friendly are a bit odd, I thought that by creating a links page, where it links, from server side, to all the links that I'm loading in AJAX - will solve the problem. But unfortunately, that doesn't seem to work. Google Webmaster Tools shows that even though my links page discovered, the content of it - the links - are totally ignored. I can only assume that google tend to ignore links in such pages. my question is - WHY?! and furthermore, how to overcome this.


Is repeated keywords in alt attributes considered keyword stuffing?

For example, I have 100 images in one page, all of them with `alt` attributes in this format:               alt="foo pics", alt="bar pics", alt="foobar pics", etc      Will `pics` be considered as stuffing?


I'm a Drupal fan - should I use Ubercart or learn a new eCommerce package?

I'm a big Drupal fan which is why Ubercart is the obvious choice for me when it comes to eCommerce. I've made a couple of Ubercart sites and I haven't been massively impressed. Ubercart doesn't seem very powerful. When you need extensive business logic, it can be hard to theme and has JavaScript reliance. Admittedly I've only played with others like Magento and Zencart, but Ubercart doesn't seem to lead in its field the way Drupal does. I'm reluctant to learn a new eCommerce package due to the time required, but the JavaScript reliance alone makes me wonder if I have to.


How to Track Visitors Comming from Adwords and Disable form fields that is not on landing page

There is a lead form on my website where we track from which source visitors have arrived. I wanted to disable the drop down and auto populate it with predefined data if the visitor is from adwords. This form is not on the landing page. Is there a way I could do that by reading cookie or any other way.


How can I set my robots.txt file to let bots not crawl certain folders in root directory?

I have a small website with about 20 pages with .html extensions, containing unique articles I wrote consisting of about 1000 words or more. These 20 pages are the main feature of my site. **Root Directory** My root directory is structured in such a way that all 20 pages of my HTML files are in the root directory, not contained in any folder. I also have a forum installed on my website, and a PHP/jQuery poll plugin which is kept in the root directory in their two respective folders and this is where the problem comes in **My Problem - Question 1** I mentioned earlier I only have 20 HTML files which makes up my site. However, when I do a scan of my site to generate a site map more than 70 pages shows up, yet only 20 of those 70+ pages are my own original pages I want crawled and indexed. The other 50+ files contained in the PHP poll folders and PHP forum folders are all source code files and not unique and do not contain any real content. **Should I or can I block Google from scanning those two folders containing the poll and forum files? If yes, how would I do this in my robots.txt file?** **Question 2** If I have these poll and forum folders in my root directory, and a scan of my site shows 70+ files but only 20 pages of those are my own would it have any effect on my SEO? I have purchased GoDaddy SEO visibility service with my hosting, a crappy but basic product service. When I started my site and only had those 20 HTML files, I got a SEO score of 85+ after installing my forum and poll and re- evaluating my sites SEO score the pages increased to 70+ and my SEO score dropped from 85+ to the mid 50s. I realize these tools are not always accurate but it did prickle my curiosity, leading me to ask this question. I would also like to add that my forum is rather empty at this stage, but I do enjoy the poll plugin. **Conclusion** So what should I do:   * Block robots.txt from scanning those folders if so how?   * Should I just remove the forum and poll folder?   * Should I not worry about it, and accept products giving you a SEO score is crap?


How to remove Ever crawled web Pages by Google

I know that we can use noindex, nofollow and robots for excluding the pages from Google Index. This process takes a long long time to clean up website from Google Index. In Webmaster Tools => Index Status => Advanced => Ever crawled, How can I remove the Ever Crawled Pages by Google.


Custom eCommerce tracking

I am selling different software on my website and am offering a 30 days free trial. Is there someway that I can track the trial in Google Analytics? (And maybe, after the 30 days run out if they do not order remove them from the GA data?) What would be your recommended solution here?


rel="nofollow" SEO impact

I saw a technique used where there was a block with three parts:   1. Image (wrapped in an anchor tag)   2. Heading (anchor tag with heading text)   3. Paragraph (regular p tag with synopsis content)                 e.g.
          Good SEO Heading
Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Vestibulum tortor quam, feugiat vitae, ultricies eget, tempor sit amet, ante. Donec eu...

 With the image tag there was a `rel="nofollow"` on the wrapped anchor tag. So the idea is that the users still has the ability to click the image and go to the details page, but the image link does not rank. When users click on the heading text, that is only what ranks for that specific page. Q: Is this the correct approach? Does this even do anything? What is the best practice?


Cleanup incorrectly indexed subdomains due to wildcard DNS

I have site `www.example.com` which someone previously configured with wildcard DNS records and with no 301 redirects. As you may have expected, Google's index is now full of garbage like `w.example.com`, `pop.example.com`, `ns1.example.com`, `foobar.example.com`, etc. All of the indexed subdomains are almost exact copies of the main domain, duplicating every content from the latter one. I've set up 301 redirects if requests come from everything except `www.example.com`, but seems that it is not enough because after almost three months since the redirects where set up, all the incorrect subdomains still pile up on Google's index. So the question is: what could I do to speed up this cleanup process? I have heard of sitemap assisted redirects, but some people suggest that this approach is not viable, since Webmaster Tools may reject sitemaps containing URL's causing redirects.


what are good UI ways for editing xml files in web pages?

I have an xml file which contain a lot fields and sub fields, I am not sure yet, but around 100 or 200 of fields.   Fields value types may need true/false , others need drop down to select from, and others free text and some just numeric values. My questions is:   From the user and usability point of view, what will be the best UI to let users manipulate this xml file from a webpage. Also if you know samples to show me this will be good as well, I don't want code I just want to know how it should look like based on your experience.


How to find out if my hosting's speed is good enough?

There are lots of different online performance tests:   * Google PageSpeed Insights   * iWebTool Speed Test   * AlertFox Page Load Time   * WebPageTest Also there are several desktop/client software such as:   * ping tool   * YSlow   * Firebug's Net console   * Fiddler   * Http Watch I just want to decide if my hosting provider has a good enough performance or if I need to switch my hosting to another provider. So, which tool should I use to compare my hosting provider with other hosting providers?


At what thresh-hold should i get my blog its own domain?

Is there some kind of thresh-hold to start seriously considering buying a domain and moving away from the [name].[blogspot,etc].com? In this case I have a blog that focuses on personal miscellany (food, politics, etc); get about 110 visits, 350 pageviews, 3.6% bounce per month; have had that for a few months now; and am looking to grow. I'd like to buy my TLD since it's available, but am also wondering if switching to the TLD would drop/obfuscate traffic. (If it matters, it's on `[name].squarespace.com` currently.) Thanks


How to secure robots.txt file?

I would like for User-agents to index my relative pages only without accessing any directory on my server. As initial thought, i had this version in mind:               User-agent: *     Disallow: */*          Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml      **My Questions:**   1. Is it correct to block all directories like that - `Disallow: */*`?    2. Would still search engines be able to see and index my sitemap if i disallowed all directories?    3. What are the best practices for securing the robots.txt file? **For Reference:** Here is a good tutorial for robots.txt               #Add this if you want to stop Alexa from indexing your site.     User-agent: ia_archiver     Disallow: /          #Add this to stop duggmirror      User-agent: duggmirror     Disallow: /          #Add this to allow specific agents      User-agent: Googlebot     Disallow:           #Add this to allow all agents while blocking specific directories     User-agent:  *     Disallow: /cgi-bin/     Disallow: /*?*


How to integrate premium responsive html template to umbraco? I have been wondering, that whether there is any kind of set of standards OR Any additional code to integrate my premium html web template to umbraco cms?


