Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [164]
The redirection remedy for domain management is to choose a specific domain URL and redirect all other domain URLs to that specific domain. Choose between a domain with or without the www, and redirect all the traffic to the primary URL. This is a task I recommend; if you are not comfortable with performing, get help. This is a significant process, and having a programmer who is adept at making these instructions will help you.
Duplicate content can arise in a website in many other ways. These issues will be explored more in-depth in Thursday’s lesson on avoiding duplicate content.
Beware of Domain-Level Redirects
The issues covered in this section are focused on domain management issues, but you should be aware that some programming methods employ redirects in order to manage other site issues but without considering search engine marketing.
CMS System Redirects
A content management system is a software program designed to allow a site’s managers to add, edit, and manage content on the site without a knowledge of programming. As such, the interface has to be simple in order to allowing management and editing functions. The problem comes when CMS systems are purchased and employed, but the company developing the CMS did not take search engine spidering and indexing issues into account. As such, the CMS may employ redirects to manage the pages and architecture of the site, not aware of the issues it may create with search engines.
An example of this is easily identified when a visitor types in the domain of a website and is redirected to a long URL that contains additional subdirectories. An example of this was the American Cancer Society website. If a visitor went there directly by typing in www.cancer.org, a redirect would send them to www.cancer.org/docroot/home/index.asp (see Figure 14-10). What happened behind the scenes is that the content management system was publishing all of the pages in a deeper subdirectory, /docroot/. To direct all of the visitors to the new home page location that deep in the structure, a redirect was used. Unfortunately, this was a 302 temporary redirect.
Because of the 302 temporary redirect, search engines would not apply the “new” home page and home page URL as being the actual home page and URL. In a search for the website, the primary domain still appeared as the home page location (see Figure 14-11).
Figure 14-10: Cancer.org redirect to a deeper website structure
Figure 14-11: Google’s result for Cancer.org still showed the location as the root-level URL and did not pick up the redirect because of the 302 code.
A redirect from the root level to a deeper structure of the site is not a recommended method of dealing with website structure. Today, the American Cancer Society has corrected the domain to be hosted at the primary URL and removed the redirect (see Figure 14-12).
Figure 14-12: Cancer.org is now corrected to show the home page at the root-level URL.
A redirect at the root level causes a few problems with search engines. The first problem is simply one of website structure. Traditionally, the home page is considered the most important page of the website, because it is often the primary landing page for visitors, and it located at the domain level (www.domain-name.com). Visitors expect to see the home page of the website when they type in the domain address. The home page introduces the website’s purpose and also contains much of the information necessary