OT: Bezeqint made me "poof... he's gone"

[Dotan Cohen]

>> I use a ehader.inc and footer.inc file for consistent layout across
>> the site, and include them with PHP. The rest of the page can be
>> either static or dynamic, as per the need.
>>
>
> That's not a bad solution. My template is more sophisticated than just
> including a static HTML header and footer, and also customises the navigation
> menu, the breadcrumbs trail, etc. based on the current location. So if you're
> under "software/" then the "Software sub-menu will be expanded.
>

Yes, my PHP includes are also slightly dynamic. Page titles and meta
tags, for instance, are written as per the needs of the page.

$title="Page title";
$description="Here I describe the page";
include_once"/blah/header.inc";


>> Use an automatic redirect. You get the google benefit, without
>> confusing users. Actually, I redirect www.* to * to keep the URL that
>> much shorter.
>
> I had a lot of bad experience with Google and redirects. It doesn't seem to
> work very well.
>

Use a header 301 redirect only! It moves pagerank to the new page.
Don't use javascript or meta redirects.

This is in my .htaccess files for redirecting away from the www site:

# www.site.com to site.com
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}s%{HTTPS} ^www\.(.*)((s)on|s.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http%3://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Or for individual pages:

redirect 301 /old.html http://domain.com/new.html
redirect 301 /olddirectory http://domain.com/newdirectory/


> Besides, this is not a redirect. I don't want any links to shlomifish.org -
> only to http://www.shlomifish.org/ . As a result, I'm trying prevent people
> from linking to sf.org without the www.
>

Don't do that. Use 301 and let the pagerank bleed through. Enforcing
your rules by annoying the user will just stop him from linking to
you. Today, many users don't even think about www. On my most popular
sites, less than 5% of the type-in traffic has the www at the
beginning. That in contrast to the late nineties, when it was over
90%. Today's users are young, impatient, and do know know about or
care about conventions.


> I maintain my web-site's blog on LiveJournal which takes care of generating
> web-feeds for me. There are other blog services, and you can always host your
> own blog using MovableType, WordPress, or whatever.
>

So long as it provides a simple XML format (such as RSS) it's good.
Google loves that! But maintaining it on a different domain
(livejournal) isn't helping your sf.org pagerank. By the way, I think
(but am not certain) that RSS pagerank affects the root site's
pagerank. I have not seen anyone else mention it, but experiments make
me believe that it is so. And just look how well these social-network
sites do, such as twitter, that have thousands of RSS feeds. It might
be a bug in google, or it might be intentional.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il