How do I reconcile my Google Analytics numbers with my Squarespace analytics?

According to Squarespace, in the last month I got Page Views 259, Unique Visitors 172, and Robot Hits 1,965. According to Google Analytics it was more like 346 page views, and 97 Uniques (no data on robots). I currently have filters for self traffic (exclude home/work) on both analytics. How do I go about reconciling the two, or believing either one?Here is a link to the exported analytics; sorry pdf


Facebook Share Button and Counter no longer displaying any Count

Is it just me or did the Facebook Share button that displays the count of shares and likes just stop working over the past few days? The sharing still works, the count of shares no longer displays. The link that is generated look like this http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u= and the JavaScript file on my page is this http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share I haven't changed anything and this has worked for years


Some easy way to abandon Blogger sites to get more control over things such as DNS?

I am fed up Blogger's misleading error reports. The issue looks like this simple here (a few text file settings) but Blogger requires me something impossible that some other blogger user preserving my domain should stop using my domain (apparently just one line to fix), totally impossible for me (I do not know the email of the preserver and I am tired to start up some official procedure against the other user). So I want some substitutes. If I export my Blogger XML content -- can I easily use it with independent hosting with my comp?I mean whether there are some service that can read the Blogger XML and I can install it to my server? Btw I think the "other user" is the old version of the site with different url that is now removed. I think the real problem is messed up DNS handling in Blogger. Any idea how I can privately contact blogger devs about the issue?


Recording audio from webpage?

I'm looking for a way to record audio from somebody on a page on my site - any recommendations? Sorry if I haven't expressed that very clearly - please edit if not! Ideally looking for a new startup who is doing it rather than a little plugin, but no big deal which! Thanks, much appreciated.


See last visited pages in Google Analytics

Is it possible to see which pages were visited when? I want to see which pages where visited most recently. Can't find a way to see this in Google Analytics.


how to promote a web app?

i'm quite surprized this hasn't been asked yet so for a given web app and a given set of potential users of this web app the goal would be to reach this set of potential users. how to achieve this?


Mod rewrite - redirecting url with certain parameter to new url

I need some help redirecting a url with particular parameter value to a new url. For example how can i redirect these two urls with id 123 and 345 to a new url? Redirect   * `http://testserver.xyz.com/abc/content/content.jsp?contentId=123`   * `http://testserver.xyz.com/abc/content/content.jsp?contentId=345` to   * `https://newpage.silkroad.com/`


removing robots.txt

Will removing robots.txt make the website 'searchable' again.   Curious if you had a robots.txt to avoid indexing, but changed your mind and wanted to get indexed.


isp that serves international customers . possible?

I do not know if it is possible to find an isp, maybe in america or asia, that provides services to international clients i.e clients outside their region, possibly in africa. i believe it is possible. can anyone help?


Moving from wordpress website

Is there an easy way to move a blog from wordpress website i.e. at               http://myblog.wordpress.com/      to my independent domain i.e               www.mywebsite.com


Weird referral traffic

> **Possible Duplicate:**   >  Strange incoming links appearing on site statistics I'm getting weird traffic from Japan, from a site called ime.nu   Why weird? because I'm not able to identify the link and also when going to their homepage link it just shows an Apache Test Page, while I'm seeing it is a pretty big site in analysis sites (Alexa Ranked 121 in JP) Can someone help me understand the mystery?


Restrict all robots except Googlebot and Yandexbot

I want to allow Googlebot access all my pages with crawl delay. Yandexbot access only `index.html`. Bingbot access `/tools` pages.   All other bots will not be accessed my pages. Is this _robots.txt_ suitable for this?               User-agent: Googlebot     Crawl-delay: 300          User-agent: Yandex     Allow: /index.html     Disallow: /          User-agent: bingbot     Allow: /tools     Disallow: /          User-agent: *     Disallow: /


Personal Domain Email Integration

i have a domain www.personal.pk with which i got my email... the company from which i got hosting from says the my email has following feature   * Email (pop3)    * IMAP Compatible    * WebMail   * Email Aliases (unlimited)   * Email Forwarding   * Catch All Email Address   * Auto Reply the thing is i am accessing my email and all the others email through Webmail using a service provided by the company called "HORDE"... when i open an mail account i can see the inbox of other by just changing slection of a **select(dropdown) box\list**.. meaning on user can see the email of others.. somebody told me the solution is integrate it with google and use the Gmails interface... HOW TO DO IT?


How do I get iFramed images to show up in RSS?

I switched to Skydrive for my image hosting recently, and after getting the page formatting the way it needed to be, I ran into an issue with my RSS feed. In particular, when I used `img src=` the image would show up in the feed. However, the images in iFrames do not. The iFrames are formatted perfectly for my margins and all I need to do is copy and paste an embed code. With the `img`, I will need to add all of the dimension code. Obviously I would like to continue using iFrames since they fit well and need little work, `img src` is a do-able but more involved solution (read: I don't want to have to tinker around in HTML if possible). Most of all I just want all the images on my page to show up in my reader: what are my options?


What CPM can we expect once we outgrow AdSense?

I've been advised that once a site reaches a certain level of traffic it's possible to get more lucrative ad providers on board that give better return than AdSense. For a reasonable sized ad above the fold (for example 728x90 or 160x600) what sort of CPM can we expect? What level of traffic do we need to achieve before we become attractive to these bigger fish? Thanks in advance for any insights you can share, Gavin


How do I create DNS records

My domain points to a rails app hosted on Heroku. Is it possible to have blog.mydomain.com point to a WordPress installation somewhere else, e.g. Dreamhost?


What's the maximum length of the meta keywords tag?

Could you please tell me that what is the maximum length for meta keywords?


Where to find twitter analytics data?

I cannot find twitter analytics data on ads.twitter.com On many articles is written that I just need to click the "Analytics" tab but I can't find it! ![enter image description here](http://i.stack.imgur.com/7CZzY.png)


dynamic website development help

I am wondering is there such thing as a WYSIWYG / graphical editor for PHP based website such as Drupal and Joomla? I am from the print world, working with code and database just driving me nuts! Thanks~ Jeno


Problems using PHP on a Plesk Windows dedicated server

I'm having a few issues with my dedicated Windows server that has a Plesk panel: 1.) I can't send e-mail via PHP's `mail()` function, it always returns the following error: > SMTP server response: 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable or > not local Which setting should I alter in order to enable sending mail? 2.) The `exec()` and `passthru()` PHP functions don't work; their outputs are blank even when I try to run simple commands such as `dir`. Is there an option that I can toggle in the control panel to enable this functionality?


