This is a thread to discuss the article "The Beginner's Guide to Onsite Search Engine Optimization (SEO)".

Have something to say about the article? Need more help? Post your questions and comments here!

Content is key. back links are key.
And duplicate content is bad bad bad

what if you have multiple links on your site to 1 page, but you name them different?
Like on my site, I COULD do the following:

p6.html is where all the content goes
make link "This is some cool content", linking to "this-is-some-cool-content-p6.html" AND
make link "Sweet stuff ahead", linking to "sweet-stuff-p6.html"
and so on..

Would that be dupe content? They all link to the same page eventually..

are you saying have 3 pages which Google spider with the same content, because that is dupe

So, are you saying they do a 301 redirect to the final page? If that's the case, it would not be considered dup content. But, I really don't see how it's going to help you. Redirecting Google 3 or 4 times, and your users would become annoying! I'm not even sure it would make that much of a difference. I would just recommend sticking to the points in the article, and not doing anything that Google may or may not like.

Yes that is duplicate content. I would avoid that. Google does make some room for duplicate content. For instance if you keep repeating your return policy on each page. However it's best not to send up any yellow flags at all.

What? No, it would not be dup content. You are doing a 301 Moved Permanently redirect, informing Google that this page has moved to a new location. Doing this from page to page with all different keywords like you are suggesting would not help at all, but it certainly would not be considered dup content. It would just be like telling Google....

page-with-lots-of-keywords.html -> page-with-different-keywords.html -> p1.html

Google from that point forth will only link to p6.html, and will disregard the other links.

For those of you that have no idea what a 301 redirect is....



Hope that helps!

Don't do that, that is bad seo

Jacob I wasn't referring to your post, I was referring to Mark's(delusion) now Mark Poppens!
His original post the way it was written would have been duplicating content imo. I was not referring to 301 redirects.


Simon I was referring to something like "All purchases are final" listed on each page. Google would not penalize for something like that.

Sorry Linda. Miss read it

What's a dynamically produced URL and what code would you add to the .htaccess file?

.php is dynamic. .html is static.

Think that's what it means. Don't bite my head off though if I'm wrong.

A dynamically produced url would be http://www.site.com/page.php?topic=About_Houses

An SEO friendly URL would be http://www.site.com/About_Houses

This is done using mod_rewrite. The exact content of this depends on what you are rewriting.

Thankfully, this is one less thing I have to worry about as none of my stuff is php.

Thank you both for the explanation, very much appreciated, as always.

No, it has nothing to do with the file extension.

The server stuff goes on behind the scenes. Let's say you build a page in PHP from different included code blocks (such as using a common header and footer). You can also do stuff like declare a variable $title = "All about tigers", which then gets used for the page's <h1>All about tigers</h1> and <title>All about tigers | Daniel's menagerie</title>.

Both of these are time-saving devices. The server then generates the page according to your PHP instructions, but it's still a static page from Google's perspective: Google doesn't see what the server is doing (neither do your users). Google just sees the result: a static web page.

The problem occurs when the page changes depending on variables. For example, when a shopping site dynamically populates a page with products from a database, depending on the user's past shopping history or other preferences. These pages often have a large number of query strings: www.shopping.com/products.php?gender=male?lastViewedProduct=partyThong?highlighted=?libidoDrugs?suggestions=condoms+antibiotics

The point here is that the page content is not static. It's determined by variables, which then cause suitable content to be retrieved from a database and plugged into the page. In principle, an entire website such as Amazon.com could consist of one "physical" page and an ungodly number of variables. Instead of linking to a new page, you could just change the variables and pull in new content from the database.

This breaks the principle of the page as the atomic unit of the web. It's much easier for Google to index pages with static content.

So it doesn't really matter what the server does before handing the page over to Google/the user. What matters is whether the resulting page content is the same each time.

Google does attempt to crawl pages with query strings (?gender=male), but advises that webmasters limit the number of such strings. Straight from the horse's mouth:

I did say don't bite my head off

That was just a friendly nibble.

None of you guys has ever seen me BITE.

Brilliant article, and a superb guide for anyone getting started with optimising a page!

With regards to the comments above there is actually a theory that search engines favour static file extensions (.htm) to dynamic ones (.php/.asp/etc) because static content is more 'trustworthy' and less likely to be dynamically generated by spammers, which is why some companies rewrite all extensions to .htm

As an example, I SEO'd http://www.thesanctuary.co.uk which is built fully in ASP.NET but rewrites everything to .htm

[Edit] Which by the way, used to rank number 3 for the word 'spa' when I was working on it - not any more though!

This post has been edited by EggManJohn: Oct 16 2008, 06:50 PM

Why thank you !