I previously wrote about 301 redirecting www to non www url and vice versa to avoid a possibility of getting a duplicate content penalty, but the is another scenario where you can have two identical homepages.
Google See’s your domain. say www.bettermychance.org and www.bettermychance.org/index.php as two different pages with the same content on both. so a great way to solve this problem is by putting some code in your .htaccess file
Here is what you do:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.bettermychance.org/ [R=301,L]
Replacing my domain above for yours.
Now when anyone goes to your domain.com/index.php they will be redirected to your main URL thus eliminating the chance of a duplicate content penalty.
Tags: , Content Penalty, Google, htaccess, mod rewrite, Redirect, seo
09.Jan.08 
Oscommerce SEO, SEO Basics, Site Optimization 
Comments (0)
Can the be too many backlinks to your site?
Well i wrote in my last post a couple of days ago about the different types of backlinks and how they will benefit you, but now here comes a few words of warning that may get you in to trouble with the big G (Google) in particular.
There is a lot of discussion about if backlinks can harm your site, i am of the belief that building backlinks too quickly can adversely affect your site, it may be something small where as the extra backlinks you are getting are just not counted or if you are going all out buying high PR backlinks or building 1,000 of backlinks using black hat method you could get your site penalised quite hard.
What could the result be? any number of things could happen to your site if you get links that are unnatural, Googles way of thinking is that a link should be natural and if you have good content on your site people will link to it naturally. therefore people going out buying paid links and using co-op programs may be in for a shock.
You could end up loosing all your sites PR (page rank), you may loose your search rankings and worst of all you may get you entire site black listed.
Think I’m joking? take a look at Googles link schemes page, and think twice before buying your next link.
Just remember good SERP’s take time, things will happen naturally and you cant cheat the big G.
Tags: Backlinks, Google, Page Rank, PR, SERPs
14.Dec.07 Backlinks, SEO Basics Comments (0)
I consider there to be two main types of backlinks.
1. A standard backlink using your url. Example http://www.bettermychange.org
And
2. An anchor text backlink. Example Search Engine Blog
The second is a much better way to improve your SERP’s (Search engine results pages) as the site that is linking back to you is telling search engines what type of site it is, it need to be written in html code and looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.bettermychance.org”>Search Engine Blog</a>
Its not always easy to get sites to link to you using anchor text, but a good place to start experimenting is forums that allows footer links, such as Digital Point. There we go, that was another backlink using anchor text. cool huh! 
Tags: Anchor Text, Backlinks, seo, SERPs
12.Dec.07 Backlinks, SEO Basics Comments (0)
A backlink in its most simplist form is a link from one site to another site (Your site)
Google considers a backlink as a vote for your site, so the more backlinks or votes you get to your site the more popular your site will become.
The above is a very basic description, you may also want to read, Types of backlinks and Too many backlinks.
Tags: Anchor Text, Backlinks, seo, SERPs
10.Dec.07 Backlinks, SEO Basics Comments (0)
