In the past few months all of the search engines, but especially Google have released or started supporting new ways of fixing site architecture issues. However IMHO these are band-aid solutions for bad site architecture, and not something you should rely on … at all.

In 2009 some of the big advances we’ve had the major search engines announce support for are things like the “rel=canonical” tag which allows you to tell a search engine this content at this URL may exist in more than one place, but you should credit it to one URL. Another new item is the ability to tell the search engines to ignore certain URL parameters. So if you’re using tracking parameters, session ID’s or other items you can now tell the search engines to ignore them entirely. There are many people who are happy to have these new tools, as it allows them to fix “issues” they have had for years. However I think these tools are crutches for lazy and incompetent programmers and developers, and should be avoided like the plague … and I’ll tell you why …

In the dawn of the public internet there where dozens of search engines that webmasters and publishers had to deal with, combine this with a lack of standards and the online publishing community had a lot of growing pains. When the dot-com bubble burst and the market consolidated we where really left with four big search engines. As Google pursued it’s relentless market domination, under the guise of a garage start-up bathed in the light of primary colored lava lamps, they stole the thunder of everyone else (coincidentally of course) and, established themselves as the ruling organization and defacto standards setting body, the rest of the world be dammed.

This is bad, as sloppy publishers and slip shod developers, now use google’s band-aid solutions, instead of developing websites and applications that don’t introduce problems that don’t need to exist in the first place. Case and point look at this URL from Forbes Magazine:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/20/live-well-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-hermes-paris-london-new-york.html?feed=rss_news

Notice the [feed=rss_news] part at the end, that enables Forbes to track where visitors came from, in this case RSS, most likely a feed reader. But now there’s the problem of that same content existing at two URL’s, remove the feed parameter and it still works:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/20/live-well-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-hermes-paris-london-new-york.html

Not to worry we can use the “rel=canonical” to point to the URL without the parameter, we can also use webmaster tools to tell it to ignore the “feed” parameter and we’re good to go right … wrong junior that’s two band-aids you needed to use instead of solving the problem properly. What you should have done is issue a 301 redirect at the server level to the correct URL, and not rely on the client or bot to figure things out. Need that parameter for tracking drop it in a cookie.

Why does this matter … as publishers we want to foster and build an environment that’s friendly for more than one search engine. Here’s an experiment, go try and append a meaningless imaginary parameter or two to a URL and submit it to a social site like Digg or Stumbleupon and see what happens. The simple fact is they aren’t sophisticated enough to parse it out as tracking parameter. Lots of other social sites are trying to gain access to your content as well, and by using substandard architecture you aren’t helping yourself. Your story will get votes in two places, decreasing its ability to go “go hot” or “popular” as its votes are spread over two URL’s.

While social search may be in it’s infancy, and may never overtake traditional search, the easier you make your content to crawl and understand for everyone and not just google, the better off you’ll be in the long run. Get out of the habit of relying on the crawling and indexing band-aids of search engines for your survival, learn to write clean code that makes you self reliant for your long term lively hood and success.

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Bad Architecture and Band-Aid Solutions

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If you’ve been involved in SEO for a while chances are you’ve heard the term google whacking. For those of you that haven’t basically it was coming up with a search term for a real word that had exactly one result. Due to the way Google does things now it’s nearly impossible, and hardly any fun to try and find one anymore. However with bing it’s entirely possible, and in some cases it looks intentional.Here’s an example go to Bing and do a search for [perez hilton] screen shot of my results below for reference.

Being a well known, popular, and controversial celebrity blogger, he really should have more results, for example check out google [perez hilton] and yahoo [perez hilton]. So have you seen any other intentional one listing only results in bing, if so drop them in the comments below …

off topic comments will deleted on sight, without prejudice or mercy
photo credit: bandita

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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I was browsing around Wikipedia and couldn’t help but laugh at the stupidity of some of Wikipedia’s editors, or wonder how Google can love thieves like these…

Wikipedia editors can’t spell, yet they want us to make a better ‘choise’ of words.

