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

[Shlomi Fish]

On Monday 15 June 2009 21:04:00 Dotan Cohen wrote:
> >> > It didn't help. Google eventually lost the page rank for the old
> >> > domain before the redirect and I had to slowly regain it.
> >>
> >> The only thing that you could have done here was to make sure that
> >> there was a redirect long before the old domain went cold.
> >
> > I did. But it didn't help. Did you mean "long after"?
>
> No, long before. The old domain has to 301 to the new domain for some
> time (I think at least until google recalculates PR, usually every six
> months), and of course Google has to see it.
>

I see. Well, in one case, it wasn't possible, because my account at the 
Technion's undergraduate students server got terminated without a redirect 
being set up after I graduated from the Technion. In one case, I set up a 
redirect from http://perl-begin.berlios.de/ (which is still there) to 
http://perl-begin.org/ and still lost a lot of page rank (or at least it 
seemed to have been the case).

> > Yes, and I don't want bots to find anything on sf.org except for a link
> > to www.shlomifish.org. As far as I'm concerned sf.org should not exist.
>
> Why not? What if I want to download your site to read offline on the
> train? 

If you try to download sf.org without following links to other hostnames, 
you'll get only one page, which should raise your suspicions. (You are testing 
the web-sites you download, right?). If you download 
http://www.shlomifish.org/ , you should get the whole enchilada. This is also 
the case for following links from sf.org to www.shlomifish.org.

> What if some new search engine wants to rank you? 

He shouldn't rank sf.org. It only has a link to www.shlomifish.org and most 
links I know point to www.sf.org.

> And what
> about the real malicious bots, that fake the IE UA anyway? 

What about them?

> Would you
> not complain if a site would not show the Firefox UA a page, instead
> making you forge the IE UA?
>
> >> Very good, and I see that you have an RSS feed as well. But get rid of
> >> the Atom feed! What is it there for? Do users really need to make that
> >> choice? Why don't you give them a choice of HTML 4.1 or XHTML 1.0 for
> >> the pages as well?
> >
> > Some people prefer Atom, and some clients only support RSS. Most people
> > can make either choice reasonably (or they are not aware of the web-feeds
> > technology at all). LiveJournal.com gives me both, so I point to both of
> > them.
>
> This choice only confuses users. What advantage does Atom give the user?
>

Well, see for example this bug:

https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=44899

Essentially, XML::Feed works the best if all feeds are Atom or all feeds are 
RSS. And there may be similar bugs in other programs. Two links - one to Atom 
and one to RSS, does not hurt. Most people are clueful enough to make a choice 
between them. And if they aren't, they probably won't enjoy my homesite.

I know many sites and blog services that publicse <link tags to both RSS and 
Atom.

> >> No, you _don't_ want different content on www.sf.org as on sf.org!
> >> Either serve the same content (and thus have the pagerank divided
> >> between two pages) or 301 one to the other.
> >
> > I want only http://www.shlomifish.org/ to exist. I want nothing on
> > sf.org, and so far it seems to work. I don't get many hits to sf.org.
>
> Then redirect it. People are going to link to it anyway, and people
> are going to type it into their browsers.

If they type it into their browsers then they'll end up at a single link to 
www.shlomifish.org , which they can follow. And with the awesome bar of 
Firefox and similar browsers, typing shlomifish.org will suggest 
http://www.shlomifish.org/ (while only a portion is typed). I didn't notice 
any people linking to it. I believe most people copy-and-paste the link from 
their browsers after browsing to the appropriate site.

I feel like we're arguing in circles, but it's still an interesting 
discussion.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
First stop for Perl beginners - http://perl-begin.org/

God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we
read.