Domain name explanations

I recently thought to myself why certain websites have very unique domain names. Is it possible for a website to have for example `www.aboutus.example.com` instead of `www.example.com/aboutus` ? Like for Stack Exchange, it has many different domain names? Is that what it's called? Domain names? For example:   * `http://android.stackexchange.com/`   * `http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/`   * `http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/` So if I want my website to have quite a few pages, can I actually create a website with   * `www.aboutus.example.com`   * `www.home.example.com`   * `www.contactus.example.com` What is this actually called and is it possible?


RDFa + microdata + xhtml5 - Ranking factors

My website a Legal Search Engine lawmirror.com and there are about 600k records available online. Currently using xHTML5 and on some pages Microdata tags. Same record appears many times on different keywords search. Google already crawled about 1000K pages but traffic is very low. Does using the RDFa, improve the ranking and traffic.


Optimizing large scale e-commerce sites

I have a few questions regarding optimizing large scale e-commerce sites with getting indexed. Over 1 million pages. Should you optimize images for e-stores with over 1 million product images? Should anything be automated for e-stores with over 1 million pages? What can be automated?


Open-source trouble ticket system

I would like to centralize the support of my many sites. I'm looking for a open source trouble ticket system which: 1) I can host it myself or it can be hosted by a third party (think Wordpress) 2) It has email aliases, so the real email addresses will not be disclosed to the support person Which system would you suggest me?


Making search engine crawl my site

I have a site with visitors from all over the world, and I'm trying to optimize indexed pages on search engines beside Google (he indexed most of my pages). I see that on Japan search engines I'm aware of (rakuten & ocnsearch.goo) I have about 15% of my pages indexed. On Baidu & Yahoo & Bing I have only ~0.5% although I've given them sitemaps weeks ago. How can I make other search engines crawl my site? Is there a list of sites I should submit site maps to? Any tips?


will my continuing to use EW4 become a handicap someday later?

I am using Expression Web 4 SP 2 for building my web site but Microsoft says they won't do any further development. I keep hearing about HTML5 and XHTML, etc. and sure sure if my continuing to use EW4 will become a handicap someday later? Please advise. Thanks.


Can Programming Websites Be Accepted for Google Adsense?

Are programming sites not getting Adsense approval? I have a site with few articles. I intend to write more, but i looked around on the net and found out that programming and coding sites are not being accepted anymore. Is this true?


SEO of <span> in <h1> header

Does the `<span>` element have any SEO side-effects? Are there any semantic preferences between the following two or parsing differences between search engines? ## Clean `<h1>`:
Search Optimised Heading
      ## vs `<span>` in `<h1>`:
Search Optimised Heading


URL not found after rewrite

Using this _.htaccess_ file:               Options +FollowSymLinks      Options +Indexes      RewriteEngine On           RewriteRule matches/(.*)-v-(.*) matches/matchevent.php?event=$1%20v%20$2 [R=301,L]      This url: `http://www.example.com/sport/league/matches/team1-v-team2` rewrites to: `http://www.example.com/sport/league/matches/matchevent.php?event=team1%20v%20team2` However, the browser returns this:               Not Found     The requested URL www.example.com/sport/league/matches/team1-v-team2 was not found on this server.      The _.htaccess_ file is inside the `matches` directory where `matchevent.php` is. I have also tried it in the `league` directory. Could someone help me?


How can I see the referring domain of visitors who's source is a campaign?

Using Google Analytics, we have a campaign that is tracked as CPC, and has several possible sources. The campaign is tagged (using utm_campaign, utm_source and utm_medium) and tracking correctly, as are all the sources. One of the sources sends us traffic from several domains, but I see no way to separate out the domains in my reports. So let's say the campaign is called "Stack Exchange" and the source could be 'Webmasters' or 'Web Applications'. If 'Webmasters' can send traffic from 'webmasters.stackexchange.com' or from 'www.stackexchange.com' - how can I see this info? If I go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns and click the campaign and then the source in question, the only thing that shows up under the 'Source/Medium' column is the name of the source (like 'Webmasters'). It is not the same as going into Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals, in this case the 'Source' column shows the domain, but campaign traffic is not included here. It seems like if a referrer is tagged as being part of a campaign and has a source, the source in the tag overrides the referring domain. Is there a way to get the domain as well?


Looking for free and reliable host for images

For this, I'm looking for a free and reliable host for images, where I can share the image with a direct link. Google Picasa is not a good option because it produces a very long direct link, any other suggestions?


How to calculate the actual count of downloads through bandwidth

I have a freeware hosted on my website, and use webalizer to track the traffic. I can get the data of my installation file from webalizer in section "Top 10 of 583 Total URLs By KBytes" (till Jan. 23):   * Hits: 21753 (6.45%)   * KBytes: 40150088 (91.27%) The size of installation file is 6564989 bytes, suppose it's 6565 Kbytes. Then the total downloads can be simply calculated as: 40150088 / 6565 = 6115, convert to weekly downloads will be 6115 / 23 (till Jan. 23) * 7 (days/week) = 1861. Now comes with my questions:   * Is the total downloads 6115 accurate here?   * What does the 21753 Hits mean? 2/3 of the hits failed or people using multi-thread download tools?


www in Sitemap URL's

I was under the impression that `www` was deprecated but a lot of the sitemap generators seem to rather I use it. I know that Google doesn't like if I mix the two, IE if the URL of the sitemap is `http://domain.com/sitemap.xml` and the internal links show `www.` etc. Can anyone enlighten me? Edit: Thanks for all the answers but I think I haven't been specific enough in the question, sorry; what I was trying to find out was why it seemed that the sitemap generators wanted me to put the `www` version in... I discovered from reading Dan Diplo's answer below that I was making a mistake in thinking that I could simply choose at the sitemap generator stage which was the canonical version - in my case anyway this had already been chosen (by me) at my server level and typing the other version into the generators was causing strange results. Thanks for the other informative answers too.


How Does One Make a Sitemap for a Flex Website?

I've got a Flex website and I'm not sure how to make a sitemap for it. For a standard HTML page, sitemaps are straight forward. As Flex sites use a "pageless" architecture, I'm not sure what I should do. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. UPDATE: As I understand it, Google doesn't look at anything after the # in a URL. So in a deeplinked Flex site, Google wouldn't see the second page-- where it reads view=12 in the sample sitemap below. Or does Google handle sitemaps differently? Should I go ahead and make a sitemap with all of the deeplinked URLS: http://brainpinata.com/#view=12, http://brainpinata.com/#view=4, etc.               <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>     <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">        <url>           <loc>http://www.brainpinata.com/</loc>           <lastmod>2010-12-01</lastmod>           <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>           <priority>1.0</priority>        </url>             <url>           <loc>http://brainpinata.com/#view=12</loc>           <lastmod>2010-12-01</lastmod>           <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>           <priority>1.0</priority>        </url>     </urlset>      Thank you. -Laxmidi


Need to redirect Wordpress category archives

I recently changed my Wordpress category structure a bit, changing some of the names and placing some under different parent categories. I don't use category name in my post URLs, so that's not a problem. But my category archive pages are indexed and have page rank I don't want to lose. So I need to redirect: "/category/old_cat_name" to "/category/new_cat_name".   Or in some cases to /new_cat_name/new_sub_cat. I gather that I can't do this though the WP Redirection plugin and that I have to modify my .htaccess. Can someone show me what lines to add there--or is there another better way to do this? Thanks.


