All of which were now going to:

http://lansner.freedomblogging.com/2009/06/14/twitter-hashtag-conversations/25613/

And all had the title:

Hashtag? How to join those Twitter

In the early days of URL forwarding, probably the most widely used service was TinyURL which has served well for people that were sending links via email or instant messenger because sometimes long URLs with tons of parameters get cut off in the sending process by human error, or technical error.

When microblogging came out, and Twitter gained a lot of popularity, more URL shorterners started popping out because of the limited characters allowed in a microblog post which is usually 140 characters. One of the popular URL shorterners is Cligs and the value added service Cligs had over the others, was the free web analytics bundled together with the URL shorterner. One more benefit that many others also had was the custom folder name, and the changeable URLs.

I am not sure if the changeable URL was a good idea, but URLs can always change, link in changing a domain, changing a CMS platform, and you would not want to have dead-404-shortened-URLs. But once someone gets to exploit a security hole on Cligs, this can be a vulnerability of losing all your created forwarders and will be forwarder to some place else.

From an SEO point of view… if any of your forwarding URLs get’s posted by one way or another on some other site that has good search engine friendly links, Cligs forwarders are actually 301 redirects, thus giving link value. So who ever hacked into Cligs, must have had this in mind to steal some links in the attempt to rank higher.

Now the question is who has done this? That we really don’t know. Although we do now that http://lansner.freedomblogging.com is owned by real estate bloggers Jonathan Lasner and Jeff Collins. Could they be responsible for this? What are your thoughts?

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*special note about “duplicate content penalties”: Some people feel that it is very important to be clear that a duplicate content “penalty” is not really a penalty. Google is not punishing your site for having a Web page that has the same content as another Web page. But what it is happening is, if your page is not the original version of the content, it is highly likely that your page will be put into the supplemental index which makes it less likely to rank well for competitive terms. So in effect, it’s the same end result of incurring a penalty but in fact there has been no “penalty.” For some reason this game of semantics is very important to some members of the SEO community, so I wanted to make sure I was clear with everyone that I know the phrase “duplicate content penalty” is not entirely accurate, but it is how most people view the situation.

Having said that, here are some of the issues that the rel=canonical tag can help with:

1. Capitalization: The search engines treat each unique URL string as a separate entity. So any variation in a URL, no matter how slight, creates a new URL in the eyes of the search engine. This includes differences in capitalization, although Google specifically has been much better at figuring this out on its own since the “Big Daddy” update. So for example, when an engine indexes these URLs:
   http://www.businessol.com/seo-blog/ and http://www.businessol.com/Seo-Blog/ it sees two different URLs for the same content.

   This happens often because Webmasters are not standardized in the way that they link to 3rd party websites. Some Webmasters and blogs capitalize letters in URLs out of coding practices or habit.

   In the old days, Google would have not been able by itself to figure out that these two URLs are the same page. And therefore one of these two URLs (most likely the one with the least amount of Page Rank) would have been put into supplemental results and the links that pointed to it would essentially be lost (because now they point to a page in the supplemental results that isn’t going to rank for much and they are not helping the other URL that is listed in Google). But nowadays, Google is pretty good about figuring this stuff out although not perfect. And the other engines are not very good at this kind of thing. So by including the Rel=Canonical tag on every page of the site, you make it easy for all the engines to consolidate URLs that have capitalization problems.

2. Dynamic URL Strings: Whether its tracking codes like www.domain.com?tracking-code or CMS systems that generate multiple URLs for the same page, the issues with these pages are the same as the issues for capitalization. But now instead of an elaborate 301 redirect strategy or costly adjustments to your backend system, this simple tag solves the problem.
3. Other Canonical Issues: Some other issues that Google already does fairly well but that can still cause problems include www versus non www version of the Web site (domain.com versus www.domain.com), session IDs and also linking using IP addresses. This tag if correctly implemented, should fix all of these problems.

Given the number of potential issues that this tag can correct, it should be added to every page of your site. If your site is dynamic, this should be a pretty easy addition.

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Once you publish content, don’t move it!

What I mean is, don’t change the URL where the content lives. I have recently had a client who has an internal content management and production system that causes URLs to move (change) after a certain amount if time. They couldn’t understand why their search listings kept fluctuating so much. They have since developed a migration strategy for their content (which consists of setting up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one) in the event they have to change their URLs.

The point is though, changing your URLs disconnects your link connectivity unless you implement 301 redirects. Search engine rankings, especially those of Google are hugely dependent on links, especially relevant external links. But moving the content means that any links that you might have had, are no longer seen unless you implement a redirect. And even though 301 redirects work, they take time to do so and can quickly become tedious, if not difficult to manage. But make sure you use a 301 redirect (permanent) which passes Page Rank versus a 302 redirect (temporary and bad for SEO) which does not pass Page Rank. If you don’t know what kind of redirect you have, use this http header check function on your URL with the redirect to find out.

The best idea though, is not changing the location of your content once its published.

Update: Please note that we are not saying that all missing pages should 301 to a certain page. Pages that do not really exist should still have error 404s and not 301s. Only moved pages that existed in an old URL should 301 to a new URL.

