Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
Ashley Sheridan schreef: On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 15:36 -0600, Govinda wrote: improvement if I went for static URLs on the site, but I don't have any evidence for that, and I'm willing to admit it. I'd rebuff this but it would feel like Im feeding a troll. choices: 1 - Waste some time on a live test to prove this 2 - Explain how I know this and show the historical evidence (which would likely be rebuffed as it's not current) 3 - Further optimise you're clients 75k page site and double traffic within a month (which you'll hardly let me do, and certainly not publicly) 4 - Propose that everybody measures to see who's is biggest. 5 - Find a post worth a reply. 6 - See what's on tv 7 - Make a personal website for the hell of it 8 - Keep my boss happy and do that JBoss/Glassfish comparison 9 - Think of more options 10 - Pester the three week old kittens who are looking at me. there's been such a low volume of decent get your teeth in to posts on this list the past few days, end up wasting time like this - terrible! peace Guys, I am personally way out of it. (I haven't had time anything PHP to even warrant posting the total newbie questions I would have here... ) but please do one thing: Be kind to Ashley. I don't know Ash at all, but as an out-of-it newbie I can say from reading many posts on this list that she (sorry if you're not female Ash) always seems courteous, often gives answers that solve the specific technical issues, often gives answers that help the greener coder with general understanding on the topic, and offers for free a lot of her time in a totally unselfish way here. I have no relationship with her at all, so my only point here is that it doesn't seem right to do anything weightier than politely disagree with her (if you do). I mean- speaking harshly to someone who does offer so much benign and useful help makes us wanna be newbies cringe. I would be tempted to say the same if someone said harsh things towards you guys, except that you'd beat me to your own defense. ;-) -Govinda Actually I'm a guy, but we can't all be perfect ;) I really didn't mean to get anyones back up too much. That last reply was after a hard days work, so I was probably far more harsh than I should have been. I apologise to both Nathan and Jochem, as I was far too critical of both their opinions. actually I didn't have an opinion of my own on this one, merely parroting nathan ... which is quite funny because normally I'm a completely opinionate SOB :-P anyways it seems we're all good ... on to the next holy war ;-) Ash www.ashleysheridan.co.uk -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
Jochem Maas wrote: Ashley Sheridan schreef: On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 15:36 -0600, Govinda wrote: improvement if I went for static URLs on the site, but I don't have any evidence for that, and I'm willing to admit it. I'd rebuff this but it would feel like Im feeding a troll. choices: 1 - Waste some time on a live test to prove this 2 - Explain how I know this and show the historical evidence (which would likely be rebuffed as it's not current) 3 - Further optimise you're clients 75k page site and double traffic within a month (which you'll hardly let me do, and certainly not publicly) 4 - Propose that everybody measures to see who's is biggest. 5 - Find a post worth a reply. 6 - See what's on tv 7 - Make a personal website for the hell of it 8 - Keep my boss happy and do that JBoss/Glassfish comparison 9 - Think of more options 10 - Pester the three week old kittens who are looking at me. there's been such a low volume of decent get your teeth in to posts on this list the past few days, end up wasting time like this - terrible! peace Guys, I am personally way out of it. (I haven't had time anything PHP to even warrant posting the total newbie questions I would have here... ) but please do one thing: Be kind to Ashley. I don't know Ash at all, but as an out-of-it newbie I can say from reading many posts on this list that she (sorry if you're not female Ash) always seems courteous, often gives answers that solve the specific technical issues, often gives answers that help the greener coder with general understanding on the topic, and offers for free a lot of her time in a totally unselfish way here. I have no relationship with her at all, so my only point here is that it doesn't seem right to do anything weightier than politely disagree with her (if you do). I mean- speaking harshly to someone who does offer so much benign and useful help makes us wanna be newbies cringe. I would be tempted to say the same if someone said harsh things towards you guys, except that you'd beat me to your own defense. ;-) -Govinda Actually I'm a guy, but we can't all be perfect ;) I really didn't mean to get anyones back up too much. That last reply was after a hard days work, so I was probably far more harsh than I should have been. I apologise to both Nathan and Jochem, as I was far too critical of both their opinions. actually I didn't have an opinion of my own on this one, merely parroting nathan ... which is quite funny because normally I'm a completely opinionate SOB :-P anyways it seems we're all good ... on to the next holy war ;-) Ash www.ashleysheridan.co.uk joy let's group hug and discuss php for dummies :-D -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
On Oct 14, 2008, at 6:17 PM, 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 :-) LOL! Thanks for the outburst of laughter. ;) ~Philip -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] 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 -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
Ashley Sheridan schreef: 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. obviously the converted weren't listening. Ash www.ashleysheridan.co.uk -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
Jochem Maas wrote: Ashley Sheridan schreef: 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. obviously the converted weren't listening. indeed, the point being (perhaps I didn't make it clear) is that the forum posts you are talking about are listed highly due to several other major factors, the difference between using dynamic (querystring) and static urls only comes in to play when all other factors are pretty much equal; in this
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 11:22 +0100, Nathan Rixham wrote: Jochem Maas wrote: Ashley Sheridan schreef: 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. obviously the converted weren't listening. indeed, the point being (perhaps I didn't make it clear) is that the
