SEO Search Engine Ranking Blog

On Feb. 27, 2004 I was just beginning to understand that search engines were dumb enough to consider to identical sites to be different sites if they had different urls:

Here’s a good explanation of the problems that can arise from having links to “http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/” and “http://seo-search-engine-ranking.com/”. 

The problem arises because search engines think they’re looking at different URLs and therefore different sites. Most webmasters can use a .htaccess file to solve the problem. It’s all here.

The answer is a bit of htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The new version of that old article is here: Canonicalization Errors

Now, of course, duplicate content is a huge issue. Webmasters with content have trouble protecting it from those who want to steal it. Search engines don’t know which sites to point to because they don’t know who the content really belongs to.

The old issues are, as far as I know, still problematic. I haven’t heard that having links to http://www.site.com and http://site.com will combine their link popularity - if they don’t then you need all the links pointing to just one site in order not to dilute link juice. Since you don’t control the links on other people’s sites, the htaccess code is the way to go.

Originally from January 28, 2004

My reciprocal links page for ESL go has 4 links (all from other eslgo.com pages). and a page rank of 5. The links:

www.eslgo.com - page rank 6 (5 external, many internal links)
www.eslgo.com/sitemap.html - page rank 5 (no external, many internal links)
www.eslgo.com/tlinks.html - page rank 5 (about 50 external and a few internal links)
www.eslgo.com/slinks.html - page rank 5 (about 50 external and a few internal links)

It used to have a page rank of 4 with the same exact links (none of which have changed rank or (substantially) the number of outbound links (which increased a little bit). It seems like the page rank increased over time.

My ESL blog has a rank of 4 with these 5 links:

www.eslgo.com/ - page rank 6
www.eslgo.com/tlinks.html - page rank 5
www.esl-blog.com/ - just itself
songsforteaching.homestead.com/ LinksESLBilingualMulticultural.html - page rank 4 (5 external links) - at one point this was the only page google recognized linking to my site. ESL blog had a rank of 1 at that time.
www.literacyconnections.com/ LinksESLMulticulturalBilingual.html - page rank 4 (6 external links)

I would have guessed that ESL blog would have a better rank (due to the external links). I wonder if (supposing the links stayed exactly the same), the page rank would increase after a month or so.

I was trying to figure out why my reciprocal links page on eslgo.com had higher PR than my esl-blog.com site. I thought that in time, if the links stayed the same, PR on the esl-blog would meet or exceed the reciprocal links page. While we do know that old links are good, I don’t think that line of thoguht ever led anywhere.

I’ve since given up on Google PageRank and reciprocal link pages.

Here is my second ever post on this blog according to archive.org.

I recently realized something I’ve been doing wrong since I started ESL go.com - English as a second language learning and teaching and that is the text of the hyperlinks. For example a link like ESLgo doesn’t help for the keyword ESL. That’s why a domain name like esl-go might have been better. Now I realize the problem and ask people to put ESL go in the text link. Of course other ESL sites don’t want me to do better in the search engines so I get annoyed dealing with webmasters who insist on eslgo for my site’s link text.

Another thing I realized is that graphic links don’t contain any keywords. Master of the obvious eh? On my site, I have a graphic header and drop down menus for a footer, and in the end my 250 pages of internal links don’t help me out with key words at all. The header has to stay, but my footer will be redesigned to consist of keyword rich text links.

What we need to add to the January 23, 2004 discussion is that graphic links have alt text and some people theorize that alt text counts as anchor text.

Also, variety shows search engines your links are natural. So if every link says “sports betting online” search engines know something weird is going on. But if some say “sports betting” others say “sports betting online” others say “sports betting tips” some say “click here” some say “this site” some are image links, etc. then search engine bots should see a site that is naturally integrated into the fabric of the web.

At least I’ve learned something in the past 4.5 years…