Sitemap: Hierarchical layout possible?

Is it possible to design my sitemap hierarchically? My site is laid out hierarchically into               World=>Continent=>Country=>State=>City=>Articles       Can I design my sitemap xml like this? Is there a benefit?


Using Google Analytics to establish busiest time of day

I am trying to find a way to establish my sites busiest hour, but when using the "hour of the day" metric, each seems to have a date specific code, rather than just a number from 0-23, as I would expect. Any ideas how to obtain this info, or if I should be using a different service?


OpenSourec PHP and MySQL based POS application

I was looking OpenSource PHP and MySQL based POS(point of sail) web application. easy to use for users and flexible for customizing the future. Which alive project you recommend? Thanks,


Aligning Images in Tables and Lists

I am trying to layout a list vertically that has a checkbox, image and description.... see here for an example... http://www.sk8loc8.com/deposit/list.jpg As you can see the images look a bit too high and i would like them to 'sink' a little to line up with the text and checkbox. i put them in a table to get around the issue, but it acts just the same as an unordered list and the image sits higher. i tried using valign=top for the text and checkbox but this doesnt seem to work, neither does adding a bottom-margin to the text, or adding a top-margin to the image. does anyone have any advice? here is the markup...

                 <input type="checkbox" />	                 	                 Park

                 <input type="checkbox" />	                 	                 Recommended Park

                 <input type="checkbox" />	                 	                 Skate Shop

                 <input type="checkbox" />	                 	                 Unconfirmed Park

      and the old code, as an unordered list...

                         Park

                         Recommended Park

                         Skate Shop

                         Unconfirmed                         Park


Switching hosting from Google Apps to GoDaddy

I am in a pickle here. I just bought a hosting service from GoDaddy and I already have a domain registered with Google Apps. So I went into the domain control center from Google Apps and I changed the nameservers to point to GoDaddy's and then I deleted all the A records and also removed the www and main CNAME. Then I created an A record with host "@" which points to the IP address I got from GoDaddy (this is the server address I see under the category Server in the GoDaddy Hosting Control Center). Also, I see that in this domain center, the domain forwarding is set to forward to my address "www.domainsite.com". So right now when I go to my website I see the error "This website is temporarily unavailable, please try again later." Does anyone know how to set this up properly or know what problem I could be having? Thanks!


Download Link for Custom File Type

I have a client that wants to make their products firmware files available for download on their website. The firmware files have a custom extension: .bi2. The client wants the files to be downloaded directly and not placed in a container (like a .zip file). Is there an IIS setting that will instruct the browser to download the .bi2 file instead of trying to open it as a webpage? Thanks in advance for your help!


Is a Google Analytics view updated when a filter is removed?

Several months ago a filter was erroneously added to a view for an entire domain. E.g. The view for `example.com` was accidentally limited to `raresubdomain**\\\\.example.com`, so almost no data shows up since that day. I've just removed this filter, and data for the full domain is now showing up in the Real-Time section, but will the view of the past days be updated in response to my filter removal? If not, is there anyway to request an update, or access all that data my site was sending them?


What is a good way to get many inbound links to your site?

How do you get links to your site from other sites?


Greater PHP version required

I have bought a new hosting plan and trying to install WordPress from the beginning. I am new with the installer I am using now. The error I get is unusual for me and i cant manage this problem. Should I wait my host feedback or I could solve it by myself? ![enter image description here](http://i.stack.imgur.com/F5SG2.png) I think i need to update PHP version but I do not know HOW to...


Google Analytics: Why is Avg Time on Site lower than Avg time on Page?

I have the following Custom Report set up in Google Analytics: Metrics:   * Avg Time on Page   * Avg Time on Site Dimensions:   * Page So a report looks like this:               Page                    Avg Time on Page         Avg Time on Site     /an-article             00:03:14                 00:00:11     /another-article        00:05:11                 00:01:07     /something-written      00:03:00                 00:00:31      Why is it that for each 'page', the 'site views' are significantly lower?


Will changing only a few keywords avoid duplicate content penalties?

If I reuse the content of the website, for example if the content of my Website for the URL `www.mydomain.com/NewYork` is `The Best Brown Bread in New York`, then if someone opened my other example URL `www.mydomain.com/Chicago` its content should be `The Best Brown Bread in Chicago`. My content is mostly static but replaced by the last word in the URL, then for `www.mydomain.com/myword` the keyword is "myword" and the output for the content comes like `The Best Brown Bread in myword` So, in case of large text, replacing just one word or few words will work? Or will Google penalize me for this?


What is the definition of "Avergage Monthly Searches" in Keyword Planner

Is the number represented in Average Monthly Searches the number of searches for that specific keyword and the maximum amount of possible clicks to my site? It seems the answer is obviously yes, but I need to confirm this as the average searches for one of my keywords is 400 which, if the above is true, will not be sufficient and I'll have to find a better keyword. This keyword gives me a 7 PR, but does nothing for volume. As a starting website, is there a good (minimum) number of monthly searches for a specific keyword that I should be targeting, but that is not overly competitive?


Does PageRank flow to pages that are only listed in the sitemap.xml?

Let's say you have a small website that has a PR of 3. On top of that you have on the domain itself a blog that is not linked to the website. The blog along with its posts are however listed in the _sitemap.xml_. Because they are listed in the _sitemap.xml_ Google will index them. Do they however gain any PageRank as well?


the zen of adwords

I'm a hardcore developer gone freelance and I'm getting more and more requests for adwords from my clients. I've just started to read up on it, and of course I'm starting with wikipedia and have moved onto the main site now. I wanted to post here if anyone has some tips or some good blog entires that describe how it works. Strategy posts would be awesome. As always, thanks!


Infrastructure to effectively set up experiements and learn from them

My website is in the early stages of creating our first product, a place on the web, where one can ask lawyers questions at a fraction of their normal costs. I got inspired by this video, which is recommended by Jeff Atwood, which talks about getting feedback faster, which is the reason for this question. **The problem** Needless to say, we want our conversion rates to be as high as possible. Therefore, we want to be able to rapidly set up a new experiment where we change something on the site (like moving an image slightly, rewriting a sentence etc.). We then want to present the modified page to a random subset of the users. After that we will compare the conversion rates of the experiment with another version. I could very well imagine that we want to run 10-100 experiments simultaneously and it would be nice to have features, where experiments that obviously have worse results will be ended before schedule. **My question** Does infrastructure to support the whole process exist? A short description of our infrastructure... We use EC2 and PHP and have a script to automatically start up new instances with all needed software. Still, starting up a new server for every experiment, seems like a bit of overkill, so I am wondering what other options exist.


