Ok, so back to my site redesign/move issues. In a previous post, I had written that search engines search by domain name, not IP address. This week, I found some contradictory information that claims that some search engines DO search by IP address instead of domain name.

This article was first published in ’03 and updated in April ’04 so it may be outdated. It’s also possible that the major search engines search by domain name, but some of the minor ones search by IP address. I’m not sure it’s worth spending time trying to figure out what’s what since it could change next week. However, a safe bet would be to assume the worst – that they search by IP address – and keep your old site up for a few months while you’re redirecting traffic to your new site. During this time, check your traffic stats to watch for search engine spider activity at both the old and the new sites. Once the major search engines have crawled your new site, you can take the old one down.

The best ways to redirect traffic are either 301 redirects, which I discussed in an earlier post, or mod_rewrite. I tried to find a solid source that could tell me why you would use one of these over the other. I don’t feel I’ve found “the” answer yet, but it seems like if you’re making a lot of page and folder name changes, that mod_rewrite might be easier. However, mod_rewrite is only for servers running Apache, whereas I think 301s can be used with other server software.

That being said, what exactly is mod_rewrite? It’s an Apache module that rewrites a requested URL on the fly. It’s very search engine friendly and while it looks like gobbledygook since it works with regular expressions which always make my eyes cross, there are places all over the web where you can copy and paste what you need. There also seem to be a number of forums for asking mod_rewrite questions if you get stuck. Mod_rewrites are put in the .htaccess file.

One use of mod_rewrite that I saw popping up quite a lot is a concern over Google seeing yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com as two separate URLs. This is referred to as the “Google Canonical problem” and the reason it’s important is that it can split your stats (two pages with 500 hits each won’t rank as high as one page with 1000 hits) and/or give you a duplicate content flag. The mod_rewrite code for making sure Google will see one site instead of two is:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yoursite.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301]

Since our exercise with microformats didn’t happen last week, I decided to research it for one of this week’s posts and see if I can learn a bit more. I decided to check out Sandy’s blog because I remember seeing that she had written about microformats so I figured I might learn something there. Also, Sandy and I are swapping links so we can learn about TrackBacks. Two birds with one stone.

So, Sandy has THREE posts on microformats! The first one is called Technorati and Microformats
and I learned a bunch there. We discussed Technorati in class and I’ve read a bit about it, but there’s something about reading a classmate’s description of it that gives it a fresh perspective and makes it more understandable. Maybe it’s the peer quality; makes it less intimidating and therefore easier to digest. So what I got is that Technorati is essentially a search engine for blogs. You can claim your blog there so others can find you more easily and you can also use it, as Sandy pointed out, for seeing what other people are saying about topics that interest you. The neat thing about it is that it pretty much operates in live time. You can get updates on new posts every 60 seconds. Cool!

Sandy’s second post is called Detecting Microformats and talks about the Firefox plug-in and how it’s still buggy for 2.0.

The third post is called vCard: Evolution to Microformats and talks about how the address book format of vCard has been transformed to work on the Web via the hCard.

There ya go, Sandy. Some TrackBacks for you and some additional learning for me. : )

One thing I ran across while looking for the best way to minimize search engine dips when doing site redesigns is the notion of a 301 redirect. I had never heard of a 301 before but the more deeply I dug into my research, the more it became clear that I was going to have to have at least a preliminary idea of what a 301 is.

Basically, a 301 redirect is some code you can put in your .htaccess file for servers running Apache. It tells spiders that a page has moved permanently, giving both the old and new URLs. 301s can be used for entire sites or for specific files within a site.

People seem to agree that a 301 is the best way to go when changing domain names or relocating or renaming certain pages on your site. With domain name changes, an older domain name will generally fare better than a newer one, but even so, having a 301 in place will help minimize the impact of the change.

One solution to this that might be the best of both worlds might be to go ahead and build the new site, 301 the new pages to the old, wait a year, then 301 the old pages to the new. For example, for my page

http://www.bend-in-the-river.com/qapersonality.html

I could build basically the same page in my new site (with the domain name alias reversed as discussed in previous posts), and, to help with findability, change the URL to

http://www.susanlitton.com/personality-disorders-questions.html.

I could then put a 301 on the susanlitton page to redirect it to the bend-in-the-river page. After a year, I could switch it: 301 the bend-in-the-river page to the susanlitton page.

