3 ms·

Optimizing your very large site for search

• andrewljohnson 18y ago
  What did he say?
  • ratsbane 18y ago
    Hmmm. He recommended using canonical URLs without query strings, stemming your URLs to avoid subdomains, using all lower-case in URLs, all of which seems mildly reasonable and is consistent with our plans. One site I work with gets 67,000 visits from Google search for every 1,000 visits from Live/MSN search, so perhaps I should pay more attention to what he's saying. On the other hand, the Live/MSN search traffic is so small perhaps it's not worth trying to optimize for.
    • thwarted 18y ago
      If Google is able to find those pages and drive traffic to them and Live/MSN isn't, it's _not_necessarily_ the site that needs to be optimized, it may be that Live/MSN needs to stop ignoring content or stop considering things like uppercase or query strings to be indicators of second- (or third-) class content. Agreed though, it could just be that Live/MSN just doesn't have the users/traffic, in which case, why are they telling _us_ how to optimize for them?
• thwarted 18y ago
  The "remove port numbers" suggestion is misleading. It should be "don't run your web server on a port other than the default HTTP port", especially with the suggestion to use redirects to canonicalize URLs. Most sites that run their web server on a different port have a good reason for doing so (although I think a subdomain would make more sense all around).