Request Removal of naked domain from Google Index

I have a site which was temporarily available at both `example.com` and `www.example.com`. All traffic to `example.com` is now redirected to `www.example.com`, however during the brief period that the site was available at the naked domain, Google indexed it. So Google now has two versions of every page indexed:               www.example.com     www.example.com/about_us     www.example.com/products/something          ...      and               example.com     example.com/about_us     example.com/products/something          ...      For obvious reasons, this is a bad situation, so how can I best resolve it? Should I request removal of these pages from the index? There is still content at these URLs, but they now redirect to the `www` subdomain equivalent. The site has many hundreds of pages, but the only way I can see to request removal is via the `Remove outdated content` screen in Webmaster Tools, one URL at a time. **How can I request removal of an entire domain (ie. the naked domain) without it effecting the true site located at the`www` subdomain? Is this the correct strategy given that all the naked domains now redirect to their `www` equivalent?**


How to improve WOT score of a site?

I don't understand why my site `Trustworthiness` and `Vendor Reliability` are considered bad by WOT. I do not have ADS, I never spammed my site around, I do not have links that point to untrusted sites. Is this an error? How can improve it and get back to green lights?


Official guides for pricing

very often we see on (other) forums the following wide question: **_how much should I charge for making a website?_** Well, recently in Brazil a web studios association were made with the most local famous web agencies, and they published a nice pricing guide (covering many different kind of jobs, and with rich descriptions). I won't post link to pdf as of now main due it is on portuguese and has local pricing. I found this reference useful, despite the pricing question is too subjective and broad to answer. My question is: does anyone know any other pricing guides from web producers associations or something similar (I'm not referring to a simple spreadsheet)?


Mod Rewrite - url rewriting

I am very new to mod rewrite. I need to redirect any user with "citzenhawk" parameter in their url to my url for example               http://www.mywebsite.com/?sc=CX12N003&cm_mmc=affiliate--citizenhawk--nooffer-_-na&prfc=5&clickid=0004c845fa9a87050a4277221a003262      should result into               http://www.mywebsite.com/      Here are my rewrite conditions:               RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (&|^)cm_mmc=(.)citizenhawk(.)(&|$)$      RewriteRule ^/rrs/ [NC,R=302,L]      Where am I going wrong? Is my RewriteCond wrong?


HTML snapshotting services

Are there any services out there that will trap Googlebot and serve a html snapshot, rendered by an actual browser, of your website? This is pretty much needed if you want to implement the ajax crawling specification.


Why drop off in Google impressions?

I'm seeing a severe drop off in Google impressions. See attached screenshot from Google Analytics: ![GA screenshot](http://i.stack.imgur.com/LEeJJ.png) I haven't been able to attribute this to any changes on the site. As you can see, this started happening on Oct 21st. Does anyone know if this corresponds to a Google Search update? Otherwise, does anyone have any suggests for tracking down the cause? I'm pretty stumped.


How do I migrate mail from one shared hosting account to another?

My web-host suddenly decide to merge with another company and that move has left me in the lurch. I have two weeks till I can migrate my mail data over to another account. The only way that I can transfer the data to the new account is through a mail client and manually copying the data to the new hosting by recreating the mail accounts and restoring all the mails from the mail client to them. Is there anyway that I can automate this process, or a faster way that I could speed-en up this process. I have over 400 email accounts to migrate which is around 2 gigs of matter. And the mails don't stop coming in. If I could do this directly server to server without downloading and uploading the matter, it would be very convenient. That way I will only have to create the accounts and the matter would transfer automatically. How can I avoid this procedure in the future? And is there a way to backup emails from a mail server?


How can I rewrite a subdomain to go to a specific file in a specific folder?

I've done searching for my answer and have tested a few solutions, but nothing has worked so far. I'm trying to get a URL like this `http://baseball.sports.com` to rewrite to `http://pro.sports.com/baseball-index.php`. However, I still need to keep the domain the same (`http://baseball.sports.com`). The reason being I have about 5 subdomains (`baseball`, `football`, `soccer`, etc.) that I want to run off the same code base (`pro.sports.com`). Everything is on the same server. I'd be happy to answer any other questions that would help me get a resolution. I truly appreciate any direction that can be given to me to solve this.


Rankings dropping after small URL-change WITH 301-redirect

Two weeks ago, we attempted to make the URLs of ca. 12 pages more search- engine friendly. We changed three things. **1. Make URLs more SEF** > from: /แอร์-ราคา/brandname.html (meaning: /aircon-price/daikin.html > > to: /แอร์-brandnameinenglish-brandnameinthai.html We set up 301-redirects from the old to the new URLs. You can find an example and the link to our page here: http://bit.ly/XRoTOK There are no direct external links to the old URLs. **2. Added text to img-links from homepage to brand-pages** Before those changes, we only linked to those brands with a picture, so we added some text under the picture. You can see that here, in the left submenu: http://bit.ly/XRpfoF **3. Minor changes to Title, h1-Tags, Meta Description, etc.** Only minor changes, to better match the on-site optimization with targeted keywords. For example, before we used full brand names, after we used what was really searched for: > from: Mitsubishi Electric Mr. Slim > > to: แอร์ Mitsubishi (means: Aircon Mitsubishi) Three days after these changes, we noticed a heavy drop (80% loss in non-paid search traffic) in rankings and traffic for those pages, and also for all pages which are sub-categorized. Rankings for all keywords not affected by the changes stayed the same. Any ideas, what happened, and how we can regain our old rankings? We have already submitted a new sitemap.


Bad Bot blocking Revisited

I've read a lot about bad bot blocking, php scripts, .htaccess techniques, etc... Is this a valid method? Since .htacces can rewrite and send a bad bot a 403 deny or forward to something like spam poison, is it possible to Disallow a folder, then through .htaccess in that specific folder redirect to spampoison? Since Apache reads each .htaccess independently and follows specific instructions, then a bad bot not following robots.txt would just be redirected. Or anyone trying to access, /badbot/ or whatever I choose to call my trap folder.


Web Server vs Web Hosting

I have always thought about hosting sites on a local web server with MAMP or a web server application on a reliable and fast connection, but I was wondering if it would be better to just go with web hosting? Also how would web hosting or a web server handle a sudden surge in traffic in a huge scale?


does co.uk domains need a uk citizen?

I am a us citizen based in the us. I would like to register a co.uk domain. Do I need to be a uk citizen or have some other sort of connection to the uk to register that domain? For instance, .ca (canada) requires this and that is why I ask. thx


Adding a page indicating that a website is in maintenance

I use **Spring MVC** + **Apache tomcat** + **Apache httpd** and I am seeking for best practices in order to redirect all http requests to a page indicating to my users that the website is in maintenance. FYI, my website will be hosted on **Cloudfoundry**.


How to exclude a website from real-time Google search results?

Google bots have recently indexed my test web site which is not intended for users. How can i exclude my JSP web site from google's search result?


Saving website copy and browsing saved copies

How can I automatically save site's copy each week with an option to browse saved copies? I need kind of WebArchive, but on my local computer.


How can I stop users from leaving after they are told they violated a rule?

I run a small forum, and occasionally we get someone who will break a minor rule, e.g. they post something in the wrong forum. When this happens we'll usually send them a message explaining to them how forums work and letting them know that there message would be better received if they posted it in the right forum. However, often those users will just leave. That's not the desired affect: the rule violation was minor and we don't want them to leave because of that. Does anyone have any ideas on how we can reduce the number of users who will leave after we tell them that they violated the rules?


looking for a Q and A tool with payment for answer

I would like to include an expert Q and A system into my site that works like stackoverflow but also gives the user the option to promise money for the answer.


