Time to think about SEO?

[Esopo]

:crybaby: That was beautiful  =D>

 :D

[duz]

Thank you Cd.

Based on what you have said I suggest the following for discussion:

Place the forum in the root of the subdomain http://forum.expertsrt.com

Implement phpBB Able2Know mods except for mod_rewrite ( http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132-0-asc-0.html )

Place articles and tutorials in subject named files http://www.expertsrt.com/subject/

Place a 301 redirect in .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^expertsrt\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.expertsrt.com/$1 [R=301,L]

- duz

[COBOLdinosaur]

Duz,

Thank you.  That is exactly the kind of advice we need.

Place the forum in the root of the subdomain http://forum.expertsrt.com

That would make the migration easier to the new version of the site.  We set up a seperate subdomain for development, so it makes migration easier if we go to a new subdomain instead of
replacing what we have.  It avoids a large outage. So operationally it is great; what does it do for us as to SEO?  It looks like we would be hiding the forum which would, I expect have a lot of links to the formal content. Why is it desirable to have forum isolated from the main content?

Implement phpBB Able2Know mods except for mod_rewrite ( http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132-0-asc-0.html )

I have not been through the mod code yet, but the description of them makes sense and includes a couple of things I was already intending to do.  If you don't mind I'm going to ask the PHP team to take a look as well to see if there are security or peformance issues we have to balance.  In the brief look at the descriptions, it appears that mod_rewrite would be desirable; why are you recommending it not be included?

Place articles and tutorials in subject named files http://www.expertsrt.com/subject/

That makes sense to me from both an SEO and file management perspective.  I assume that this makes it easier for the spiders pickup everything you want indexed.  If also brings a question that is probably quite basic, but that I never thought much about before; are the fully qualified abaolute urls better, or will relative urls produce the same results?

Place a 301 redirect in .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^expertsrt\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.expertsrt.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I don't know what this is for, can you explain what we are trying to do with it?


I really appreciate you taking the time to look at this and make recommendations.  Because my background is primarily apps running on private networks, SEO is something I have never needed to know much about, so I know a few things that are good like keys words in h1 tags, but I probably know more myth and mis-information than I do correct approaches.

But... I'm a quick study.

[duz]

             
>what does it do for us as to SEO?  It looks like we would be hiding the forum which would, I expect have a lot of links to the formal content. Why is it desirable to have forum isolated from the main content?

For SEO purposes this is looking to the future when it may be necessary to put the forum or the content on a separate IP.

There are no disadvantages and it also moves the forum content up one directory level.

>it appears that mod_rewrite would be desirable; why are you recommending it not be included?

For phpBB I have never seen any evidence that it is advantageous and is overkill imo.

Off topic but while I think about it: (1) phpBB is the hackers favorite target.  Someone will need to be charged with the responsibility of incorporating all the latest security updates as they become available. (2) It may be worth thinking about the RSS Content Syndicator mod for phpBB.

>are the fully qualified abaolute urls better, or will relative urls produce the same results?

Except in very exceptional circumstances search engine bots do not have problems with absolute urls or relative urls, provided the urls adhere to RFC 1738, RFC 1808 and RFC 2396.

Obviously the bots treat absolute and relative differently because for relative the bots must construct the url.

When a bot finds the various forms of relative (for example directory1/directory2/file1.html , /directory1/directory2/file2.html , ./directory1/file3.html , ../../../directory1/file4.html etc., etc.,) it must interpret them. This it does with reference to the base url and if necessary the url of the current page.

Although this all seems very simple in practise it is very easy for the bots to get really confused, not just misinterpret one relative url.

This does not mean that if you have a site that is spidered perfectly with relatives that you should rush out and change them all to absolutes because it would not make the slightest difference. It does mean however that constructing a complex site using relatives and not being totally familiar with the RFCs or being prone to typos can cause problems.

There is no practical downside to using absolutes. On the contrary apart from removing a source of potential confusion for the bots, using absolutes also makes a site less vulnerable to page jacking.

>I don't know what this is for, can you explain what we are trying to do with it?

