"permanent redirects" for my domain name - CONFUSION

Dangleman

Dangleman

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Dan
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Morning web experts

I'm currently slaving away trying to improve the SEO of my new website. Amongst various issues I'm encountering, when using a website analyser tool one of the things thrown up was the message below:

"Permanent Redirect Not Found
Search engines may think www.dandphotography.co.uk and dandphotography.co.uk are two different sites. You should set up a permanent redirect (technically called a "301 redirect") between these sites. Once you do that, you will get full search engine credit for your work on these sites."

So:

A) Should I do this? Any risks involved?
B) If I should be doing this, how?
 
Yes, you should be, otherwise, as said, the search engines will see two sites and duplicate content (which they'll then penalise you for.)

If you're hosted on Linux, you can use this code in a .htacess dropped in the root folder (usually either public_html, www, htdocs, or similar)

Code: 
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
 
As I understand it (and I'm no SEO expert by any means) it's best to use just one version of your web address. I went for the www. version as I think it looks better on business cards etc but it makes no difference which to SEO.

The way I did it was to edit my .htaccess so that whenever anyone tries to access markrichardson.co.uk/anything it will send them to www.markrichardson.co.uk/anything

This seems to work and I'm first page on google organic for my main search terms.
 
I'm too slow - I use a similar code to the one mattyh uses, but because I use add on domains on my server too I had to modify it a little.

If you need any help with the detail feel free to ask (though mattyh seems to know what he's talking about too so maybe you should ask him!)
 
Gah. This is getting quite annoying. I've switched hosts recently from 1&1 to CMD (who now host my site etc) and my site rankings are actually worse than they used to be (I made a post a few weeks ago about it).

This could be the key though, thanks folks!

I must say though, when you buy into a 'template site' like CMD I shouldn't have to worry about all this nonsence and my tech understanding is fairly limited so any help much appreciated.

Would I be best asking CMD to sort it out for me (I do have ftp access to the root of my site, but I don't want to break anything)

*EDIT* - I should add that my domain name is still registered and controlled with 1&1 but my site is hosted with CMD (creative motion design). Does this make a difference as to what should be done where????
 
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mattyh said:
Ooh.. If you're using addon domains you should put it in the root for THAT domain... Otherwise you'll likely bork half the sites on your hosting... Been there, done that :D

LOL It's only stuff I've picked up on my internet based travels Mark :)
Click to expand...

I only know as much about web stuff as I've picked up fixing my own problems too...still it seems to be a good way to learn!

I've actually set up so that my one .htaccess in the main publicHTML root folder redirects all non-www addresses to www addresses regardless of domain. (not so many worries about breaking things as all of the other sites I have are virtually identical - each couple I shoot for currently get a mini-site at their own domain)

Dangleman said:
Gah. This is getting quite annoying. I've switched hosts recently from 1&1 to CMD (who now host my site etc) and my site rankings are actually worse than they used to be (I made a post a few weeks ago about it).

This could be the key though, thanks folks!

I must say though, when you buy into a 'template site' like CMD I shouldn't have to worry about all this nonsence and my tech understanding is fairly limited so any help much appreciated.

Would I be best asking CMD to sort it out for me (I do have ftp access to the root of my site, but I don't want to break anything)
Click to expand...

I've never heard of CMD so can't really comment on how helpful they are likely to be, but most decent hosts would happily make a minor change like this to the .htaccess file. Drop them an email explaining what you want and they'll probably do it.

The other thing to bear in mind is, if you've just had a new site design as part of the move, it may be that your new site is not so search engine friendly - if you post a link here I'm sure people would happily take a look.
 
Thanks Mark

CMD (creative motion design) are similar to bluedomain - 'flashy' flash based websites popular with pro togs.
I went with CMD as part of the package includes an html splash page, html mirror site and auto detect html iphone/ mobi site.

As such I was expecting my new site to perform a lot better in search results due to these html features. My old site was entirely flash but actually performed better (for some search parameters) than my new site which is confusing me.

(My site by the way is www.dandphotography.co.uk)
 
I don't know what your important search phrases are, but looking at that site (the HTML version) I couldn't figure out at all what your keywords would be.

You seem to have a couple of long lists of keywords on both the home page and the about you page, which might well look to google like keyword stuffing (which is frowned upon).

You would be better off having a clearer idea what you want to have on the home page, and then for other search terms having a separate page optimised for that.

No idea how much flexibility you have with the site construction though.
 
markrichardson said:
I don't know what your important search phrases are, but looking at that site (the HTML version) I couldn't figure out at all what your keywords would be.

You seem to have a couple of long lists of keywords on both the home page and the about you page, which might well look to google like keyword stuffing (which is frowned upon).

You would be better off having a clearer idea what you want to have on the home page, and then for other search terms having a separate page optimised for that.