Why sometimes images load top-bottom, and sometimes by "enhancing" resolution?

In everyday use of internet, i notice that most times, any image that loads, loads by "growing" itself vertically, from top to bottom,. that is, you first see only a few rows of pixels, and it increments until it is full height. I.e, the way an image would print in a physical printer. But other times, the images loads full-size, that is by using all their width and height, but they load at very low resolution, they look very pixelated and blurry, then they have "swipes" that improve the resolution a bit each step. After a few "swipes" it gets the max resolution of the image. (I don't know if _resolution_ is the proper term, but i hope you get the idea) So, why or when does each happen? what are the conditions? On what it depends? I have no idea of web protocols, transfers, data-encoding or any of that, so please give an easy to understand answer for a non expert (a regular internet user).


Website Systematically Blocking IP Addresses

I have a series of websites hosted at the same server. The issue I am having is that it keeps blocking me access from different means to the sites. Allow me to explain:   * From my IP, Blocked.    * From Boomproxy: Blocked    * From Zend2: Blocked    * From hidemyass: Blocked    * From Zacebook: Accessible **The "Block" message goes something like this:** > Exact error is: This webpage is not available The connection to www.xxx.yyy > was interrupted. Here are some suggestions: Reload this webpage later. Check > your Internet connection. > > Restart any router, modem, or... etc, etc ...Go to the Chrome menu > > Settings > Show advanced settings... > Change proxy settings... > LAN > Settings and deselect the "Use a proxy server for your LAN" checkbox. Error > 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): The connection was reset. Please remember that no matter what proxy service I use, it systematically "blocks" them one by one. Does anybody know how this keeps happening? It also affects any access to the sites from my network.


I18n website and URL prefix iso639

I'm adding i18n to my website. For translated pages I add iso639 code of the language like this:               http://example.com/en/mypage.php      But I'm curious about language code. Should I use iso639-1 (en) or iso639-2 (eng) code ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639#Relations_between_the_parts When I check, I see that most of the websites including Wikipedia, uses 2 character language code ? What is the standart or most widely used option for language codes ?


SEO for german website - can I use senukeX?

I'm going to use senukeX to go to the top with small german website... the problem is -> it's in german and wordpress, social bookmarks, wikis in Senuke are in english. Does it matter?


Filter combinations as indexable pages: good or bad for SEO?

I'm building a site based on tags for navigation (not a tree structure). My idea was to create a unique URL representing a unique combination of tags. The problem is that the sum of every combination of tags will produce over a million pages. Is this bad? These pages contain text and links pointing to the real content pages of the site, so not content at all, just dynamically generated content.


Time to wait before submitting again site to DMOZ.org

Most sites I have done, got listed in DMOZ. It has always being a very frustrating process that required waiting for months. For some of these sites I had also to resubmit them again in order to see them listed. My question is: in case site A does not get listed in DMOZ after the 1st submission, do you know how long should I wait before submitting site A again? I'm supposing DMOZ does not enjoy receiveing the same site submitted each day by the same person. Maybe some of you was/is a DMOZ editor and knows the answer. Thanks * * * UPDATE: Thanks to _danlefree_ , I should have explained in my question that I know on DMOZ guideline they say to submit site only once. But by following slavishly DMOZ guideline: **a site that was not included on 1st attempt should not be submitted again for the rest of your life.** I think it's common sense to try to understand what was wrong with the not included site, try to fix it and **after some time** try to submit the site again to DMOZ for inclusion. My question is more about what you percieve to be the right time to wait before submitting again a site to DMOZ.


Is it possible to use Whois Guard on dot pro domains?

I have purchased two dot pro domains but the holder info is exposed. Is it possible to use Whois Guard or the like on dot pro domains? If so, Do you know any service provider or registrar that offers this?


how a web agency handle multiple client sites

I have few sites on different shared hosting and I want to move them in a new VPS. Most of them are build with Drupal (version 6 and 7), but also I want to be able to host and maintain Wordpress sites. So what is the solution that's most used in a web agency where you can have multiple client sites with different CMS? Is the "multiplre sites" in both Drupal and Wordpress the prefer way to do that?


Quick question about Google AdSense policy

Is it against the Google AdSense terms of use to direct users to click on the ads? I mean I'm not gonna put a big flashing arrow or anything but what about "check out our sponsors" or something subtle like that?


What imprint do I have to use to comply with various international laws?

In German law every website has to have an imprint clearly stating the owner and their contact information. This is nothing I really worry about since I have already created it. But my question is what decides which countries' laws apply to my website?   My website is running on a root server in Canada, I am German citizen, I will be using a `.tk` (New Zealand) domain, and the website is designed for an international audience. I am pretty sure the domain doesn't matter at all. So which countries' laws apply to my website? If it is the Canadian law, then what do I have to do in order to stay legal?


Solving "Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site."

I'm getting the following warning over and over again in google webmaster tools               Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site.      The examples he's showing don't give me much clue on what is really wrong here. How would you suggest me to resolve this issue? UPDATE: My site has a large amount of pages (40M) with ~10M indexed. Should I consider adding noindex to some of the pages to make it 'smaller' for search engines?


Multilingual website avoiding duplicate content and right referral in SERP

I have a site with UGC in many languages. The translation I'm doing is for the titles so for each page I have multiple copies, one per language. I want to make sure   1. Search engines don't see this as duplicate content.   2. Search engines direct to the right language link.  What I've done is specifying the language in a sub domain, so for each page I have:               mydomain.com/page     ja.mydomain.com/page     es.mydomain.com/page      And in each one of those pages added in the HTML                 <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http:/mydomain.com/page" />       <link rel="alternate" hreflang="jp" href="http://ja.mydomain.com/page" />      In order to make sure people are viewing the right language I'm redirecting according to the IP of the viewer, to the right subdomain. For example if I get a visitor from Japan I'm redirecting to ja.mydomain.com/page while leaving an option to change language manually. Is there a way to avoid the redirecting I'm doing and let search engines link to the right page? Should I specify canonical for these pages to avoid duplicate content? Should I specify geo-targeting per subdomain in google webmaster tools?


Star rating not showing in rich snippets

We've recently been doing a lot of work on our site's SEO (`www.betterthanreviews.com`). We recently did a push to update the rich snippets breadcrumb, meta description, and star rating. After giving Google some time to index the site, it has updated the breadcrumbs and meta descriptions for our review pages, but the stars are still not showing. This is currently how it appears on a Google search (link to the actual page: `http://www.betterthanreviews.com/home- security/livewatch`): ![enter image description here](http://i.stack.imgur.com/ZZxrz.png) This is what the Rich Snippets is supposed to look like, and how it appears in Google's testing tool: ![enter image description here](http://i.stack.imgur.com/y7YCj.png) More context: As seen in our html, we are using schema.org language. We initially were using _schema.org/Corporation_ for the site, but we now have the page labeled as _schema.org/HomeAndConstructionBusiness_ because Google will not show star ratings for the Corporation language. However, in our Webmaster Tools, the Structured Data is still showing the Corporation language, which could be a potential issue. Here is a look at some of the coding that we used. But it can be looked at closer by inspecting the element:

             <meta content="4.5" itemprop="ratingValue" title="4.5 out of 5 stars" class="star-rating-readonly">                    <meta content="2013-12-05" itemprop="datePublished">
Way better than my previous system

Scott H.
                 •
2 months ago

I love it! The experience I have had so far is extremely positive. I had another alarm system before and I didn't like it but this one is really nice. I am telling everybody about it.

