Posted by ljmacphee on April 5, 2007 under blogger, blogging, how to, search engine | 
Using your own domain name for your blog instead of something.blogspot.com will help you with search engine ratings, it will make it easier for people to remember and find your site and people will take your site more seriously.
Go Daddy will register a domain for you for $7/year.
Blogger help for domain names gives very specific, very detailed directions for pointing your domain name to your something.blogspot.com blog. Be patient and follow each step exactly and it’s a painless process.
Posted by ljmacphee on March 15, 2007 under how to, search engine |
I am moving the old website into 7 new websites, then revamping the old one. So as I’m copying old pages from the website I’m redirecting them to the new site. Search engines really hate it when you move pages. Best to keep as much intact as you possibly can. ( see Cool URIs don’t change )
If you must move pages than the best way to do this is and not upset the search engines is to edit your .htaccess file in your website root directory. You just add lines at the end or create a new file and start at the top.
redirect 301 /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://www.newwebsite/newfile.html
Be sure to put one and only one space between each item.
Test and then test again before deleting the old files. Also make sure your web browser is not delivering a cached copy. I spent the better part of an hour trying to fix some re-directs that weren’t broken. The browser was just serving up the cached copy of the file.
There are other ways to do this with scripts and html in each file. But those methods were heavily used by spammers and may get your search engine ranking dropped if you use them.
Posted by ljmacphee on March 14, 2007 under search engine |
We are going to begin to clean up and revamp TimesToCome. We will first redo the robots.txt file to mark off directories and pages that we don’t want to see on the search engines.
To prevent pages on your site from being indexed by robots you can use the robots META TAG or you can include those pages in robots.txt
Put robots.txt in the root directory of your website. Include pages you only intend to use in iframes or other such pages that are not intended to be viewed and indexed separately.
robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/
Disallow: /private.html
Disallow: /directory/donotinclude.html
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
You can specifically block off specific search engines or you can use ‘*’ to block off all search engines.
Disallow: tells the robots not to go to that file or directory. Not all robots are well behaved and will follow the robots.txt rules, but the main ones you know and love will do so.
/directory/ will block off a specific directory
/file.html will block off a specific file
And or you can include this in the head part of any documents you do not wish to be indexed.
< META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” >
More information:
The Web Robots Pages
Google Webmaster Blog: Speaking the language of robots
Posted by ljmacphee on February 22, 2007 under search engine, tools, useful sites |
The internet changed while I was busy doing other things.
Now most search engines are looking for ’sitemaps’. This is an xml file that provides a map of your website to the search engine.
XML-Sitemap will generate one for a small site (less than 500 files ) for free or you can buy the software for $15 if you have a larger site. I tried the software and it worked well.
WebMaster Tools-Free XML Sitemap Generator will also generate a site map. They have a very nice applet tool that generates site maps and provides you with a list of broken links on your site. I found I had some house cleaning to do on TimesToCome.
Once you have your site map ( sitemap.xml ) you’ll want to submit it to google using the webmaster tools and upload it into the root directory of your website.
Sitemap FAQs