Category Archives: Search Engine Optimization

Search engine cloaking, it’s the intent that matters

Posted on April 16, 2007 by Todd Huss

Back at the end of 2005 I wrote a short post titled Cloaking, no need to be ashamed and now in 2007 even more big sites are practicing some form of search engine crawler targeted cloaking. Yet still most SEO’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Web | Comments Off

Search Engine Friendly URLs with Ruby on Rails

Posted on February 4, 2007 by Todd Huss

Update 2/5/07: I’ve since discovered five plugins that address this very problem with slightly different approaches (the latter two store a permalink in the table, good for mutable titles): acts_as_sluggable acts_as_urlnameable acts_as_slugable acts_as_friendly_param permalink_fu Obie’s recent post on search engine … Continue reading →

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Search Engine Optimization, Software Engineering | 3 Comments

Tracking your SEO pagerank

Posted on April 12, 2006 by Todd Huss

I’ve started using Sitening’s free SEO SERP tracker to track the position of GreatSchools.net for terms we want to rank for in Google. If you rely on search traffic and want to keep track of how you’re ranking for certain … Continue reading →

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Using image tags (for style elements) in HTML is bad design

Posted on April 11, 2006 by Todd Huss

Update 4/11/06: I’ve received some criticism on this post from people who assumed I was saying you should never use image tags in HTML. My bad for the misleading title, I’ve added to the title in parens to be more … Continue reading →

Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Design, Search Engine Optimization | 9 Comments

Crawler side effects of using XHTML entity references

Posted on April 5, 2006 by Todd Huss

We’re slowly moving towards making GreatSchools XHTML compliant (we have a long way to go though)! To start we’ve begun using proper XHTML entity references for URL’s with & as a separator instead of plain old & in a few … Continue reading →

Posted in Design, Search Engine Optimization | Comments Off

Java’s SEO blunder: jsessionid

Posted on April 4, 2006 by Todd Huss

Update: Bryce pointed out a servlet filter you can implement to disable JSESSIONID’s… very nice! When we started moving GreatSchools from Perl to Java + SpringMVC + Hibernate one of the first things we had to figure out was how … Continue reading →

Posted in Java, Search Engine Optimization, Web | 9 Comments

Search engine market share changing is an understatement

Posted on March 30, 2006 by Todd Huss

The market share change between Google and Yahoo has been breathtaking this past year! The article Google gains search share, widens lead on Yahoo (over at Yahoo news) indicates Google’s market share was 36.3% a year ago and now it’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment

Keeping current with SEO

Posted on March 24, 2006 by Todd Huss

Keeping current with SEO has always been a challenge for me, it reminds me of paying bills, you have to do it but you don’t always want to. However, as the majority of our traffic comes from search, staying on … Continue reading →

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Web | 1 Comment

Nofollow hurts bloggers more than spammers

Posted on February 3, 2006 by Todd Huss

Nofollow really took off in the blogging community as a means to stop comment spammers and I think at this point it’s safe to say that it’s had absolutely no effect on that front. What’s worse is that it’s the … Continue reading →

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Web | 9 Comments

SEO Toolbox

Posted on January 9, 2006 by Todd Huss

At work when we design a new page that we hope to drive people to via search engines we often consult with our search engine consultant to ensure we’ve thought through the page design and that the HTML is up … Continue reading →