      Any suggestions for how to fix this?


Redundant Hosting and duplicate content's effect on SEO

My Company is currently in the early planning phases of a project where we are playing with the idea of hosting our web project on multiple continents. The idea is to push local users to the closest server possible to decrease loading times. This will likely involve mirroring the web project across each server. Thats cool and not our dilemma at the moment - remember we are in the planning/design phase. The concern which was brought up yesterday (and caused myself and acouple others to lose sleep) is the SEO effect of hosting on multiple servers. What our fear is, is that with say 3 servers running in 3 different continents we are going to have duplicate content on each of those 3 servers. Now we can use url canonicalization to go from domain.com www.domain.com so search engines view the url as a single url and everything resolves to the same url (good for SEO). But what we wont be able to do that any of us can foresee is IP canonicalization to tell search engines that all three instances are all the same site possibly confusing SEs on which url is the correct one to index (or so our worry is). In the experience of other webmasters is there a correct way to go about this? Has in any of your past experiences has running multiple instances of a website in this manner negatively effected your SEO efforts? If yes do you guys have any ideas on how to minimize the potential of pages not being indexed by going this route? I know its a pretty small part of the ranking algorithms but it is enough that we want to have this planned out as best as we can especially considering the scale of the project.


google webmaster tools, site maps and indexing, number of pages indexed reduces with no new sitemap

It seems to take two weeks ish to get updates on to the google index, which seems fair enough as I imagine googles index of the whole internet could be rather large. However, the some changes to my sitemaps don't seem to be being picked up, and today noticed that indexed pages had gone done. The current status shows 118 pages indexed, however two days ago was at 119 with no changes to sitemap : ![enter image description here](http://i.stack.imgur.com/wUmIB.jpg)


Load Wikipedia sourced biographies via Ajax or render it with the rest of the page as part of the initial request?

Apparently Google Search ranks pages with unique content higher than pages that have content that is originally from somewhere else (e.g. 'Wikipedia'). In a web site I am building, I show some specific information about different influential people. Each person's page also includes an abstract about that person which is sourced from Wikipedia, as well as a read more link to the original Wikipedia article. In order to improve ranking of these pages, is it better to render this information inline so it is indexible by Google, or is it better to load it via Ajax, hence not visible to Google bots?


A safe way to allow upload of all file types?

By default WordPress restricts the file types that can be uploaded to `/uploads` using the default Media Manager. I know it is possible to manually extend the allowed file types. I also know it is possible to change `functions.php` to allow all file types to be uploaded. This restriction obviously exists for security concerns - e.g. someone could upload a harmful `.exe`. Would it not be possible to allow secure upload of all filetypes by setting the permissions of the `/uploads` directory to prevent execution of any of its contents? Thus it wouldn't matter if someone uploaded a harmful file because it would not be executable on the server...


Which CMS is this (from screenshot)?

Does anyone know what CMS this is? Thanks!! ![MA WebCenters Web Site Manager](http://i.stack.imgur.com/ntW9l.jpg)


Illegal iphone app for website

I have a web site and someone had made an iphone app for my site without my permission and selling it. He is using my API without getting permission. How can i report this to Apple? EDIT: AFAIK, there's no way to report this to Apple. I blocked all requests from the iphone app.


Gzip compress offline?

I've configured my site to serve compressed content by putting this line in .htaccess               AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/javascript text/css application/javascript application/json      This works perfectly for almost all files except a few large JSON files that are above 200Kb. For some reason they are not being compressed. I see that they don't using the net tab in firebug and the Network section in chrome. So as a workaround I thought I could compress these files offline and have Apache read them compressed.   What tool should I use to compress them? is the linux gzip the one? any special flags or something I should use?   What should I put in .htaccess so that the server would know to serve these files with content-encoding gzip ?


duplicate meta description even though link is removed?

I thought this was just webmaster taking it time to catch up but it has been there for weeks now and webmaster crawled as recently as 16th May. I am being advised in HTML improvements the below but I changed the URL on the page from: `/catalog/plant/concrete-preparation/` to `/catalog/tools/concrete-preparation/` So I cannot see why it is still alerting me? _Pages with duplicate meta descriptions_ www.contractorshire.co.uk/catalog/ **plant** /concrete-preparation/ www.contractorshire.co.uk/catalog/ **tools** /concrete-preparation/


Single-page-apps and alternate / canonical URLs for mobile websites

I have a "normal" website and I am currently developing a mobile version of the site. Because of the complexity of the shown information, I am using a separate domain (mysite.mobi) and no responsive solution. The site is built as a single-page-app using jQuery mobile. The main workflow is that I am using a custom parameter attached to my main file (mysite.mobi/index.htm#forecast?location_id=1234). It will then fire an AJAX-request and fetch the content corresponding to the forecast for the location_id 1234. The desktop website URL would be something like mysite.com/forecast/1234. Now I am thinking about how to get my mobile search results displayed in Google searches. According to their recommendations, I should use a `link rel=alternate` tag in the main page and add a `link rel=canonical` tag to the mobile site. There is the problem - as I am using a single page webapp, I only have a single crawlable file on my mobile domain where I could add this tag. However I can not get this tag to reflect the correct location on my main site. What are the best practices for using a single-page-app and canonical URLs?


best way to import 500MB csv file into mysql database?

I have a 500MB csv file that needs to be imported into my mysql database. I've made a php file where i can upload the csv file and it analyses the fields n stuff and does the actual importing. but it can only handle small fiels max 5mb. so that's a 100 files and actually pretty slow(uploading) is there another way? I have to repeat this process every month because the data in the file changes every month it's about 12 000 000 lines :D


Why are new pages not being indexed and old pages stay in the index?

I currently have a site that was recently restructured, causing much of its content to be reposted, creating new URL's for each page. To avoid duplicates, all of the existing pages were added to the robots file. That said, it has now been over a week - I know Google has recrawled the site - and when I search for term X, it is stil the old page that is ranking, with the new one nowhere to be seen. I'm assuming it's a cached version, but why are so many of the old pages still appearing in the index? Furthermore, all "tags" pages (it's a Q&A site, like this one) were also added to the robots a few months ago, yet I think they are all still appearing in the index. Anyone got any ideas about why this is happening, and how I can get my new pages indexed?


Is doing A/B tests using site redirection a bad practice?