No idea how much flexibility you have with the site construction though.
Click to expand...

It's quite difficult for me to pin down keywords too. I'm a commercial and editorial photographer and I cover a pretty wide area as it says on my site (ie Lancashire, Yorkshire the northwest and beyond if needs be).

I figure I need to get a lot of 'place names' on the html splash page to try and get this across/ do better in searches. However, I am worried about potential keyword stuffing - do you think this is pushing it?

Did you look at the html version of the about page? That is slightly different to the flash version and does contain a sort of 'list' at the end agreed. Again do you think I may be getting slightly penalised for this?

As it's a 'template site' I don't have a lot of flexibility unfortunately, and the html version of the site looks pretty poor. I think the CMD rationale is for the html mirror site to be working away in the background but you don't show it to clients! However, I'm not sure how effective this mirror site actually is...
 
The mirror site is (at the moment at least) pretty important if you have a flash site - partly because Google still doesn't do a great job of getting text content out of flash sites, and for people with no flash (corporate networks often don't have flash installed)

As I said, I'm not SEO expert, but I look at the list of place names and it seems meaningless. You'd be better off having multiple 'copies' of your home page, each focussed on a smaller area (or ideally just one place) (e.g. dandphotography.co.uk/bradford_commercial_photographer). You'll need to have slightly different content on each, but it wouldn't be too huge an investment in time. SEO speak for this is long-tailed search optimisation.
 
How does the site "detect" if the crawler/viewer has flash installed or not?

I can't view the site (at work), but if G isn't picking up the html mirror (and it's possible), then you won't be getting indexed from it, and obviously the flash site is bringing you down in the SERPS

Mark's given you some good advice for various page options, which I would consider doing too
 
The sitemap only lists the html versions of the pages so it should pick those up. Might be worth putting a link to the html version on the splash page so that it's possible to follow links from your home page to the html version.

Long term I'd suggest looking to get rid of the splashpage and just having code to detect flash and redirect accordingly to the appropriate version of the home page. For that to work though, you'd need to have better content on your home page.
 
Thanks you two - really appreciate this.

I've now added a link to the html version of the site to the splash page. Will google be able to 'follow' this more easily now? Will the fact I've added this help google trawl and index my site better?

Template sites like CMD are really restrictive, understandably I guess. At the moment the html 'splash page' is the only thing I can tweak slightly but even that's quite difficult and limited, and a must to keep for the moment due to the content limitations within the CMD site.

This "multiple 'copies' of your home page" business - could you guys elaborate on that a bit more. I thought this was exactly the sort of thing google penalised you for, but maybe I'm not understanding it right (very possible :))

I have ftp access to the root level of my site (I think it's root level). Would I just create some simple pages ending in .htm and upload them there eg

dandphotography.co.uk/manchester_commercial_photographer.htm
dandphotography.co.uk/leeds_commercial_photographer.htm
dandphotography.co.uk/bradford_commercial_photographer.htm
etc
etc
 
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I would create each of those pages (using the current index.html file as a template), and change the content for each page, so you're not duplicating the content.

It's a bit naughty, but as long as the content is substantially different, you're unlikely to suffer any penalty. If you just change the town names, you could be on a bit of a sticky wicket with the big G :D
 
Yep - that's the idea.

As long as the content changes (ideally both text and images, but certainly text) it should help your ranking for those search terms.
 
Hmmm. Problem is I can't actually see the index.html file when I ftp my site. Does this mean if I tried to upload new pages to the level I can actually see/ access it would be wrong and of no use?

I can and have uploaded files to what I assumed was the root level of the site though eg a favicon and some pdf files. For example you can access dandphotograpy.co.uk/terms.pdf absolutely fine.

Also, would the new pages need to end in .html or .htm ?
 
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OK guys, as a very quick and dirty test - based on my current splash page code I made a new text file, changed the content a bit (only listing Manchester as location etc) and saved it as:

manchester_commercial_photographer.html

I then FTP'd this to the root (or lowest level I can access!) of my CMD site and...

you now see this at: http://www.dandphotography.co.uk/manchester_commercial_photographer.html

Is this along the right lines? So I could create multiple versions of these for different towns/ areas (making sure to change the image and the text enough for each one) and upload them all to the root of my site?

Will this definitely help with search results?

I'm really worried about getting slapped by google though. The fact that I might create page(s) with addresses like that above, but have no actual text on a page that links to each of these specific pages - will this be a problem?
 
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This is along the right lines, but you really need more text - ideally more descriptive of your service rather than just listing words...sort of more of a narrative.

Google won't penalise you as long as each page is different. To be certain you could put a different image on each of them too. Then all of the content is different and it's just the navigation and background that are the same (and clearly that's expected).
 
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