So let me get this straight. The content was garbage, but you still thought it was good to plagiarize it? That’s like watching Bruno and thinking he’s a role model! And of course, while you’re plagiarizing, you may as well link around to the rest of the crap content you stole and repurposed on the Wiki.
If you like this post, set up your Wordpress blog’s Internal Link Building plugin to autolink to this post with the anchor text Wikipedia . That way, whenever you mention Wikipedia, it’ll link here and help remind the world of Wikipedia.org’s high quality standards.
photo credit: Kelly Sue

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wikipedia: The Guide To Complete Idiots

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Today’s post deals with a much more harmless form of SEO Outting, accidental outting and invalidating testing. To teach this lesson I’m going to use a story …

Let’s assume for a minute your at a ball game or party and your friend comes back from the bathroom, and you notice their zipper is down. Because they are your friend you want to help them out, so in a normal voice you point at their crotch and say “excuse me but your zipper is down” … kudo’s to you for being a good friend right?

Well not really, because while your intentions may have been knoble, your execution had the opposite effect, as you just embarrassed your friend unnecessarily in public. A much better course of action would have been leaning in and whispering in their ear that they need to check their zipper, allowing them to correct the situation without alerting everyone around you. Got it … now that I’ve turned into Miss Manners what does that have to do with SEO …

We’re all familiar with the concept of outting someone, paid links, spamming, cloaking or any other search engine guideline offenses. Where you stand on that issue is hotly debated and I’m not wading into that quagmire. However in the same way that you can cause more damage by trying to help some one by loudly pointing out their fly is down, you can also cause damage trying to help someone by pointing out and linking to “strange” things on their website or blog.

In case you haven’t noticed I do a lot of testing here, in fact it was one of the main reasons I started the blog all those years ago. Some of the tests are pretty obvious, others are subtle so subtle you would never spot them for what they are, but most are somewhere in the middle. So if you see something odd going on here there’s a pretty high likelihood there is a test running. Some tests take longer than others, it’s just part of google slowing down the update cycle to put a damper on out ability to reverse engineer things.

How do you know a test from a wordpress hack … you don’t, but if you see something odd, you don’t twitter about it publicly, write about it on your blog, or worst of all link to it (no followed or not) from anywhere, it’s the same as pointing at my crotch and telling me my zipper is down. Really I’m pretty easy to get a hold of, there’s a contact form here and that phone icon in the sidebar will send a copy of your transcribed voicemail to me by email and SMS, so I’m not going to miss anything. You can ask in a roundabout way “you know it’s that guy in that place with the thing …” just don’t link to it ok, cause even though you are trying to help you just invalidated my experiment.

Lastly and only somewhat related, this blog is not a shining example of SEO Best practices, in reality it’s much closer to Dr. Frankenstein’s castle, with odd parts stitched together in ways they where never intended to be. There are lots of “mistakes” here, in fact there is no shortage of people who will call me out for being wrong. But sometimes when I do things “wrong” I do them that way on purpose, so let’s not send a team of OSHA experts to a mad scientists lab looking for violations … OK

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

SEO Testing – Is Your Zipper Down

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If you watched any of the congressional hearings about the newspaper industry where Marissa Mayer testified one of the concepts she brought up is Living URL’s. Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up on it on Search Engine Land. The basic concept is a story lives at a single URL and gets added to/edited/updated over time (the way wikipedia articles currently do). I took a stab at how to get from here to there in the comments, but after putting a little more thought behind it I’ve got another idea.

A word of warning this is an experiment in progress and should not be taken as solid, tested, or proven SEO best practices, your mileage may vary and if something breaks or goes haywire you have been warned.

OK so part of the problem is google news needs/wants a unique URL for each news story, especially if the facts have changed significantly that a new version of the story has to be written, which let’s be honest is the way a lot of news is reported/done. However this is in direct opposition to the “living URL” concept, so what I’m trying to accomplish is a workaround that is somewhat stable, and fits both conditions.