It's a 301 permanent redirect from http://expertsrt.com to http://www.expertsrt.com

At the moment http://www.expertsrt.com and http://expertsrt.com are the same page(s) which is not good for the search engines for a number of reasons. Choosing one or the other is best practise.

- duz

                 

[Anonymous]

It's a 301 permanent redirect from http://expertsrt.com to http://www.expertsrt.com

Completely agree with this.

The domain expertsrt.com should decide what service is being asked for when a user does not specify.

e.g. If I am connecting to expertsrt.com with an FTP client, I am expecting to talk to the FTP server. If I connect using a HTTP client, I am expecting to talk to the HTTP server.

The convention for HTTP servers is to prefix the domain with www

So, expertsrt.com => www.expertsrt.com.

This should be done asap.

Any absolute links within expertsrt.com should be chaned to www.expertsrt.com too.

Once a user comes to the home page, allowing them to jump onto the different sub-domains is fine (forums.expertsrt.com, articles.expertsrt.com, etc).

Richard.

[duz]

Once a user comes to the home page, allowing them to jump onto the different sub-domains is fine (forums.expertsrt.com, articles.expertsrt.com, etc).

Richard just to be clear I am suggesting that there should be only one subdomain forums.expertsrt.com and everything else should be of this form http://www.expertsrt.com/subject/ for example:

http://www.expertsrt.com/css/
http://www.expertsrt.com/php/
http://www.expertsrt.com/application-server/
http://www.expertsrt.com/windows-server-2003/

- duz

                 

[COBOLdinosaur]

(1) phpBB is the hackers favorite target. Someone will need to be charged with the responsibility of incorporating all the latest security updates as they become available.

Fortunately we have some of the very best PHP developers around already working on modifications to the PHPBB code and the first requirement I had was making the forum secure, and just about the first thing they started doing was analysing the security related issues.  As we go along we will also be doing substantial customization so that final release it will not look much like PHPBB.  The customization will help to make it more difficult to attack the site.

It may be worth thinking about the RSS Content Syndicator mod for phpBB.

I am already looking at that mod, along with a lot of others just to see how much work I can avoid by not re-inventing the wheel.

For urls I think we will make it best practice to use absolute urls and reduce the chances of messing up a spider. There will like still be some relative urls in use, but if our internal standard is to use the absolutes then that should minimize relatives. In the final cut a lot of the code will be home-grown or heavily modified off the shelf open source. So that will probably mean the the only place we have relative urls is where they are used in third party pieces that we do not heavily modify.

The .htaccess change will be done this week.

Now a question about using subdomains.  It is my intention to make subdomains available to Mentors to give them some work space, and extend self-promotion/business promotion beyond what is possible with just a profile page. I for example setup coboldinosaur.expertsrt.com to house content that I will be migrating to the site.  At some point, as resource requirements grow I will register www.expertsrt.net for Mentor site hosting.  Will having those subdomains create and SEO, problems?  Will links between the the main domain and the subdomains in both directions cause any problems to make the spiders not like us?

[duz]

Now a question about using subdomains.  It is my intention to make subdomains available to Mentors to give them some work space, and extend self-promotion/business promotion beyond what is possible with just a profile page. I for example setup coboldinosaur.expertsrt.com to house content that I will be migrating to the site.  At some point, as resource requirements grow I will register www.expertsrt.net for Mentor site hosting.  Will having those subdomains create and SEO, problems?  Will links between the the main domain and the subdomains in both directions cause any problems to make the spiders not like us?

The jury is still out on cross-linking of multiple subdomains. Personally I like to be cautious in these situations and avoid any possible risk.

I have a professional colleague of the highest standing who uses subdomains (legitimately) when appropriate as a standard method for theming his clients sites. I have emailed him for his latest experiences and thoughts on the subject and after discussion will report back here with a definitive recommendation.

- duz

                     

[COBOLdinosaur]

Thanks Duz.  The information will make a difference in the configuration path I take as we scale up the site.  The cost of domain registrations and resources is low enough that doing it the best way is not going to cost a lot more, and have extra resources in reserve is never a bad thing, if the cost of the reserves is reasonable.  I just don't want to buy what we don't need out of ignorance and waste money that can be spent on positive improvements.