Writing 301s doesn’t appear to be difficult. For specifics on how to write the code, I found this article helpful:

Giving search engine spiders direction with a 301 redirect

I’ve had fun and a fair amount of success in tracking down the answers to my questions about how a total overhaul of my site will affect my search engine rankings. In some cases, the answers are straightforward; in other cases, an answer has lead to another question. Here’s what I have so far:

Q: I’ve been wanting to transfer my site to a different hosting company but I haven’t known how (or if) that will affect my site’s search engine ratings.

A: The answer to this seems to be “No”. That answer told me an important piece of information I hadn’t had, namely that search engines search by domain name, not IP address.

Q: When I first created the site, the domain name I chose was bend-in-the-river.com. I published the site with that domain and then a bit later, decided to also use susanlitton.com. Since the site was already up, I ended up putting susanlitton.com as an alias. I’d like to switch that out — have susanlitton.com as the main domain name and bend-in-the-river as the alias. Will that change affect my ratings?

A: A tentative answer to this seems to be “Yes” with the added bit of info that an older domain will fare better than a newer domain. However, there seemed to be some disagreement and/or lack of clarity about how an alias actually works. I solved this dilemma by writing to my hosting company. Here’s their response:

The alias works via redirection from the zone records.
Zone records are basically a table that resolves domain names to i.p. addresses.
Thus, susanlitton.com has a zone record that tells servers looking for susanlitton.com to go to bend-in-the-river.com. The advantage of having an alias is that all e-mails going to susanlitton.com get forwarded to bend-in-the-river.com.

To show it visually…

bend-in-the-river.com has 66.113.130.214 as it’s i.p. address.

susanlitton.com also has 66.113.130.214 as it’s i.p. address.

I don’t know if all hosting companies do an alias this way, but I was happy to at least see how one company handles it. A solution to this concern seems to be to use a 301 redirect. More about this in another post.

Q: I also thought that at some point, I’d like to convert the site from HTML to PHP, but again, I haven’t known if that would mess things up.

A: Again, this question got a bit of a mixed review. However, people seem to agree that to a search engine, index.php is seen as the same as index.html. If you have any doubts, though, it seems that adding the trailing slash at the end of the URL will clear it up as well as possibly speed up your site a bit. (See waferbaby’s Slash Forward (Some URLs are Better Than Others))

Q: If I decide to include the site in my portfolio, it’s going to need major overhaul. In fact, although the content and the overall site architecture are still OK and I’d keep most of the images, I’d probably have to do pretty much everything else from scratch. How will that affect the ratings?

A: Short answer is that there will be a dip. Again, a 301 redirect will help here and I’ll explore that in my second post tonight.

Q: I’d like to use some of the tips and tools we’ve been studying in class to find out all I can about what is and what isn’t working to help people find my site.

A: The only thing I’ve done on this so far is sign up for Mint. I think it will be way cool to log some of these early stats and compare them throughout the process of my redesign. But see . . . even this brings up a question for me. I signed up for Mint using the main domain (www.bend-in-the-river.com). Since I now know that my alias has the same IP address, will Mint automatically give me stats for both or do I need to buy a separate package for www.susanlitton.com? I haven’t had a chance to look at Mint yet or figure out how to use it so hopefully when I crack it open, that answer will be obvious.

The first step in applying what we’re learning about findability to my psychotherapy site seems to be to compare my site to the nuts and bolts findability techniques. No tools or analytics or cool stuff yet, just the basics:

The Good

• The site has a lot of content and the content tends to be fairly keyword rich. This is largely due to a 17-page Questions & Answers section.
• The titles of each page start with “Psychotherapy in Atlanta, GA: Susan C. Litton, Ph.D. — ” and then have the name of that section, e.g., Philosophy of Therapy, Articles, Questions & Answers: Attachment Disorders, Questions & Answers: Personality Disorders, etc.
• The URLs contain some form of the main word for each page, e.g., the URL for the Philosophy of Therapy page is http://www.susanlitton.com/philosophy.html.
• I built another psychotherapy site for all the therapists in our practice and my personal page on that site includes a back link to my main site.
• I have links to my site in a signature I use for a mental health message board I monitor for iVillage.com.
• There are meta tags for both keywords and descriptions for each page on the site.
• There are a fair number of internal links on the site and the text of the links tend to be keywords. Again, the best example of this tends to be on questions pages, e.g., Abuse Questions.

