Many questions about website architecture, crawling and indexing, and even ranking issues can be boiled down to one central issue: How easy is it for search engines to crawl your site?
Tags: Canonical, Google, Index, Information retrieval, Microsoft, Robots exclusion standard, search engine, search engine optimisation, search engines, url, URL redirection, Web archiving, web crawlers, Web search engine, webmaster, world wide web, Yahoo
Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.
Tags: Canonical, Duplicate content, Google, Microsoft, search engine, search engine optimisation, Search engine optimization, search engines, search results, SEO, Uniform Resource Identifier, url, web application, Yahoo
Okay, so many of the points below aren’t purely my philosophy, but ideas and principles I have picked up along the way throughout my [development] career. Some relate to the UNIX philosophy, or even the Zen of Python, but wherever they’re from, they can be applied to many other domains.
Tags: Adobe, api, Asides, Design, Dev Opera, Development, Freelancing, Google, Google Code, JavaScript, Microsoft, philosophy, Python, unix, web community, work, Yahoo, zen, Zoho
An increasingly popular technique among websites and in particular, blogs, is the idea of making URLs search engine friendly, or safe, on the premise that doing so will help search engine optimisation. By removing the obscure query string element of a URL and replacing it with keyword rich alternatives, not only makes it more readable for a human being, but also the venerable robots that allow our page content to be found in the first place.
Tags: .htaccess, All, Apache, ColdBox, ColdFusion, Fusebox, HTTP, httpd.conf, ISAPI, Microsoft, mod_rewrite, New Brunswick, None, PHP, search engine, search engine optimisation, search engine robots, search engine safe, url, URL rewriting, USD, web applications
The first step to increasing your site’s visibility on the top search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN is to help their respective robots crawl and index your site. To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file. Conversely and importantly, webmasters can also notify the search engines about the existence and importance of pages with a sitemap.xml file
Tags: Google, Microsoft, optimisation, sitemaps, Tools, webmasters, website, Yahoo
The SQL Replace function enables us to look for a certain character phrase in a string and replace it with another character phrase. The updated string is then returned by the function.
Tags: database, database server, extend, fairly straight forward, function, Microsoft, Oracle, SQL, sub-routine, subroutine, t-sql, UDF, user defined function
With the advent Google Chrome there has been a lot of media coverage regarding the browser’s uptake and how it will compete with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. This is where the User Agent becomes most valuable.
Tags: Apple, Browsers, Chrome, Chrome's address bar, encryption, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Google Inc., HTTP, HyperText Transfer Protocol, Internet Explorer, Internet users, Microsoft, Microsoft Vista, Microsoft Windows, mobile phones, Mozilla, Official Build Google Inc., Opera, operating system, Safari, United States, url, User Agent, web crawlers, Web Standards era, webmaster, windowing system, Windows NT, X11
This weeks Computer Weekly magazine’s Downtime section has an interesting story: In what is likely to be better news for men than women, Microsoft’s latest browser, Internet Explorer 8, boasts a feature that allows users to hide the trail of their web browsing.
Tags: advertisers, adverts, Browsers, Computer Weekly, content network, Google, IE8, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft, online advertisers, revenue, web browsing
In the first part of this series I talked about setting yourself up in business. The next step is to publicise yourself and your skills. At this point, it is helpful to know exactly what line of work you want to be focusing on, since you will need to target your efforts.
Tags: Adobe, aggregators, blog, blog owner, brand, branding, brightkite, ColdFusion, contractor, demo example applications, europe, freelance, freelancer, Freelancing, FriendFeed, Google, micro-blogging, micro-blogging services, Microsoft, moveabletype expressionweb, online presence, online world, plurk, search engines, socialthing, temporary, tumblr, Twitter, typepad, united kingdom, United States, wordpress, Yahoo
In the past, the US has held a near monopoly not only in ColdFusion-based user groups, but also conferences, with CFUnited, cf.Objective() and the more general Adobe MAX leading the way.
Tags: Adobe, Adobe ColdFusion, Adobe MAX, Aral Balkan, BlueDragon, Brighton, cf.Objective, CFUnited, ColdFusion, Coldspring, conference, Edinburgh, europe, Flex, Frameworks, Fusebox, Hal Helms, London, Mach-II, Microsoft, Model-Glue, Peter Bell, Peter Elst, Railo, Scotch on the Rocks, Sean Corfield, search engine, Silverlight, Simon Bailey, Spry, technology-agnostic topics, united kingdom, United States