‘URLs’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: I was reading an article by Tom Critchlow on  why we shouldn’t use tiny urls in newspapers. All good stuff, but this got me thinking about how the tinyURL system works? TinyURLs are useful when referring people to sites on Twitter. Clearly we require a mapping which takes a URL and maps it to a unique but shorter URL. Hash tables do this; there is an input and a method of encoding which generates the tinyURL. What could be used? MD5 produces a code that is 32 characters still too long and a usability minefield. Other MD codings are available and MD2…

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Excerpt: For those that do not know Magento is a feature packed open source ecommerce  platform. It is an excellent solution for people wanting to sell their products online. However, in the support forums there has been some concern over its ability to be made SEO friendly. We covered one method which was basically to use robots.txt to avoid crawlling those portions of the site which could possibly introduce duplicate content. This partially solves this problem but it prevents the flow of pageRank from those pages so if someone has linked to one of these duplicate copy pages you won’t get…

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Excerpt: Social media is a popularity contest. A study of UTube and Digg has shown that the popularity of a post or video depends on the number of votes it get early on in its life. This should come as no surprise to anyone that uses Sphinn. Articles gain importance from the number of Sphinn they can achieve.  On Sphinn I can see there are two reasons for this: i) A variation on the filthy-linking-rich theory – that posts with Sphinns find it much easier to get Sphinns. These sites will be ranked higher and receive greater exposure giving them more opportunity…

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Excerpt: PDF and Search Engine Optimisation In a previous post, we looked at SEO for Flash but there are other formats which are indexed by search engines. PDF documents are a popular format used by industry and a favourite way of sending information such as product brochures. Many companies have lots of information in the form of PDF, so how well can these be read and what can be done to optimise them so that they can be found more easily? Search Engines and PDF Readability The major search engines have algorithms for reading the content in PDF documents. The data below was found by…

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Excerpt: One of the best tools to use for SEO is the Google search engine. It allows you to perform very specific searches on sites and for file types. Knowing how to get information out of Google should be part of every SEO specialist’s basic knowledge. Search Operators or Query Modifiers These are placed in front of the search term and allow you define searches for phrases that occur within a website title or in the anchor text of the site. The search allows you to do searches using the minus character to excludes certain words. Complete phrases can be added between double…