Re: searching by tags....

On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 00:58 +0100, Nathan Rixham wrote: > Ashley Sheridan wrote: > > On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 01:17 +0200, Jochem Maas wrote: > >> Nathan Rixham schreef: > >>> Ashley Sheridan wrote: > >>>> On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 14:54 -0700, Ryan S wrote: > >>>>> quite a few sites seem to have a very neat way of implementing this > >>>>> with (url rewriting?) something like > >>>>> http://sitename/blog/tags/tag-comes-here/ > >>>> As for getting those search terms, well a link in a page can contain GET > >>>> values, such as > >>>> http://www.somedomain.com/blog?tag=search_term . > >>>> Alternatively, you could use mod-rewrite to rewrite the URL and turn the > >>>> path into tag variables. This is the same as the above but with the > >>>> added benefit that users can type in tags directly more easily, and > >>>> there are apparently benefits for SEO with this method as well (but I'm > >>>> not sure how true that is) > >>> it's very true; from the google webmaster guidelines: > >>> > >>> If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" > >>> character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic > >>> pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and > >>> the number of them few. > >>> > >>> previously it was text along the lines of "google doesn't index all > >>> pages with query parameters, so avoid them where possible" > >>> > >>> additionally one of the weightier points in categorising pages within > >>> the SERPS is the text in the url (especially if the page is actually > >>> about /the_tag_in_the_url : see > >>> http://www.google.com/search?q=tags) > >> ^-- some what ironic :-) > >> > > Yeah I saw that too... > > > > What always gets me is that forums always feature really high on search > > results, and I've yet to see one of these forums use URL rewriting! I > > really think this belief about query-less URLs being more search engine > > friendly is outdated. > > > > > > Ash > > www.ashleysheridan.co.uk > > > > a search engines main job is to send people to what they are looking > for, not what an seo has determined they should be seeing, as such > "content is king". > > Forums, lists and newsgroups tend to hold more specific content on > exactly what the user is searching for, hence why google shows it high > (as it's one of the few documents on the net which relate most directly > to what was searched for [long tail search terms]); additionally all the > aforementioned often have a trail of replies; sometimes this is a bonus > as the replies repeat the keyword terms; however sometimes it's to the > detriment, particularly when they wander off topic. > > It's also worth noting that sites which update frequently, especially > those who update sitemaps and send out pings get crawled more frequently > and thus indexed faster. On hot-topics this has a knock on effect, the > posts get crawled by scrapers and content harvesters and re-published > (often with a link back) - and this helps as the vote count for the > original forum post goes up due to the link backs + the original source > is detected as such and given prominence over the copies (most of the time). > > Further people take care to title their posts/messages correctly in > order to attract answers quickly, this text is then repeated on the > forum page in all the prominent places (title, permalink, heading > tags..) and further still, the post/message is normally perfectly > matched to the user specified title - so it's natural seo at it's best. > (Worth having a read up on contextual and semantic analysis as well) > > Next up, the sites weight, as forums often have thousands (or hundreds > of thousands) of pages/posts, and high volume traffic, the site is > deemed more important and thus higher ranking, which brings in more > traffic and so it spirals. On this note it's also worth considering that > google track what you click on so if searchers continually click item 3 > in the search results, over time they'll move it up as it's been classed > as most accurate for that search (more.. obviously due to wide use of > analytics and checking when a user comes back to the results to click > another they can also harvest accuracy data by comparing bounce rates > etc and adjust accordingly). > > so much more on this subject but that's about the top and bottom of it > in this scenario. > > *yawn* getting late > You're preaching to the converted on this topic, I've already put together a couple of articles on my site about it in the past. What I was saying was that the sites that seem to feature so prominently on listings were in fact using querystring URLs; the very thing that SEO guides tell us not to use. I think it's just an outdated belief that URL rewriting is better, as clearly it doesn't ever seem to be. Ash www.ashleysheridan.co.uk