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
Ashley Sheridan schreef: On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 11:22 +0100, Nathan Rixham wrote: Jochem Maas wrote: Ashley Sheridan schreef: 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. obviously the converted weren't listening. indeed, the point being (perhaps I didn't make it clear) is that the forum posts you are talking about are listed highly due to several other major
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
Jochem Maas wrote: Ashley Sheridan schreef: On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 11:22 +0100, Nathan Rixham wrote: Jochem Maas wrote: Ashley Sheridan schreef: 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. obviously the converted weren't listening. indeed, the point being (perhaps I didn't make it clear) is that the forum posts you are talking about are listed highly due to several other major factors, the difference between using dynamic
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
improvement if I went for static URLs on the site, but I don't have any evidence for that, and I'm willing to admit it. I'd rebuff this but it would feel like Im feeding a troll. choices: 1 - Waste some time on a live test to prove this 2 - Explain how I know this and show the historical evidence (which would likely be rebuffed as it's not current) 3 - Further optimise you're clients 75k page site and double traffic within a month (which you'll hardly let me do, and certainly not publicly) 4 - Propose that everybody measures to see who's is biggest. 5 - Find a post worth a reply. 6 - See what's on tv 7 - Make a personal website for the hell of it 8 - Keep my boss happy and do that JBoss/Glassfish comparison 9 - Think of more options 10 - Pester the three week old kittens who are looking at me. there's been such a low volume of decent get your teeth in to posts on this list the past few days, end up wasting time like this - terrible! peace Guys, I am personally way out of it. (I haven't had time anything PHP to even warrant posting the total newbie questions I would have here... ) but please do one thing: Be kind to Ashley. I don't know Ash at all, but as an out-of-it newbie I can say from reading many posts on this list that she (sorry if you're not female Ash) always seems courteous, often gives answers that solve the specific technical issues, often gives answers that help the greener coder with general understanding on the topic, and offers for free a lot of her time in a totally unselfish way here. I have no relationship with her at all, so my only point here is that it doesn't seem right to do anything weightier than politely disagree with her (if you do). I mean- speaking harshly to someone who does offer so much benign and useful help makes us wanna be newbies cringe. I would be tempted to say the same if someone said harsh things towards you guys, except that you'd beat me to your own defense. ;-) -Govinda -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
Govinda wrote:
improvement if I went for static URLs on the site, but I don't have any
evidence for that, and I'm willing to admit it.
I'd rebuff this but it would feel like Im feeding a troll.
choices:
1 - Waste some time on a live test to prove this
2 - Explain how I know this and show the historical evidence (which
would likely be rebuffed as it's not current)
3 - Further optimise you're clients 75k page site and double traffic
within a month (which you'll hardly let me do, and certainly not
publicly)
4 - Propose that everybody measures to see who's is biggest.
5 - Find a post worth a reply.
6 - See what's on tv
7 - Make a personal website for the hell of it
8 - Keep my boss happy and do that JBoss/Glassfish comparison
9 - Think of more options
10 - Pester the three week old kittens who are looking at me.
there's been such a low volume of decent get your teeth in to posts on
this list the past few days, end up wasting time like this - terrible!
peace
Guys, I am personally way out of it. (I haven't had time anything PHP
to even warrant posting the total newbie questions I would have here... )
but please do one thing:
Be kind to Ashley.
I don't know Ash at all, but as an out-of-it newbie I can say from
reading many posts on this list that she (sorry if you're not female
Ash) always seems courteous, often gives answers that solve the specific
technical issues, often gives answers that help the greener coder with
general understanding on the topic, and offers for free a lot of her
time in a totally unselfish way here. I have no relationship with her
at all, so my only point here is that it doesn't seem right to do
anything weightier than politely disagree with her (if you do). I mean-
speaking harshly to someone who does offer so much benign and useful
help makes us wanna be newbies cringe. I would be tempted to say the
same if someone said harsh things towards you guys, except that you'd
beat me to your own defense. ;-)
-Govinda
Nicely said Govinda and fair point :-)
to be completely impartial on this you'll want to read what google say:
http
:://
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
/2008/09/
dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html
(join it back together yourself as mailinglist blocks it as a spammy url :p)
this debates dynamic vs static urls - what it doesn't mention is SEF
(search engine friendly urls) which you'll note they use themselves ^^^
from personal experience I know from rolling out a few hundred automated
sites (as part of sponsored study of the major search engines and more
transient web entities) that this is true, turns out though there are
hundreds of factors and methods one can use to seo a website and gain
better rankings - nothing though compares to writing valid, well
structured, accurately titled xhtml documents which concentrate on one
subject per page and link correctly through out.
Additionally amount of pages on a site has a vast impact on traffic 1k
pages indexed will bring in more traffic than 5 in 99.9% of cases and is
always worth mentioning.
Ash (assumed you're male..) no offence intended, to be brutally honest
here's how it is:
1- The closed question format of you're reply ruffled my feathers a
little bit; primarily as it would lead me to developing another site
purely to test - and too much on my plate at the minute to realistically do.