• Publish a story under a unique URL
• As the content becomes “aged” move it to “living URL”
• If new content need to be created repeat leaving the old/historical post in tact

If you’ll notice one of my goals isn’t to update the page, but just relocate and add the new content as needed. IMHO rewriting every time new data become available just ins’t workable. You can see an example of this in place on the Survivor pages on wikipedia ( grasp the concept people don’t get distracted by the content)

I decided to experiment with one of my more popular posts, the one on wordpress SEO Plugins. The first post I did was in 2006, and it ranked in the top 3, however it became outdated, and people kept asking for a new version. Eventually in 2008 I wrote one.  However the older post had more links so it always ranked higher, so I put up a note saying this post was old go here (much like Danny’s California Wildfire’s post). It wasn’t elegant but it got the job done. When I was looking around for something to experiment with the living URL’s on my wordpress SEO plugins seemed to be the perfect test. So I took these to pages and combined the content in reversed chronological order :

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/seo-plugins-for-wordpress/
http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/seo-plugins-for-wordpress-part-ii/

I put the combined content on a new page and set up 301 redirects to this page:

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo-plugins-wordpress/

At the time this post was written the 301’s haven’t taken affect for [wordpress SEO plugins] as the old post still shows. The primary reason is a technical issue which is worth sharing. I use WP cache to keep things running smoothly here. While it has a setting to “clear the cache when you publish new posts” it doesn’t seem to be working properly with scheduled posts, which 90% of the posts here are. So I had the set up the 301’s but because I didn’t clear the cache googlebot was still getting the old versions and not the redirect, good to know.

So right now this remains an experiment in progress, but is a concept I think you should watch going forward.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wordpress SEO: How to Create Living URL’s

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For this post we’re going to be taking  look at the optimal permalink and URL structures for wordpress. There are a lot of different options, and there isn’t a one size fits all answer, however there are definitely better and worse choices you can make.

Out of the box wordpress is configured like this

http://example.com?p=123

This really isn’t a permalink structure, it’s a parameter based format with “123″ being the post number. While all major search engines can crawl and index this it’s generally not an optimal setup. From an SEO perspective you miss the opportunity to give the search engines some keywords, and from a user experience you miss the opportunity to entice them with an information scent that they are on the right track. For example lets assume you were looking for hotels in Kentucky which URL gives you a clue you might find the information your wanted on the page:

http://example1.com?p=1234

http:// example2.com/kentucky-hotels/

Another common implementation involves putting some or all of the date in the post URL, like these two examples:

http://example.com/2009/09/16/sample-post/
http://example.com/20090916-sample-post/

The first example creates a heirarchy based on year, day, month, this is really unneccesary in most situations. If you are going to add words/numbers to your url’s they should have a reason and/or keyword value. Unless the date is important to the majority of the keywords or terms you are trying to rank for, they are decoration. In fact if you publish a lot of evergreen content, having the date may work against you. Many users have a bias for “new” content, and are more likely to click something newer over something older (I use date based hooks to stop showing the date in the text on older posts). In the second example you aren’t creating a directory structure but you are including the date. This is less dangerous, but if you change your production schedule and the date of publication, you may create some 404 errors if posts were interlinked, so again I’d avoid using it, unless you have a really good reason.

Another common implementation involves categories like this:

http://example.com/baking/apple-pies/

On the surface this implementation looks ok, but there are some downsides, for example if you like to put posts in two categories your post can exist at two URL’s like:

http://example.com/baking/apple-pies/
http://example.com/dessert/apple-pies/

The problem is BOTH url’s will work, the second is wordpress chooses which is the “primary” one, not you. Another disadvantage is if you decide to rename/consolidate/change your categories you’ve got a massive 301 project on your hands. However one advantage of this set up is that you can exclude some directories via robots.txt file. A variation of this technique is :

http://example.com/baking/1234/

Unless you are going to have a massive number of posts, or posts with very similar titles (you may have 15 different apple pie recipes for example) I’d opt for the keyword over the post number.

One last combination I’d like to look at is :

http://example.com/post-title/

The advantage of this configuration is it’s very short and has keywords, however if you have more than one post with the same name, wordpress will automatically add a number onto the end like this:

http://example.com/post-title-2/

This isn’t horrible but something to keep in the back of your mind. Something to be aware of using this strategy, you won’t be able to exclude files by directory in the robots file, you’ll need do it by single post or use the meta data. One additional bit of information I’d like to throw into the mix is consideration for google news. If you ever think there might be the remote possibility you’ll want to get into google news add a unique 3 digit number into the structure, I prefer to append the post number after the page title (words at the front have more KWD value so put the place holder numbers at the end):

http://example.com/post-title-567/

You could use the date instead of the number, just be sure to consider how changing publishing date can affect other links (like if an embargo is broken and you decide to publish early too, linked posts might be broken).