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I just got back from San Francisco and I had the opportunity to meet with a couple of our enterprise level clients. It’s always fun to get out of the office and travel a little. It’s also fun to get an opportunity to explain SEO to a receptive audience. One of the challenges that my clients face is managing their marketing URLs. They have a number of vanity domains that are product specific or are part of a marketing campaign. Up until now, the company has used 302 redirects to direct those URLs to the appropriate sub pages on their site. The benefit there is that the Marketing URL, or MUrl for short, is what gets displayed in the organic search results. However, if one really looks at the situation and the difference in the way search engines treat a 302 redirect and a 301 redirect, it becomes apparent that the 302 is not the answer.

The biggest issue with 302 redirects is that they do not pass link connectivity metrics because they are temporary by definition. And so therefore, if Page A is redirecting to Page B with a 302 redirect, the links that point to Page A WILL NOT be assigned to Page B and vice versa.

In this situation, what was happening was that people were using the MUrl to navigate to Page A which then redirected them to the long URL string of Page B. So many Webmasters who then wanted to link to the content, copied the URL string from the Web Browser (the Page B URL) and linked to it. But because the MUrl (Page A) is the page that Google is using for its search results, those viral links to Page B, were not being taken into consideration by Google when it ranked Page A. The solution was to convert the 302 redirects to 301 redirects so that the pages would be consolidated into a single page in Google’s view. The only drawback was that the URLs that Google is now going to be indexing will be the long URL strings.

Example Page A (MUrl): www.domain.com/marketing-slogan

Example Page B: http://www.domain.com/?abunchofstuffthathasalotofparametersandishardtoread

The company can still use the MUrls for their print media and Internet marketing campaigns, but the Page B URLs are what will be listed in Google. And although the marketing department would prefer the shorter URL for obvious reasons, the trade off of consolidating links (this company is huge and gets a TON of viral links) is going to produce a much greater ROI than any benefit that having the MUrl show up in the search engine results would provide.

Two other notes. Due to technical limitations of the caching system and load balancing for this company’s servers, it is technically impossible to 301 Page B to Page A or we would have done that. There are a ton of technical hurdles that have to be worked through based on the hosting environment of the company. But these are the kinds of challenges that make working with these large companies so fun.

The other note I wanted to make was that since the Big Daddy update by Google, Google has gotten a lot better at solving 302 issues like these. In the case of our client, there were a few examples where is seemed that Google did in fact assign link connectivity factors to the MUrl (Page A). But there were also examples of where it did not. And so because Google is so inconsistent (and the other engines like Yahoo and MSN are much worse at getting this stuff right), its better not to take chances and just use a 301.

So the important point of today’s post (other than my prediction of the Chargers beating the Patriots), is that if you have any MUrls, or vanity domains for that matter, use 301 redirects instead of 302 redirects. Go Chargers!

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The hard part is getting it so that your brand URL redirects through Feedburner so that you can promote your brand URL in the event that someday you ever leave Feedburner. Here are the instructions for that under the Feedburner Mybrand Section. It’s a little hard to find because it’s under the myaccount section and not the feeds section which seems a little odd to a first time user…lol.

I will try to get the MyBlogLog stuff going soon as well, as soon as they figure out how to get their code working to let me migrate to the new system, doh!

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It started out pretty rough today I have to admit…lol. So I thought I would lose myself in the SEO world today to take my mind off how tired I am. Here are some of the things I found along the way:

More on sub domains versus folders and how it effects SEO.

The ongoing discussion about the evils of paid links in SEO.

A great article about the problems that CMS systems have with SEO. I’ll blog more on this subject later myself. I have a number of observations to add..lol. That’s why we invented our own CMS system that is SEO friendly

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Speaking of frazzled nerves, I was a little nervous Saturday night before singing for the first time ever at a bar with my band. Playing guitar and singing at the same time is hard enough by yourself, much less at a bar in front of people. But it went pretty well and no one ran out of the room, so from that standpoint, it was a success. For those that don’t know, I play in a band called Dive Bomber ( http://www.heavymusic.com/ ).

I am in the process of writing a three part article series for http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ about how PPC and SEO can work together to produce greater results. I am almost done with the article and I have to say it has really been fun. I am getting an opportunity to share some of the SEO observations that we have had at BusinessOnLine that can really make a difference for some Web sites and I think that’s exciting.

In SEO news, Matt Cutts today tried to add some logic behind the old subdomains versus subfolders debate. Google treats subdomains like separate sites in many ways. The bottom line with this debate is that you should do what’s best for users. Any kind of SEO advantage that could or might be gained by manipulating sub domains is likely to be short lived and is obviously against the spirit of Google’s best practices. If you’re trying to build a solid search engine traffic foundation that is, or could become, a primary source of income for your Web site, it’s best to build that foundation on solid ground. There are many legitimate reasons to use sub domains including technical considerations like load balancing and hosting issues. There are organization structures where sub domains make sense ( maps.google.com ). But I believe that a travel site that has a sub domain for each city where each city has one page of content is an unnecessary use of sub domains. The bottom line is, when making the decision to use sub domains versus sub folders, forget SEO and pick the one that works best for user experience. Then you know that you have also made the best decision for SEO best practices.

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