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Improving This Site's Search Ranking

Although this site will always be "codestore.net", that's not the only domain by which you can get here. There are three domains codestore.net, .org and .info. All very well but it transpires that this dilutes the site's Google PageRank (PR).

As you can see each domain/access point has a different PR, as Google considers codestore.org to be a different site to codestore.net. Which makes sense, kind of, I guess.

Domain Google PageRank
www.codestore.net 5
codestore.net 5
www.codestore.org 3
codestore.org 3
www.codestore.info 2
codestore.info 2

In an attempt to try and improve the PR of www.codestore.net I've now made it so that the other 5 possible entry points now redirect (permanently, as in HTTP status code 301) to www.codestore.net.

Example links:

Both should take you to the .net address and (hopefully) Google will now start considering them as one.

To do this I added an Internet Site document to handle the 5 "sub" domains, while leaving in the existing Internet Site document, as below:

image

All the first Internet Site document does is redirect all requests to the second one. It's the 2nd one, which controls all the web settings for the site.

Something that caught me out was that the new site document had to have the same value in the Homepage field as in the main Site document.

The Redirection document I added to the "others" site looks like this:

image

The only problem this leaves me with is that Google also seems to consider www.codestore.net/ and www.codestore.net/store.nsf/ as two different sites, as you can see in the search results below:

image

Not sure how to stop that or even if it's worth it in terms of PR. Anybody?

Until now the whole PR thing hasn't interested me that much. That said, if I had a pound for every time I'd been asked about it only to say it's "not my area"...

Comments

  1. You may would to build a sitemap and check with https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and use the rel="canonical" to specify your preferred address (see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html )

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 27 Apr 2010 05:35 AM

      Rel="canonical" looks like it might help. Thanks Giuseppe. Will add it to my todo list.

  2. Jake did you / do you submit a sitemap to Google?

    http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184

    Not sure how much help it is but it can't hurt.

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 27 Apr 2010 05:35 AM

      Hadn't done, but will do.

    • avatar
    • Paul
    • Tue 27 Apr 2010 06:35 AM

    Jake, have a look at this http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/04/20/tip-trick-fix-common-seo-problems-using-the-url-rewrite-extension.aspx IIS specific but the discussion is relevant.

  3. Beware the Google "duplicate content penalty".

    http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

    They consider multiple URLs which lead to identical content to be an attempt to "game" their page ranking algorithms because there have been attempts to do just that.

    1. You might set up a robots.txt file that will steer indexing away from the sites you don't want to be considered.

      Hide the rest of this thread

        • avatar
        • Jake Howlett
        • Wed 28 Apr 2010 03:01 AM

        There is a robot file, which blocks them from anything inside the /apps/ folder where all the demo DBs are and the /archive/ folder where older versions of this site (more duplicate content I guess) live.

        http://www.codestore.net/robots.txt

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Wed 28 Apr 2010 03:02 AM

      Thanks Rob. I addressed this yesterday by adding the <link rel="canonical"> tag to most pages on this site.

      All I need to do now is give it a few weeks and see what affect it has. Will report back when I know more.

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Written by Jake Howlett on Tue 27 Apr 2010

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CodeStore is all about web development. Concentrating on Lotus Domino, ASP.NET, Flex, SharePoint and all things internet.

Your host is Jake Howlett who runs his own web development company called Rockall Design and is always on the lookout for new and interesting work to do.

You can find me on Twitter and on Linked In.

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