My recommendations are, post title & post number followed by category & post title, here are few other points to keep in mind:

• Try to stay in the 3-5 word range whenever possible, including the category
• Eliminate stop words whenever possible
• use your URL to incorporate KWD variations

PS: having done more than my fair share of .asp and .html to php migrations I always leave the file extensions off, there are workarounds, but I have a strong personal bias to do something once and do it right …

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wordpress SEO: How to Choose a Permalink Structure

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When you run wordpress or any other blog for that matter, chances are your blog is getting scraped, and re-used without your permission. In this post I’ll show you how you can use this to your advantage to build links with the anchor text of your choice.

The first step you need to take is to make sure you are publishing a full feed. I know this sounds counterintuitive, as publishing a full feed will actually encourage more people to scrape your feed, but that’s exactly what you want to happen.

Next you’ll need the RSS Footer plugin from Joost de Valk. By default the plugin links back to your home page with the name of your blog, and back to the individual post with the post title as the anchor text. This helps the search engines figure out who is the source of the blog post.

However you can take this plugin to a whole new level by also adding in links to different parts of your blog (or another website) with the anchor text that you put in. Initially I used this plugin in test mode to help me rank for the term [seo blog]. Once I had established that worked as proof of concept it was on to something more competitive. I’m now using it help me rank for the phrase [seo consultant].

Some important aspects of using this strategy, you don’t want to leave the anchor text, links, or surrounding text in place to long, you want to change it somewhere between every 30-90 days. This helps your backlink profile look more natural, and helps the scrapers from filtering out your links with pattern matching. Second go ahead and use it to build links for commercial terms, but don’t be greedy about it. Stuffing it full of  30 links pretty much shines a big spotlight on what you are doing, keeping it down to to 2-4 links keeps it from attracting too much attention.

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wordpress SEO: How to Use RSS and Scrapers to Build Links

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In recent weeks wordpress security, or more correctly the lack of wordpress security has been getting a lot of attention. While most people consider this a site maintenance issue, it has implications that affect your SEO efforts, in this post I’ll explain why, and look at some things you can do to protect yourself, and reduce the damage.

From a security standpoint wordpress has always been a piece of swiss cheese, with lots of security holes in it. As wordpress grows in popularity it’s attracting the attention of hackers at an alarming level. In June of 2009 wordpress released version 2.8.0, four months later we’re at wordpress 2.8.4, that’s four interim security related updates in four months. While wordpress has always been very quick to issue patches, they have done very little to prevent any of these hacks from happening in the first place. In this author’s opinion this represents nothing less than gross incompetence on wordpress’s part. Even more tragic is that this is a top down failure on the part of the entire wordpress development team, and isn’t likely to change anytime soon, so it’s imperative you understand the problem and all of it’s implications.

From a pure SEO perspective, the optimal wordpress setup is to use wordpress as a subfolder in the main site (http://example.com/blog), as this allows you to consolidate any inbound link equity into your main domain, increasing your overall trust and authority scores. From a security standpoint this is the most dangerous as many publishers will use the same database for wordpress as they do for their main domain customer, product, and transaction records. If  login or access to the admin panel is comprimised, the hacker has access to all of your data. All they need to do is install the PHP MyAdmin plugin and they have full access to your database records to copy, modify, or delete at will, scary I know. Depending on the level of the compromise the hacker may also have access to your file system, to copy, modify or delete your entire website, even more scary.

The slightly suboptimal SEO implementation, consists of placing wordpress on a subdomain (http://blog.example.com) . The link equity is still shared with the main domain, but it’s not as effective as a subfolder is. From a security standpoint you can isolate your subdomain more effectively than a subfolder. The truly paranoid can even have the subdomain and database on a completely different server or hosting company by changing an A-Name record. With this type of implementation you’ve traded a lot of link equity for a lot of increased security.

