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.

My last January 2004 post:

Previosly, the keyword “ESL” was mentioned once in my ESL site’s title and heading. I recently changed the title so that it’s now mentioned 3 times: ESL go - free English as a second language: learning ESL + teaching ESL.

What kind of affect has this had? Not as significant an effect as I would have hoped. I seem to have moved up about 15 spots, from the mid-nineties to #80. Google has also registerd about 40 new links to my site (though my page rank is still 6) so link popularity may have also fueled the increase.

It’s not too different 4+ years later: “ESL - English as a second language learning & teaching ESL”

I haven’t looked at the title in years so it’s probably time to reevaluate. The site is #5 for ‘teaching ESL’ and I bet that if I remove that from the title I will lose a few spots. I like the learning, because I need people to know that the site is for both teachers and students when they see it listed in the serps. I may not change the title at all.

Anyway, SEO tip for choosing a title. Make it keywords or phrases you want to and can rank for. Also make sure it gives people a reason to click on your site when they do find it in the SERPs.