Is XFN (XHTML Friends Network) still in use? - hyperlink

For starters, I understand what is the use of XFN for blogs. I see it being used in every WordPress theme. It makes sense.
But, is it still in use? http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 is showing no documentation. This page is empty. I had to access this page from archive.org.
Why is gmpg.org no longer maintaining this XFN page? Is it moved to somewhere else?

The XFN link types are listed in the Microformats wiki: existing rel values
This wiki page is the canonical source of link types allowed in W3C’s HTML5 (and later). However, the current REC (HTML 5.2) links to a specific section on that page, while the XFN link types are listed in another section. It’s not clear if only the link types in this linked section are valid in HTML.
I have no insight whether gmpg.org is still maintained. But the status of this site shouldn’t affect the use of XFN. The definitions are known, the link types are listed in the relevant Microformats page, and countless sites use it.

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Joomla - Wrong url path from google results

I have a strange problem in one Joomla website.
If i access from homepage and then navigate into the site it works correct, but if i go in some internal page from google results it shows uncorrect page layout, because the url is not correct.
This is the correct url
Correct page from homepage
and this the uncorrect url that Google finds Uncorrect page from Google
in this second page is showed rating module (that i never used) instead of an article, as you can see in links.
Someone can help me?
EDIT: I'm using Joomla 2.5 version. Every menu item is category blog type, and must show all articles of one category. Each category have 2 articles. In the uncorrect link seems that it access to single article, adding the rating that i have hidden in each article
Which version are you using?
if you can turn on SEF option in the global settings in joomla admin. Then you need to make sure all your articles are in menus. then if you link them on different pages it should keep the url the same.
The way you have it at the moment with all the x=123&... get params pages will show for what ever ids you change the menu to.
The reason you are seeing an uncorrect layout is the two different Itemid parameters (the right url has 127 while the wrong one has 104). The rest of the difference in the urls will be ignored by Joomla.
Solution: Find your menu item with id 104 (look at the menu ids on the right of the menu items view), then check which modules appear on the page from there. There may be modules in non-visible positions.
One of these modules is publishing the links with the wrong ids. If it's a Joomla core (like a search module) you can usually force the Itemid either in the module or in the component's configuration. Else you need to fixsome third party code.
Only once you have solved the multiple-itemid should you turn on SEF, otherwise you'd get the same problem only more difficult to trace.
sh404 could help you with this, I'd give it a try on a test site to see if it gets you out of trouble faster.

Remove multiple indexed URLs (duplicates) with redirect

I am managing a website that has only about 20-50 pages (articles, links and etc.). Somehow, Google indexed over 1000 links (duplicates, same page with different string in the URL). I found that those links contain ?date= in url. I already blocked by writing Disallow: *date* in robots.txt, made an XML map (which I did not had before) placed it into root folder and imported to Google Webmaster Tools. But the problem still stays: links are (and probably will be) in search results. I would easily remove URLs in GWT, but they can only remove one link at the time, and removing >1000 one by one is not an option.
The question: Is it possible to make dynamic 301 redirects from every page that contains $date= in url to the original one, and how? I am thinking that Google will re-index those pages, redirect to original ones, and delete those numerous pages from search results.
Example:
bad page: www.website.com/article?date=1961-11-1 and n same pages with different "date"
good page: www.website.com/article
automatically redirect all bad pages to good ones.
I have spent whole work day trying to solve this problem, would be nice to get some support. Thank you!
P.S. As far as I think this coding question is the right one to ask in stackoverflow, but if I am wrong (forgive me) redirect me to right place where I can ask this one.
You're looking for the canonical link element, that's the way Google suggests to solve this problem (here's the Webmasters help page about it), and it's used by most if not all search engines. When you place an element like
<link rel='canonical' href='http://www.website.com/article'>
in the header of the page, the URI in the href attribute will be considered the 'canonical' version of the page, the one to be indexed and so on.
For the record: if the duplicate content is not a html page (say, it's a dynamically generated image), and supposing you're using Apache, you can use .htaccess to redirect to the canonical version. Unfortunately the Redirect and RedirectMatch directives don't handle query strings (they're strictly for URIs), but you could use mod_rewrite to strip parts of the query string. See, for example, this answer for a way to do it.