The complete security zealots can go with a blog on a completely different domain (http://exampleblog.com) with almost zero chance of  a wordpress hack influencing or compromising your main database or website. However this implementation is only useful in very few SEO situations. With this setup you have sacrificed almost all of the SEO value in the name of security.

Is it is possible to retain the SEO value, without completely sacrificing security, here are my tips on how to do it.

Backups: Ok technically backups aren’t part of security, but if something does go wrong, backup are your safety net. I use wp-DB-backups, to send a backup of all of my important database tables to an email account every night. This way I can roll back to whatever day I want. At the end of every month I archive the backups from the 1st and the 15th and delete the rest.

Database Isolation: You should always have your wordpress database isolated from all of your other databases, with different usernames and passwords. Worst case scenario the only thing a hacker can do would be to screw up your WP blog database, as long as you have the backups you can minimize the damage to your blog.

Change Detection: Chances are you already have an “about” or other static information page that changes very infrequently or never changes at all. Use a service like ChangeDetection.com to monitor it for changes and have it send you an email/SMS as soon as it happens. If someone injects a bunch of poker links in your footer this will let you know sooner rather than later. You can also use google alerts to alert you if something managed to slip by.

Block Brute Force Login Hacks: Sometimes automated programs will try to hack your username and password combinations. The Login Lockdown plugin can help prevent that. After a specified number of failed attempts the IP is banned for 30 minutes. Hackers will move on to something else. Every once in while you will lock yourself out if you change and forget your password, in that case you’ll need Emergency.php which lets you change your password and gain access. If you use this DELETE IT RIGHT AWAY or else someone could use it to gain access.

Limit Access With htaccess: If you’re comfortable working with htaccess, you can use it to grant access to the admin panel based on IP. If you don’t have a static IP, travel a lot, or have authors or editors without static IP’s this won’t work for you.

Social Engineering: Set up an account with admin priviledges but without the “admin” username, then delete the admin account. Use strong passwords, and don’t use the same password for all of you logins. If you’re old and suffer from short term memory loss try a password formula to help. Don’t give anyone who doesn’t need admin status admin status. Don’t give anyone who doesn’t need editor or author status editor or author status. Uncheck the “allow anyone to register” box unless you need to leave it checked. If you do need to let anyone register, put a captcha plugin on the page to keep the bots at bay.

Updates: Keep your blog and plugin as up to date as possible. Sometimes updating right away breaks plugin, so it’s a catch 22. But if you lag behind you have no one to blame but yourself when hackers do get in.

Using these suggestion in most cases you can maximize the SEO value of a blog by keeping on your main domain, and be reasonably sure the damage hackers can inflict is minimal, and your ability to spot it quickly recover from it is very very high.

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wordpress SEO: Wordpress Security Why it Matters to SEO

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While there are hundreds of thousands of posts on maximizing external links for your blog, like a red headed step child no one pays much attention to internal links. Internal links can be very powerful in helping you distribute the link equity that those external links bring, and they can decrease your bounce rate and increase your page views per visitor by sending your visitors to other pages. In this post we’ll take a look at some tools that help you link internally more effectively.

To be clear in this post we’re talking about links within the body or post area of your pages, and we’re talking about linking to pages within your website. Secondly before you put this strategy into action you’re going to have to make some decisions about site architecture. If you’re using your robots.txt file or “noindex” meta tags to block category, tag and date archives from the search engines from picking up duplicate content you may have to revist your thinking, as you don’t want to feed the spiders links to pages they can’t index.

To get an idea of what really good internal linking looks like take a look at this post on lifehacker, it’s filled with mostly internal links, since it’s a pretty helpful bit of linkbait information chances are it will secure a lot of  external links, and pass the equity on to the other pages. There are two ways you can do this effectively, automatically and manually, and we’ll look at both.

Chances are you’ve come across blogs where lots of words are always linked to internal pages such as the words [new mexico] on this post from Gadling. If you are running on the wordpress platform you can do this really easily with the cross linker plugin. Basically you set up words and tell it to automatically link to a preset page everytime it finds the word(s) in a post. This makes it really easy for a publisher as it’s a hands off operation once you set up the link. However from a user perspective, it can be problematic  at times. Let’s assume you have a travel blog and want to set up the word [Washington] to automatically link to a page you have about Washington state, no brainer right? Except if you write about Valley Forge where George Washington was camped, or you write about the Washington Monument, or about an article in the Washington Post. In each of those cases the word [Washinton] would have been automatically linked, but it would be awkward for the user as the link doesn’t match the context. You can override the autolinking, but it’s cumbersome, time consuming, and defeats the purpose. So if you use this solution use it sparingly and at a very high level.