The Bad

• With a couple of minor exceptions, the only changes I’ve made in content to the site are the yearly updates to the copyright date. There have been years that I haven’t even gotten around to doing that.
• The URLs could be done a lot better. For example, in the Questions & Answers area, although the main keyword for the page does appear in the URL, the keyword for each question page is prefaced with “qa” and the keyword for each answer page is prefaced with “ans”. For example, the URL for the page of questions pertaining to abuse is:

• Headers for each page are graphics and although they do have ALT tags, the anchor tags don’t have title attributes.
• The layout was done with tables and the tags have none of the attributes that would help search engines locate content.
• There’s no sitemap.

The Downright Ugly

• The home page is in Flash. There is a link on the home page to a non-Flash version but I don’t know how effective it is.
• The site doesn’t validate. There’s some real scary stuff in there.
• The site doesn’t even give a nod toward accessibility standards.

As you can see, the site needs some serious help. Stay tuned next week for the upcoming installment in this findability project.

Been mulling things over and have come up with a way to learn that excites me: I’m going to try to apply the things we’re learning in our Findability class to a real world project I need to do. The project is my psychotherapy site. I built it before I ever started taking classes at the Art Institute so the coding is a mess. No. A MESS. A peek under the hood would be an embarrassment. However, it generally ranks fairly high in Google and my referrals have increased exponentially as a result of the site.

There are several objectives I’d like to accomplish with this. Some of the tasks I have in mind will give me some answers I’ve been wanting for my site; some will help me learn the findability class material better; most will do both. One of the problems with my site is that I’ve been afraid to change anything because I haven’t wanted to mess up my search engine ratings. However, there are some changes I’ve really been wanting to make on the site so using this class as an opportunity to learn seems like a great idea. Here are the objectives:

• I’ve been wanting to transfer my site to a different hosting company but I haven’t known how (or if) that will affect my site’s search engine ratings.
• When I first created the site, the domain name I chose was bend-in-the-river.com. I published the site with that domain and then a bit later, decided to also use susanlitton.com. Since the site was already up, I ended up putting susanlitton.com as an alias. I’d like to switch that out — have susanlitton.com as the main domain name and bend-in-the-river as the alias. Will that change affect my ratings?
• I also thought that at some point, I’d like to convert the site from HTML to PHP, but again, I haven’t known if that would mess things up.
• If I decide to include the site in my portfolio, it’s going to need major overhaul. In fact, although the content and the overall site architecture are still OK and I’d keep most of the images, I’d probably have to do pretty much everything else from scratch. How will that affect the ratings?
• I’d like to use some of the tips and tools we’ve been studying in class to find out all I can about what is and what isn’t working to help people find my site.

So . . . several questions to research and then some activities to do.

Our websites for this class have to meet Priority One accessibility standards. I didn’t know what those were so I decided to write a post about them. The first Google article I found was for the w3c, which is probably as it should be. However, trying to decipher those seemed a bit overwhelming so I looked for a site that had them broken down a bit. Found one! A site called The HTML Writers Guild has their own interpretation of the Priority One checkpoints and they seem to mirror the w3c standards but are easier to understand. Here’s their list followed by my explanations:

• Provide text equivalents for non-text elements.

Use alt, longdesc, etc. for images, imagemap areas, multimedia, etc.

• Don’t rely solely upon color.

Color useage is encouraged but you should also use strong tags or something else to identify text marked by a color change.

• Identify language changes.

Use the LANG attribute (and probably the SPAN element) to mark language changes. An example is:

<span lang=”fr”>Cette phrase est en français</span>.

• Make sure pages are usable without style sheets.>

Use of CSS is encouraged but you should check to make sure your pages still present well (and in order) when the CSS is turned off.

• Update equivalents for generated content.

If you have dynamic content, make sure images and other related items are in synch with the content.

• Don’t make the screen flicker.

Period.

• Use plain, understandable English.

If you use a technical term or jargon, provide a reference link.

• Use client-side imagemaps, not server-side.

“Server-side imagemaps may be used in addition to client-side maps, but should never replace them. A text equivalent list of links should be provided for all imagemaps.”

• Use HTML 4.0 table markup on data tables.

This one is a biggie and I’m not going to detail it here. In general, though, it means using stuff like THEAD, TBODY, COLGROUP, CAPTION etc. You can read about it in the HTML 4.0 Specification.

