Hope this post will not be killed on the ground of "NOT PROGRAMMING RELATED".
It seems everyone is flocking to URL shorten service recently. For some special sites like twitter, I am really OK with it.
However, I just wandering if I use that shorten URL in other place like PR, am I losing back links juicy? or are there any other down sides that I need to bear by using the shorten URL?
Many thanks to those who are enjoying closing posts for sparing my question!
Best regards to those who are reading, considering and answering my question!
Good holidays!
You definitely are losing SEO value. But yes, this isn't the best place to ask this question. I don't know where to send you, but maybe webmasterworld or something. They have forums.
Perhaps a little bit. You're sending traffic to the URL shortener first (and link juice) but then you get free click-through statistics (as with bit.ly) and, of course, the shortening effect.
If you don't need a shortener, make the links full.
Good luck!
The biggest question you have to ask yourself if you rely on an URL shortener that you don't run yourself: Who exactly are you relying on for working links into your web site?
Related
I was reading a thread last year about cms softwares that are used for making social sites... and basically someone said it takes less time to do something with a certain cms and the response was you could make a whole twitter in seconds using so-and-so framework, that doesn't mean its best overall. I surly bookmarked that so-and-so website and were planing to test it. but its not anywhere in my bookmarks and searching in google didn't help. does anyone know what that cms/framework for creating twitter-like websites?
Thanks alot.
I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but take a look at http://openmicroblogger.org/.
You can take a look at other possibilities, as told in here: http://socialcmsbuzz.com/ever-wanted-to-start-your-own-twitter-clone-now-you-can-02122008/.
Hope this helps,
I've found a lot of topics talcking about url schemes when going to international, the most common is the one which do :
www.mysite.com/fr/products
www.mysite.com/en/products
www.mysite.com/es/products
Is is common or useful to do something like this?
www.mysite.com/fr/produits
www.mysite.com/en/products
www.mysite.com/es/productos
ie translating the path as well as the page content.
I'm not sure if Stack Overflow is the right forum for this, but here goes:
From a technical point of view, option 1 is probably the easiest to implement. If you are on any English-language page and need to link to, say, the Spanish version of the same page, all you need to do is take your URL and replace /en/ by /es/.
So far I've seen this approach used practically everywhere... I cannot remember ever having seen option 2 in practice.
So, this is a little bet more of a high level question. I'm not necessarilly looking for specifics, but more of the general tools and technologies I need to use. I'm really new to website hosting and development.
I want to redirect a domain, say something.com to something.squarespace.com. How would I go about doing this so that the following occurs:
The address bar never has the url something.squarespace.com in it.
When a user clicks a link on the site that goes to a local page on something.squarespace.com (so say, something.squarespace.com/page1), the address bar says something.com/page1.
something.com currently is pointing to a shared hosting apache webserver. I would like to be able to maintain access to files and email on that server. If I couldn't get the files, that's fine. But the email is crucial.
I know this is a lot to ask - but if anyone can help me out with some advice on this I'll be very thankful!
Thanks.
I think you should take a look at URL rewriting concept. that's where you can achieve what you're asking in 1 at 2. As for no 3, I couldn't understand what you mean exactly.
I'd like to start using "SEO Friendly Urls" but the notion of generating and looking up large, unique text "ids" seems to be a significant performance challenge relative to simply looking up by an integer. Now, I know this isn't as "human friendly", but if I switched from
http://mysite.com/products/details?id=1000
to
http://mysite.com/products/spacelysprokets/sproket/id
I could still use the ID alone to quickly lookup the details, but the URL itself contains keywords that will display in that detail. Is that friendly enough for Google? I hope so as it seems a much easier process than generating something at the end that is both unique and meaningful.
Thanks!
James
Be careful with allowing a page to render using the same method as Stack overflow.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/random-text-can-cause-problems
Black hats can this to cause duplicate content penalty for long tail competitors (trust me).
Here are two things you can do to protect yourself from this.
HTTP 301 redirect any inbound display url that matches your ID but doesn't match the text to the correct text.
Example:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/random-text-can-cause-problems
301 ->
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/can-an-seo-friendly-url-contain-a-unique-id
Use canonical URLs.
<link rel="canonical"
href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/can-an-seo-friendly-url-contain-a-unique-id"
/>
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/can-an-seo-friendly-url-contain-a-unique-id
I'd say you're fine.
Have a look at the URLs that StackOverflow uses. They have a unique id, then they have the SEO-friendly stuff. You can omit the SEO-friendly stuff and the URL still works.
You are making a devils bargan here, you are trading away business goals for technology goals.
If you were to ask "From a purely business and SEO prospective, is it better to include unique IDs in the URL or not?"; the answer would clearly be to not use them.
The question then becomes, if you do use them, how much does it hurt you in the search engines? The answer is that it definately has some negative impact. How much is yet to be determined.
