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12. Examining Your URLs for Problems

URLs with too many parameters or redirects can confuse a search engine. You should construct URLs

with both users and search engines in mind.

URLs are discussed in Chapter 3, “Provocative SE-Friendly URLs.” Redirects are discussed in

Chapter 4, “Content Relocation and HTTP Status Codes.” In Chapter 13, “Coping with Technical

Issues,” you learn how to build your own library that verifies the links within your web site are

functional.

13. Looking for Duplicate Content

Having many pages with the same or similar content in excess can result in poorer rankings. And though

it is a matter of contention as to whether an explicit

penalty

exists for having duplicate content, it is unde-

sirable for many reasons. Duplicate content is, however, not a simple problem with a single cause. Rather,

it is a complex problem with myriad causes.

Duplicate content is the subject of Chapter 5, “Duplicate Content” (aptly named).

14. Eliminating Session IDs

Use of URL-based session management may allow users with cookies turned off to use a web site that

requires session-related information, but it may also wreak havoc for the web site in search engines. For

this reason URL-based sessions should either be completely turned off, or cloaking should be employed

to turn off the URL-based session management if the user-agent is a spider.

Session IDs and their associated problems are discussed at length in Chapter 2, “A Primer in Basic SEO.”

This particular technique is discussed in Chapter 11,“Cloaking, Geo-Targeting, and IP Delivery.”

15. Tweaking On-page Factors

On-page factors may have diminished in effect over the years, but it is still advantageous to author

HTML that employs elements that mean something semantically. Especially if you author HTML

using a WYSIWYG editor, or use a content management system with a WYSIWYG editor, this may

not be occurring. Other problems may involve having a large navigation element physically before

the content.

Chapter 6 discusses the aforementioned topics as well as many other HTML and JavaScript-related

issues at length.

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Chapter 15: Site Clinic: So You Have a Web Site?

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