For Cat.

catherine yronwode <cat (AT) luckymojo (DOT) com> wrote:

John Bokma wrote:

A symbolic link is something on your web site, it's a file system
thingy.
--
John Experienced (web) developer: http://castleamber.com/

Could you use your experience to explain what you just wrote in more
user-friendy language?

Apologies :-)

The web uses URLs (uniform resource locators), which means a funny
notation for one resource. A webserver is used to connect those URLs to
actual files on a harddisk (for example).

But it's not necessary that it are files, or even that it has to be stored
somewhere. As long as the webserver is able to return a reply for a
request.

A symbolic link is something that happens a file system level, ("on" the
harddisk). The webserver just follows the symbolic link to the actual
file, and serves that out, without telling the visitor (Google, me) that
it actually did that.

So there is no way that Google can see the actual organization of your
files. Google can't even see if the file is real, or not, a symbolic link
etc.

--
John Experienced (web) developer: http://castleamber.com/
Perl SEO tools: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
NEW ----> Textpad reference card (pdf): http://johnbokma.com/textpad/

catherine yronwode <cat (AT) luckymojo (DOT) com> wrote:

Also, i cannot imagine that the few hand-made symblic links he made
can account for 50 THOUSAND links seen by google. Something else must
be going on. But i have no clue what it is.

I am afraid that if there are many clones (e.g. several links leading to
the same page) that it harms your site, but I have little experience with
that.

Due to one (or two) mistakes, I got also several unwanted pages [1].
Fixing it with mod_rewrite seems to go very slow. A few do get hits, but I
just don't want those pages :-)

I have no idea how to check this out, but I think that it's important to
make all "phone URLs" either redirect to the long URLs, or stop Google
from indexing them.

Also, at a glance I've seen quite some pages that could be seo-ed better
(based on title though), but I think you're on my side: rather write a new
page instead of tweaking an old one ;-)

But if I can get roughly 10 visitors/page, with 5,000 actual pages you
must be able to get way more then 15,000 uniques/day.

Another tip: never link to index.html if / does the same. It reduces
traffic if you don't do it ;-). (A proxy doesn't know that / and
index.html are the same file, only the webserver does).


[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=index...:johnbokma.com

--
John Experienced (web) developer: http://castleamber.com/
Perl SEO tools: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
NEW ----> Textpad reference card (pdf): http://johnbokma.com/textpad/

Thanks, Paul and John, for the information.

cat

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:29:25 -0700, catherine yronwode
<cat (AT) luckymojo (DOT) com> wrote:

Thanks, Paul and John, for the information.

cat

No problem Cat. Glad to help out.
I had never heard of symbolic links until you mentioned them, so I
learnt something too

take care
plh
Paul


----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups
----= East and West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =----

Paul B <webmaster (AT) firstpeople (DOT) us> wrote:

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:29:25 -0700, catherine yronwode
cat (AT) luckymojo (DOT) com> wrote:

Thanks, Paul and John, for the information.

cat

No problem Cat. Glad to help out.
I had never heard of symbolic links until you mentioned them, so I
learnt something too

That's why, after all those years, I still use Usenet every day. It either
teaches me something new, or I have to find something out to make a point,
and learn something new :-D.

--
John Experienced (web) developer: http://castleamber.com/
Perl SEO tools: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
NEW ----> Textpad reference card (pdf): http://johnbokma.com/textpad/