In terms of "user friendly", no, they are definitely not user friendly.
In terms of Google, they state "Whenever possible, shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters." See their URL structure document.
I'm not aware of any problems caused by adding an ID to a URL. In fact it can be extremely useful, as it allows the human/search engine friendly part of the URL to be changed without causing a broken link to a page that a search engine has already indexed. Using SO as an example, here's a link to your question:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/you-can-put-any-text-you-want-here
Nothing wrong with that. An increasing number of services have started to use a hybrid solution as Paul Tomblin already pointed out. In addition to SO, Tumblr uses this pattern too (maybe it was the first).
Furthermore, in certain services—like Google News—the URL must contain a unique numeric ID.
Getting rid of the parameterized URL will definitely help. From my experience, including the ID does not hurt or help, as long as there are no '?key=value' pairs in the url.
I have two seemingly contradictory points to make here:-
Nobody looks at URLs! Experience has "trained" browser users to render the "Address" box contents as invisable, they know the contents will be any two of 'ureadable', 'meaningless' and 'confusing', hence they just ignore it completely.
Using a String which can be easily converted to an integer may offer a slight performance advantage over using a longer string which is slightly harder (hash() vs. to_int() ) to convert into an integer. However in the context of the average web application any performance difference would would be negligable.
My advice would be to stick with what your comfortable with.
Use something like modrewrite to parse URLs before they reach your server. So you could convert a slug like http://oorl.com/99942/My-Friendly-Text-For-Search-Engines/ into http://oorl.com/lookup.php?id=99942. This will also let you change slug and keywords used to optimize certain links without damaging functionality.
Duplicate refer cause more negative impact compare to friendly URL, be careful about using fake text with id, your competitors could miss use this.
Yes, and in fact it's more SEO friendly to include a number in your url as it implies to google that you are consistently updating your content.
I am fairly sure that it makes it much more difficult to get indexed in Google News if you don't have an incrementing number attached in some way to your URLs.
I am unlucky to be in charge of maintaining some old Yahoo! Store built using their RTML-based platform.
Recently I've noticed that HTML code generated by some RTML functions is sprinkled all over with "padding images" (or whatever is the conventional name for those 1x1 pixel images used to enforce layout). I have nothing against using such images, but... all those images are supplied with an ALT attribute like this:
<img href="http://.../image1x1.gif" alt="pad">
With all due respect to the original authors of RTML, but they must have been smoking something when they came up with this "accessibility enhancement"... :-(
Anyway, here are my questions:
Does anybody know a list of all RTML functions that generate HTML with all these "pad" images?
Is there any way to get rid of all those alt="pad" attributes without rewriting a lot of RTML code?
NB: This may sound a little cynical, but improved accessibility is not the main goal here. The main goal is to stop exposing those moronic alt="pad" attributes to Google and other smart search engines. So client-side scripting is not going to help, as far as I know.
Thank you!
P.S. Probably, most of you are really lucky and never heard of RTML. Because if somebody would establish a prize for software products based on
commercial success
------------------
usability
ratio, this RTML-based "platform" would probably win the first place.
P.P.S. Apparently someone from Yahoo! finally listened, because I can no longer find those silly "pad" tags in the RTML generated for our store. Nevertheless, one of the ideas offered in response to my original question does provide a very practical solution - not just to the original problem but to any similar problem with RTML platform. See the winning answer - it's really good.
The only way I see is to have your own website front-end that will filter whatever you want from the RTML site....
for example, your rtml site is at http://rtmlusglysite.yahoo.com/store/XYZ01134 , you could host a simple PHP front-end at http:://www.example.com that would be acting like a "filtering" HTTP web proxy, so http://rtmlusglysite.yahoo.com/store/XYZ01134/item1234.rtml would be accessed by http://www.example.com/item1234.html
It's not an ideal solution, but it should work, and you could do some more fancy stuff.
Nice try from the other posters, but there is a very simple RTML command that will do it. . .
TEXT PAT-SUBST s GRAB
MULTI
HEAD
BODY
TEXT #var-with-alt-tag-equals-pad-in-it
frompat "alt=\"pad\""
topat ""
The above RTML will find all instances of alt="pad" and replace it with nothing.
Well you're right on RTML being relatively untraveled :)
Do you have a way to add your own attributes to these images tags? If so, would it be possible to override the alt attribute? If you specify alt="", I would think that would override Yahoo's... Otherwise consider putting a useful alt tag in there for the blind and dialup types.
It's the first time I'm hearing about this platform, but here is an idea: if you can add javascript to the pages, you could write a function that will run after the page has loaded and remove all the alt="pad" attributes from the page.
Unfortunately this solutions works only with browsers that know about scripting, so lynx or some other text based browsers might not support it.
I have shared a link official RTML guide from yahoo. Hope it will help. Thanks!
List of available RTML books and resources