A more manual aproach comes from the Insights Wordpress plugin. This plugin allows you to search your blog (or other external sources as well) from within the edit post page (see screen shot below)

Type in any term and it searches your blog for posts. If you highlight the words from the post, copy and paste and then hit the chain/pencil icon it takes care of the linking for you … automagically. While this approach takes more time, it avoids the awkward out of context links that I showed you in the first example. If you’re careful with which words you interlink, always use keywords, and avoid “this post” types of anchor text, you’ll help yourself focus your internal anchor text.

Lastly when you implement this tactic resist the temptation to link too many words, whether you do it automatically or manually. If you do it too much you end up looking a lot like a bad wikipedia entry, with too many links, that no one knows where to click to go next.

PS: yes I’m aware I used “this post” when linking to other people, but told you to avoid it, but of course internal and external links serve different purposes now don’t they …

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wordpress SEO: How to Maximize Your Internal Link Strategy

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Recently I’ve been experimenting with a plugin for checking broken links, on several of my blogs, and I’m fascinated by what I’ve discovered.The plugin is called, obviosly enough, Broken Link checker, what it does is periodically run through all of your posts and blogroll and checks for broken links. You can put a widget on your wordpress dashboard page so that you can see what the status is everytime you login.

Having over 8000 outbound links, and over 6500 unique outbound links, I fully expected the first time I ran the plugin, it would discover several hundred broken links, which it did. What I didn’t expect was to find anywhere from 20 to 50 broken links every week!

When you click thru on the broken link report you’re presented with a screen similar to what’s shown below (click to enlarge)

Now it’s important to remeber that websites go down temporarily, and if that happens to be when your link checker was running, you are going to get a false positive, so I suggest you actually check the broken link. You’ve got several choices you can hit the Discard link (which removes it from the report but doesn’t do anything else). Hitting Details gives you more info about the broken link, Unlink removes the link, Exclude removes it from all future reports (in case you hit a site that blocks the checking), and Edit URL lets you change the URL to point somewhere else.

There are a lot of times when I run the job and check the results, and I find that site owners have removed, changed, or relocated the content, without properly handling the 301 redirect. It’s not just small sites who may not be tech savvy, it’s sites of all sizes, in some cases even military, government sites, and heaven forbid OLD GOOGLE HELP FILES (queue dramtic soap opera music).

In most cases I will try to relocate the correct URL, but if I can’t find it after a few tries, unless I really like you, or it’s really important for the user experience, I’m just going to kill the link. As an SEO everytime a link gets killed, it’s sad. That’s why as an SEO it’s important to understand good site architecture.

• The number one rule of site architecture is getting it right the first time, if you can, set up a site architecture so you can grow and expand in the future, without needing to radically change your URL’s. Keep file extensions like .html, .php, .jsp and other out of your URL’s so you don’t have to change them if you change the underlying programming technology (or maintain them using htaccess overrides). This can be especially hard if you change CMS’s or use shopping carts, but in the end it’s really worth the effort, so you don’t lose the links.
• Manage your redirects. You want to use a 301 and avoid chaining them together. I’ve worked on site’s where I’ve seen one URL request pass through 4 or more 301 redirects. It may work from a user experience, but I’m not convinced it works from a search engine, link equity standpoint. However if you follow rule number one and get it right the first time, you really will avoid most of this problem.
• Consolidate dead pages. A lot of times for marketing efforts pages need to be created that have a very short lifespan. Ideally you would want to keep the page up and put up a note that says the page info has expired, however CEO’s, Marketing managers, and legal departments don’t agree. if that’s the case, redirect the URL up one level to the root, to a more appropriate page, or to the homepage. The worse thing you can do is let it 404 and lose the link equity you gained.

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Checking for Broken Links and Link Rot and the Importance of Good Site Architecture

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