Making a website without hyperlinks

I am making a simple CMS to use in my own blog and I have been using the following code to display articles.
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function(){
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200){
document.getElementById("maincontent").innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
}
}
What it does is it sends a request to the database and gets the content associated with the article that was clicked on and writes it to the main viewing area with ".innerHTML".
Thus I don't have actual links to other articles. I know that I can use PHP to output HTML so that it forms a link like :
<a href=getcontent.php?q=article+title>Article Title</a>
But being slightly OCD I wanted my output to be as neat as possible. Although search engine visibility is not a concern for my personal blog I intend to adapt this to a few other sites which have search engine optimization as a priority.
From what I understand, basically search engine robots follow links to index the web sites.
My question is:
Does this practice have any negative implications for search engine visibility? Also; are there other reasons for preferring one approach over the other as I see that almost every site uses the 'link' method.
The link you've written will cause a page reload. In order to leverage the standard AJAX stuff you've got at the top, you need to write the links as something along the lines of
Article Title
This assumes you have a javascript function called ajaxGet that takes an argument of the identifier for the article you're searching for.
If you were to write your entire site that way, search engines wouldn't be able to crawl you at all since they don't execute javascript. Therefore they can't get to anything off the front page. Also, even if they could follow the links, they'd have no way of referencing the page they got to since it doesn't have a unique URL. This is also annoying for users, since they can't get a link to an exact story to bookmark, send to a friend etc.

Url with pseudo anchors and duplicate content / SEO

I have a product page with options in select list (ex : color of the product etc...).
You accede to my product with different urls :
www.mysite.com/product_1.html
www.mysite.com/product_1.html#/color-green
If you accede with the url www.mysite.com/product_1.html#/color-green, the option green of the select list is automatically selected (with javascript).
If i link my product page with those urls, is there a risk of duplicate content ? Is it good for my seo ?
thx
You need to use canonical urls in order to let the search engines know that you are aware that the content seems duplicated.
Basically using a canonical url on your page www.mysite.com/product_1.html#/color-green to go to www.mysite.com/product_1.html tells the search engine that whenever they see www.mysite.com/product_1.html#/color-green they should not scan this page but rather scan the page www.mysite.com/product_1.html
This is the suggested method to overcome duplicate content of this type.
See these pages:
SEO advice: url canonicalization
A rel=canonical corner case
At one time I saw Google indexing the odd #ed URL and showing them in results, but it didn't last long. I think it also required that there was an on page link to the anchor.
Google does support the concept of the hashbang (#!) as a specific way to do indexable anchors and support AJAX, which implies an anchor without the bang (!) will no longer be considered for indexing.
Either way, Google is not stupid. The the basic use of the anchor is to move to a place on a page, i.e. it is the same page (duplicate content) but a different spot. So Google will expect a #ed URL to contain the same content. Why would they punish you for doing what the # is for?
And what is "the risk of duplicate content". Generally, the only onsite risk from duplicate content is Google may waste it's time crawling duplicate pages instead of focusing on other valuable pages. As Google will assume # is the same page it is more likely to not event try the #ed URL.
If you're worried, implement the canonical tag, but do it right. I've seen more issues from implementing it badly than the supposed issues they are there to solve.
Both answers above are correct. Google has said they ignore hashtags unless you use hash-bang format (#!) -- and that really only addresses a certain use case, so don't add it just because you think it will help.
Using the canonical link tag is the right thing to do.
One additional point about dupe content: it's less about the risk than about a missed opportunity. In cases where there are dupes, Google chooses one. If 10 sites link to your site using www.example.com and 10 more link using just example.com you'll get the :link goodness" benefit of only 10 links. The complete solution to this involves ensuring that when users and Google arrive at the "wrong" on, the server responds with an HTTP 301 status and redirects the user to the "right" one. This is known as domain canonicalization and is a good thing for many, many reasons. Use this in addition to the "canonical" link tag and other techniques.

How to display my website in a search engine with menus and links displayed in the search results

If you search for "richfaces" in google.com, the first result will be about www.jboss.org/richfaces. You may watch there that links (menus) like "Downloads", "Demos", "Documentations" are also displayed. How to have these links displayed in the search results?
(The "description" meta tag not enough I hope)
You are not able to make Google show links to your site (they will do this if they deem your site is relevant enough to warrant providing this feature). However, you can remove these links if they are present, if they are inappropriate.
See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334 for more details.
These are called Google Site Links. Google is pretty tight-lipped about how this feature is automated, but there are a handful of HTML5 tags which are supposed to help make search engines smarter. You can read more about them at O'Reilly's Dive Into HTML5 website. Especially interesting are the "Google Rich Snippets", though they're not exactly what you're looking for.
It might help to put those links in the HTML5 nav tags, like
<nav>Home About FAQ</nav>
and I've heard it tossed around that the site navigation should be an unordered list, but I don't know how true that is. Still, it couldn't hurt to do it that way and style the list with CSS.

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