2- I completely have to agree with Govinda's comment's such as often
gives answers that help the greener coder with general understanding on
the topic so credit where credit's due
3-
while(1) {
if( $php-list-general-hasNewPost() ) {
$ash-sendReply();
}
}
but then we all (well I certainly) do that from time to time; if not
just to pass time and do something more interesting than the day job.
4- you plainly have skills; just remember others do as well
5- not quite sure what I'm saying you seem decent and well mannered
enough; something ruffled my feathers and can't figure out what it is;
maybe you know; maybe you don't but for the greater good I'm going to
forget it anyways
6- does nobody have any meaty php/web dev based problems? I need to do
something code based to keep my brain ticking over (ie not stop and not
burst, heavy work on at the moment and migrating to java (which is
great, but on completely the wrong project (or right project wrong
time)) - overuse brackets))
--
PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 15:36 -0600, Govinda wrote: improvement if I went for static URLs on the site, but I don't have any evidence for that, and I'm willing to admit it. I'd rebuff this but it would feel like Im feeding a troll. choices: 1 - Waste some time on a live test to prove this 2 - Explain how I know this and show the historical evidence (which would likely be rebuffed as it's not current) 3 - Further optimise you're clients 75k page site and double traffic within a month (which you'll hardly let me do, and certainly not publicly) 4 - Propose that everybody measures to see who's is biggest. 5 - Find a post worth a reply. 6 - See what's on tv 7 - Make a personal website for the hell of it 8 - Keep my boss happy and do that JBoss/Glassfish comparison 9 - Think of more options 10 - Pester the three week old kittens who are looking at me. there's been such a low volume of decent get your teeth in to posts on this list the past few days, end up wasting time like this - terrible! peace Guys, I am personally way out of it. (I haven't had time anything PHP to even warrant posting the total newbie questions I would have here... ) but please do one thing: Be kind to Ashley. I don't know Ash at all, but as an out-of-it newbie I can say from reading many posts on this list that she (sorry if you're not female Ash) always seems courteous, often gives answers that solve the specific technical issues, often gives answers that help the greener coder with general understanding on the topic, and offers for free a lot of her time in a totally unselfish way here. I have no relationship with her at all, so my only point here is that it doesn't seem right to do anything weightier than politely disagree with her (if you do). I mean- speaking harshly to someone who does offer so much benign and useful help makes us wanna be newbies cringe. I would be tempted to say the same if someone said harsh things towards you guys, except that you'd beat me to your own defense. ;-) -Govinda Actually I'm a guy, but we can't all be perfect ;) I really didn't mean to get anyones back up too much. That last reply was after a hard days work, so I was probably far more harsh than I should have been. I apologise to both Nathan and Jochem, as I was far too critical of both their opinions. Ash www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
[PHP] searching by tags....
Hey, this the first time I am actually working with tags but it seems quite popular and am adding it on a clients requests. By tags I mean something like wordpress' implementation of it, for example when an author writes an article on babies the tags might be baby,babies, new borns, cribs, nappies or a picture of a baby can have the tags baby,babies, new born, cute kid, nappies the tags are comma separated above of course. The way i am doing it right now is i have sa an article or a pic saved in the db as article_or_pic_address text the_tags varchar(240) My question is, when someone clicks on any one of the tags, do i do a LIKE %search_term% search or...??? 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/ Any help in the form of advise, code or links would be appreciated. TIA. Cheers! Ryan -- - The faulty interface lies between the chair and the keyboard. - Creativity is great, but plagiarism is faster! - Smile, everyone loves a moron. :-) -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 14:54 -0700, Ryan S wrote: Hey, this the first time I am actually working with tags but it seems quite popular and am adding it on a clients requests. By tags I mean something like wordpress' implementation of it, for example when an author writes an article on babies the tags might be baby,babies, new borns, cribs, nappies or a picture of a baby can have the tags baby,babies, new born, cute kid, nappies the tags are comma separated above of course. The way i am doing it right now is i have sa an article or a pic saved in the db as article_or_pic_address text the_tags varchar(240) My question is, when someone clicks on any one of the tags, do i do a LIKE %search_term% search or...??? 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/ Any help in the form of advise, code or links would be appreciated. TIA. Cheers! Ryan -- - The faulty interface lies between the chair and the keyboard. - Creativity is great, but plagiarism is faster! - Smile, everyone loves a moron. :-) I think your question has two parts there. With regards to searching in the database, I'd do a LIKE '%search_term %'. 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) Ash www.ashleysheridan.co.uk -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 23:17 +0100, Nathan Rixham wrote: 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) What I meant was this definately used to be the case, but I've not found it to be anymore. Try searching the various engines with a strange/obscure question (a real one obviously!) and look at the results. Often you'll find forums are the main results, which almost exclusively use GET parameters rather than URL rewriting. Also, you mention about keywords in the URL; GET parameters qualify for this, but I agree, certain parts of the URL (i.e. domain, path, querystring, anchor) could have different weightings. Ash www.ashleysheridan.co.uk -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
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) -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
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 :-) -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
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 -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] searching by tags....
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 -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