• Frames should have NOFRAMES and TITLEs.

(If you use frames)

• Don’t rely solely upon scripts and applets.

An example here is that if you’re using client-side validation for forms, make sure you also have a server-side script for users with JavaScript turned off.

• As a last resort, make an alternate page.

Try to avoid this if possible. The author of the HTML Writers Guild site noted that often, alternate pages aren’t updated like the original one, so they tend to get out of synch.

Ok, so what seems to work is for me to use these posts to explore some of the things I feel dumb about. Helps me play catch up and not feel so out of synch. So . . . RSS. Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t have a clue what it was except that somewhere, I had heard that it stood for Really Simple Syndication. I think. There. I’ve said it. I haven’t a clue. Let’s learn about it.

When you enter RSS in Wikipedia, the article starts like this: “RSS is a family of web feed formats . . . “ That sort of made sense but I wanted to dig a little deeper so I followed the link to “web feed”. Ah. Neat article here. I learned the following:

• If you’ve got content (which, I guess, means anyone who has anything on the Web) – as a content owner, you can “syndicate” that content. (Here’s a fun tangent – I tried to look up “syndicate” on Wikipedia and the article wasn’t helpful. I was about to leave Wikipedia for Miriam-Webster when I noticed a little thing in the side bar that suggested I look up syndicate in the Wiktionary! What a great name! That entry wasn’t totally helpful either but basically, it seems like syndicating content just means that you distribute it.)
• Once you’ve syndicated your content (which I’m not sure how to do but that will be a different article), then a user can subscribe to that content.
• The user signs up to receive the content with something called an aggregator (also called a feed reader or a news reader).

Feed readers. Some stuff to learn here:

• It’s like getting an email except that you don’t have to give them your email address (which makes it safer).
• Personalized home pages like My Yahoo, My MSN and My AOL use feed readers to present your news, weather, stock quotes, etc.
• There are other web-based tools that are made just for feed reading. A popular one is Bloglines. I think the Netvibes thing we’re using in class is maybe a feed reader plus other stuff?
• Firefox has a feed reader built into its toolbar called Live Bookmarks; IE 7 has a similar one called Favorites
• You can also get desktop feed readers that you download (e.g., Newsgator and Feed Demon).
• Attensa is a feed reader for Outlook

Whew. Ok, now I just need to sign up for some (aside from what we did for Netvibes) and practice using them so they become old hat.

I need another personal post – helps me clear out my brain and focus. Life is very intense right now. The septic tank at my office decided to die and since the owners of the building are planning to sell, they opted not to fix it. This meant that the 8 of us who have called the place home (me, for over 20 years) are suddenly in the position of having to scurry around and find a new place to practice. Moving to commercial office space is a lengthy process. Once you find a space you like, you give the owner the specs you want and it typically takes around 2 months for them to get the necessary permits and build the place out. Two months in the old office with the possibility of no water or plumbing isn’t a viable option; two months of not seeing clients isn’t a viable option. So, Anne and I decided to move our offices to our home temporarily.

As a result, this week has been a week of rapidly changing hats. We go look at commercial office space to try to find a new permanent home. Then we swap that hat for our Home Depot hat as we go into fix-it mode to try to convert our home into temporary office space. Then we don our therapist hats as we go see clients. And the interior designer/architect hats as we make tentative drawings of how we want our new space to look. In a few hours, we’re going to go hire a couple of guys off the street to come help us move furniture. I’m not even sure WHAT that hat is. And of course, there’s my student hat that I just pulled down over my ears as I began to write this post. And the beat goes on . . .

A couple of times this week, I thought of writing Aarron a whine email telling him all of this and asking him not to expect great things from me this quarter. I still pretty much just want to whine about it all. However, in my nobler moments (which are few and far between right now), I’m trying to see this as an opportunity to learn something I’ve never been good at: how to work smarter, faster, with less “fat”. Get more (and perhaps better) work done in a smaller amount of time. I’ve never, ever worked quickly. I meander around a lot to get from A to B. For example . . . well, ok, writing this personal post. It doesn’t have to be done. It’s not part of any assignment. I’ll still write my two non-personal posts for this week. But it helps me. Gets me in the right track. So . . . is that fat or something essential? Hmm. Maybe I need to remember that fat – for all the bad press it gets – is an essential nutrient. At least it seems to be for me.