Search engines are particularly harsh to sites that use hard redirects to another page. If you are using PHP and need to have a page redirect to another location, use this code:
<?php
header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(”Location: http://www.newdomain.com/newpage/newurl.htm”);
exit();
?>
Found this site last week when researching SEO. The SEO Mini Book covers some important search engine optimization topics, such as:
This free online book is a great starting point for anyone who wants a concise introduction to SEO.
Almost all popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) increase a web site’s rank based on the number of links pointing towards the web site. In an attempt to falsely inflate a web site’s popularity, an individual may generate hundreds or even thousands of dummy web sites containing little to no content except for links pointing towards a specific domain name. One method that search engines use to detect this type of miscreant behavior is to see if these inter-linking web sites are hosted on the same IP address or IP address range. If the web sites are in the same IP address range, it is highly likely that they are operated by the same individual. Search engines devalue links from web sites pointing to other web sites hosted on the same IP address range.
Conversely, search engines value links from web sites hosted on different IP addresses. An effective search engine optimizer would go further than hosting inter-linking web sites on different IP addresses. They would host the web sites on completely different class C network addresses. They would make sure that all of their domains were registered with different registrars under different names. They would not use the same template on more than one web site. They would erase all traces that their sites are operated by the same individual. They would go through all of this trouble with one goal in mind - to game the search engines in order to bring in more organic traffic.
For most web sites, having a dedicated unique IP address will have little to no effect on search engine rankings. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, stated:
“If you are an average webmaster and just running a few sites, I wouldn’t worry about them being on the same IP address and I definitely wouldn’t worry about them being on the same server. That’s something that everybody does.”
To see other web sites hosted on your server, use this tool.
Search engines use keywords in a web site’s URL to determine site content and ranking. Knowing this, it is important to form your URLs to be as search engine friendly as possible.
My latest web project is a collection of web-based network tools. I originally wrote the site with URLs formed using camel case like this:
http://www.yougetsignal.com/openPortsTool/
Search engines have a difficult time understanding what the term openPortsTool means. Matt Cutts, from Google, recommends separating terms in the URL using dashes. Here’s my new URL:
http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports/
Camel Case: loremIpsumDolor
Underscores: lorem_ipsum_dolor
Dashes: lorem-ipsum-dolor < - Use dashes in your URLs for better search engine placement
Reference: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
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