Internet Marketing Survival by Praveen Kumar C

Google  have answered few basic questions from users on how to handle redirections and 404 error pages. Here are those interesting questions,

• Recently, I did some spring cleaning on my site and deleted a couple of old, orphaned pages. They now return the 404 “Page not found” code. Is this ok, or have I confused you?
• I was just reading your reply to Frankie above, and it raised a couple of questions.What if I have someone linking to a page that no longer exists? How can I make sure my visitors still find what they’re after? Also, what if I just move some pages around? I’d like to better organise my site, but I’m worried you’ll get confused. How can I help you?
• I have a problem—I live in a very dynamic part of the web, and I keep changing my mind about things. When you ask me questions, I never respond the same way twice—my top threads change every hour, and I get new content all the time! You seem like a straightforward guy who wants straightforward answers. How can I tell you when things change without confusing you?
• I am the kind of site who likes to reinvent herself. I noticed that the links to me on my friends’ sites are all to URLs I got rid of several redesigns ago! I had set up 301s to my new URLs for those pages, but after that I 301′ed the newer URLs to my next version. Now I’m afraid that if you follow their directions when you come to crawl, you’ll end up following a string of 301s so long that by the end you won’t come calling any more.
• I know you must like me—you even ask me for unmodified files, like my college thesis that hasn’t changed in 10 years. It’s starting to be a real hassle! Is there anything I can do to prevent your taking up my lovely bandwidth?

Google presented the answers with excellent method. Looking for the answers? Oh thatz here..

Today is an Interesting and big development in search engine history. Wouldn’t be a big news to SEO industry and web site owners, if Google and yahoo start indexing flash based websites? Yes, thatz true, Google announced that it updated its search algorithm using Adobe Flash player technology to make it to learn the texts and links in the flash websites. Till now, the web masters have not been implementing their flash technologies in many cases, as it is not good for SEO. But this new algorithm makes every body happy as the texts in the flash files will be returned on search queries. This new trend tends to increase the number of flash rich content websites across the WWW.

Here are the important fact on this updation on Google search algorithm.

• All existing SWF content, across all versions of the SWF file format could be crawled not FLV format.
• Only texts and links can be indexed and not the images on the flash.
• Google bot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
• Google do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
• Millions of indiscoverable flash contents across the internet will be available on search.

Though the web masters no need to do any thing to get indexed their existing flash sites, how ever, I feel disabling the non-flash version may prevent from getting penalized for having duplicated contents. What you say? plz comment.

Moving a site completely to a new domain is not an easy task. All the webmaster see this as a hard one since they fear about losing the page ranks and incoming links of the old domain. But there are certain steps to be followed to move your site to a new domain with out hurting the performance of the site in search engines like Google.

The time taking to make a smooth move depends up on the size of the existing website. Smaller website takes lesser time where as a big website takes long time to move every thing with out making wrong. The main aim on this move is, it should be invisible to the web site visitors and at the same time we have to make Google to treat the new pages with the same quality of the old one.

What will happen if you move the site to new domain name with out any precaution?

After making the move to a new domain and if you leave the contents on old domain undeleted then there are chances for the new domain to be penalized by search engines. This is because when the new domain crawled by the search engines it sees the contents are duplicated from the old domain. So TWO domain but SAME content. Hurts us, right?

So what will you do next? Delete the content? If so, stop it. If you delete all the contents in the old domain after making a move to the new domain then there is another problem starts. This will lead to 404 not found error to harm the site visitors and also make a negative impact on the achieved search engine rankings. The returning user types your old domain and finds 404 not found and leaves your site.

What about the impact in search engines? If your site is already visible in search engines still search engines will continue to show your pages. When some one searches in Google and click your site on the result page then they will also get 404 not found error. Are you interested in treating your visitors with this experience? Also note that you will appear in search results until search bot crawls your site and finds it empty. Soon your pages will disappear from the search engine database.

Have you ever thought about losing the hundreds and hundreds of natural inlinks of your site? So is that what we expected by spending lot of money and time on our site. Really not. Then how to avoid this problem while moving the site?

What are the steps while changing the site to new domain?

Making 301 redirect:

Move the contents of the directories to the new domain and then make 301 redirect to permanently redirect those pages of old site to this new site. Do not make a permanent redirect of all traffic of old site to home page of new site. It should be a page to page redirect as in below format

www.old-domain.com/test.htm to www.new-domain.com/test-new.htm

www.old-domain.com/dir/move.php to www.new-domain.com/dir/move.jsp

If there is no correspondent page in the new site then please redirect with the similar pages so that none of the pages from old site will have 404 not found errors. This will enhance the user experience as well as tell Google and other search engines that the site has been moved to new domain.

Now check for the new site in Google results periodically. Mean time, all the organic and in organic traffic of old site will be redirected to appropriate pages of new site.

Finally check for the external links of the old site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You can find broken internal links using Xenu.

Also keep the old domain for couple of months and monitor the old and new site using web master tools for crawl errors. Hope you may find this post useful. Please post your questions here as well as your tips on this topic.