Setting up in-house networks is a lot easier.  You just have to make sure you have enough bandwidth across the board, and that your firewalls are solid.  There are a lot more, sometimes conflicting issues when it is a public site.  On the technical side I know how to do a lot of stuff, but administratively the differences between private and public sites is really very large; and the priorities are skewed.

[duz]

               
Site structure - subdomains

After consultation I am still not convinced that cross-linking of multiple subdomains currently is good SEO. The examples I have seen that work are all where the webmaster has absolute control of the linking structure, which would clearly not be the case (neither should it be) for expertsrt.

My recommendation is to have only the one subdomain and that is for the forum http://forum.expertsrt.com/

If work space for Mentors is required then I would suggest that they are in this form http://www.expertsrt.com/coboldinosaur/

(FTP access can be restricted by user and directory using something like Pure-FTPd).

- duz
                 

[COBOLdinosaur]

I am going to have to do some thinking on that one.  I might be better to use a seperate domain.  I was going to bringup up expertsrt.net anyway, before we went live. I could then do hosting for Mentor work sites on the .net domain and we could install tools and support things like FPE, or perhaps use Chilisoft to support ASP development; without any danger of conflicting with the live environment.

That would make security much easier. We would also not have to be as restrictive.  In the long term it would also give us a natural seperation when we move to dedicated servers and multiple IPs.  

On another front.  The logs show vists from spiders Google, MSN, AskJeeves have all visited.  Of course, all they can see is the under construction page.  I am assuming they will be back, but how much time will there be between visits; or is it triggered off of finding new links to the site?

Of course there is always one more question.  I added a Google search to the pages.  I do not have it doing a site search just WWW at the moment.  Will that have any effect on Google spidering us?  When we open the doors and I add a site search to the Google search, will that result in us getting indexed more quickly?  Will having a site search result in new pages getting indexed sooner?

I really appreciate the time you are putting in on this.  It is saving us from making mistakes we would ahve to correct later.  The host is upgrading the PHP to PHP5, so the development strategy and timelines will change so we can take advantage of that.  How we decide to stage it will determine how we do the transition to put the forum in forum.expertsrt.com, but in any case that will be the setup.  Now that I know the cross-linked subdomains are not a good idea I will look at how I organize server resources.

[duz]

I am going to have to do some thinking on that one.  I might be better to use a seperate domain.

It may be easier but on the other hand from the SEO point of view it would be nice to have all the content on one domain. External links to the Mentor pages would benefit the main site rather than split the inbound links over two sites.

I was going to bringup up expertsrt.net anyway...

If you do choose that route  then to get the maximum benefit expertsrt.net should have different registration details and be on a different class C IP. That way the sites would not be considered 'related'.

The logs show vists from spiders Google, MSN, AskJeeves have all visited.  Of course, all they can see is the under construction page.  I am assuming they will be back, but how much time will there be between visits; or is it triggered off of finding new links to the site?

Spider frequency is a function of the introduction of fresh content and PageRank. Once the site is busy they will come every day or every two days.

I added a Google search to the pages.  I do not have it doing a site search just WWW at the moment.  Will that have any effect on Google spidering us?

No.

When we open the doors and I add a site search to the Google search, will that result in us getting indexed more quickly?

No.

Will having a site search result in new pages getting indexed sooner?

No.

Have you decided on what the navigation of the main site will look like? If it's javascript then we will need a comprehensive sitemap for the spiders to follow.

- duz
                 

[COBOLdinosaur]

Actually that was my next question.  The links will be on a tags but scripting will reference the href:

Code:

<div onclick="window.location.href=this.childNodes[0].href;"
   onmouseover="this.className='over'" onmouseout="this.className='out'"
   class="out"><a href="http://www.expertsrt.com/index.html"
   onmouseover="this.parentNode.className='over'"
   onmouseout="this.parentNode.className='out'">HOME</a></div>

Will that cause the spiders to bypass links or will they follow them?

[COBOLdinosaur]

The links outside of the main navigation will be primarily text links; with a few image links but all of them shold be <a href="link"> format.  It may be that we need to generate a link sometimes using Javascript, but I think we can generally avoid that with generation on the sever side.

BTW that code above will not be generated with JavaScript is will come from the server that way.