I'm developing hotels websites here in Brazil. When the site is done, we do an A/B test with the old version to measure conversion and show to the hotel owner how good our site is. Due to the fact that I cannot put the old site inside the new one as a sub- resource (`newone.com/old`), currently I'm doing those A/B tests as follows:   1. I create 2 Google Analytics accounts, one for each site (old and new);   2. I put the GA tags in the old website pages (changing its possibly existent GA ID to the just created one);   3. I put an JavaScript code that redirects the user to the old website (in a different URL and different domain) with 50% of probability. So I compare all the metrics, events and goals between those two GA accounts. How bad is this approach? How Google can interpret the fact of being sometimes redirected, sometimes not? The experiment usually runs for 2 weeks. Is there any other alternative for doing this in a better way?


tool for google adsense account analysis (app)

does any one know of a tool to analyse my google adsense traffic / clicks ... preferably a desktop solution... Something which provides more advanced and easy analysis reporting solutions then adsense thanks


mod_rewrite with Apache -> mod_jk -> tomcat

Related to some of my earlier questions. I now have a setup I quite like; Apache httpd listening on port 80 accepting http and https connections. Several Tomcat instances running on several AJP ports. Mod_Jk is sending different url requests to different tomcat instances;               www.mydomain.com/demo -> tomcat:8101     www.mydomain.com/test -> tomcat:8102     www.mydomain.com/     -> tomcat:8100      This is achieved with the following config in httpd.conf (or included sub files);               LoadModule jk_module modules/mod_jk.so     JkWorkersFile conf/workers.properties     JkLogFile logs/mod_jk.log     JkLogLevel info          NameVirtualHost *:80          <VirtualHost *:80>         JkMount /demo* demoTomcat (workers.properties not shown)         JkMount /test* testTomcat         JkMount /* rootTomcat     </VirtualHost>      And this all works great. I also have SSL setup and running for https connections using a similar VirtualHost tag;               <VirtualHost _default_:443>         JkMount /demo* demoTomcat          JkMount /test* testTomcat         JkMount /* rootTomcat     ... SSL Stuff follows ....      What I'm now having trouble is that my SSL Cert is only for www.mydomain.com and NOT mydomain.com. I've been advised to use the follow mod_rewrite calls;               Options +FollowSymlinks     LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so     RewriteEngine On     RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.|$) [NC]     RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [PT,L]      I've placed these before before and after the mod_jk rules in the httpd.conf file. Apache was at first complaining that RewriteEngine was an invalid command, but that went away when I remembered the LoadModule command first :) Now Apache restarts just fine, the server starts and accepts requests and everything works the way it use to ... but thats just it, these mod_rewrite commands appear to have no effect? I type `http://mydomain.com` into the browser and I just get my website as per normal. The url does not appear to change to `http://www.mydomain.com` and when I start to access the secured areas I get warnings that `mydomain.com` is NOT secured and is serving me a cert from some other website called `www.mydomain.com` (why this is an issue at all and it can't just use some logic to realise its the same site, I don't know!). Am I placing the mod_rewrite rules in the wrong place? I've read that it should work, the rewrites should change the url to www. and then pass through to the mod_jk stuff for anything further?


using .htaccess to redirect .asp to .php?

Ahoy all! I've been racking my brain with this one. I basically just converted all of my pages from ASP code to PHP code. Kept the same filenames. So, here is the htaccess code I have so far, but it keeps redirecting to my ROOT.... ie /home/accountname/publc_html... What am I doing wrong?               RewriteRule (.*)\.asp $1.php [R=301]


Bounce rate issues

I currently have a site which shows the best uk speaker deals and I am having bounce rate problems. The site simply allows the user to search for the best deals and then go to the provider’s site (this is a non profit site). What I didn’t anticipate is that people are going straight to the deal details from Google (organic) and missing out the listing pages. The users then either go off to the deals or bounce. Either way my bounce rate is quite high at 54% and my event tracking says 25% of people are clicking on my ‘go to deal’ button (example). Overall I wish to lower my bounce rate so that Google doesn’t think my site is bad and hopefully make a more pleasant experience for my users. Questions:   1. Do you think the site/ user would benefit from a page in-between the link button and the provider’s page. This would say something on the lines of “you will now be transferred to the providers site in 5 seconds”. This therefore warms up the user to the new website and cancels out the bounce.   2. Given that I have an Analytics Event on each ‘go to deal’ button, will Google recognise this and not consider it a bounce?   3. Should I put less emphasis on the ‘go to deal’ button and more availability to go to other products on the site.   4. Is the page taking too long to load therefore the analytics code doesn’t register?  Home of the website - http://www.soundplaza.co.uk Thanks


Is it a good idea to add robots "noindex" meta tags to deep low content pages, e.g. product model data

I'm considering adding robots "noindex, follow" tags to the very numerous product data pages that are linked from the product style pages in our online store. For example, each product style has a page with full text content on the product: http://www.shop.example/Product/Category/Style/SOME-STYLE-CODE Then many data pages with technical data for each model code is linked from the product style page. http://www.shop.example/Product/Category/Style/SOME-STYLE-CODE-1 http://www.shop.example/Product/Category/Style/SOME-STYLE-CODE-2 http://www.shop.example/Product/Category/Style/SOME-STYLE-CODE-3 It is these technical data pages that I intend to add the no index code to, as I imagine that this might stop these pages from cannibalizing keyword authority for more important content rich pages on the site. Any advice appreciated.


Procedure to register an URL

this is a newbie question. I want to set-up a web site (let call it www.mywebsite.com) on a server I own with a public IP address:   1. What is the precise procedure to register the URL? What I mean is, how to tell the world that requests to www.mywebsite.com should come to my server?   2. Is this a free procedure?   3. I guess I cannot use any name for my URL. What are the rules? Thanks.


Soft 404 error on redirected outbound links

I have a redirect script on my site which sends visitors to an affiliate site. However in the last month I've noticed that Google webmaster tools is reporting my outbound links as a 404 error. Here is the breakdown on how its setup: My outbound links are coded like this:               Link Title      My redirect script will then perform a 302 redirect to the affiliate link Originally I had the affiliate links (CJ) directly in the HTML, however I noticed over time that this had some impact on my sites traffic. So I changed them to a redirect script and my traffic returned. This seemed to work with no issues for over 1 year but now I'm getting soft 404 errors in Google webmaster tools. I did try adding a rule in my robots.txt to block any links starting with /f/ but I'm not sure if this will help or Google will still report soft 404 errors. I am considering as possible options to change the **a** tag to a **button** tag and use an onclick event to load the link.


htaccess block access to directory but allow access to files

I need to block directory access but allow access to files if typed into a browser. Also would like this to load my custom 403.shtml


Is it possible to check Page Rank of a site without the Google toolbar?

I am just getting started in SEO, and I want to check the Page Rank of one of my sites. All google docs say to use their toolbar to check Page Rank. However I'm using Chromium. I _could_ check with Firefox, but I'm curious if there's a way to check the page rank without using it. I see many sites for checking it, but they all seem a little spammy.


What is the feature that imports URL information into Facebook and Google+?

I want to be able to import a heading, short description, and an image into my website, just using a link. I am using Joomla but can switch to any CMS, or try to build an extension myself. The problem is, I don't know where to look for example code, or what to look for. To me it doesn't seem like too difficult a process. Also, the code must be out there, with a little tweaking I can probably use someone else's, but I don't even know what to search for.