January 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Domain-Specific Redirects in WordPress Multisite

How to write an htaccess call to handle an entire mapped domain on WordPress Multisite.

Warning: This post has a pretty high geek factor.
You’ve been warned.

Since Otto (@ottodestruct) fixed the wordpress permalink issue in WordPress 3.3, when I moved christopherprice.com to a different WP install, I decided to eliminate the /%year%/ portion of the permalinks he recommended previously.

Since it is very bad for SEO to have previously ranked pages just disappear and show up at different URLs, I needed to set up a 301 redirect (permanent) instruction for each old URL to each new URL. For example:

http://domain.com/2011/post/ should now redirect all visitors (including Google spiders) to http://domain.com/post/.

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Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
May 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Insensitive and Vulgar SEO

Macho Man Randy SavageIn a post titled: Sickening. Macho Man Dies, TMZ Stuffs Keywords to Profit, and a Lesson In Bad SEO, Derek Halpern calls out the editors of AOL’s blog, TMZ, for posting an article using the following URL:

http://www.tmz.com/2011/05/20/randy-savage-car-accident-macho-man-dead-dies-died-killed-wwe-wrestler-florida/

Yes, optimizing your site by including relevant keywords is important. However, TMZ took it way too far. Beyond the lame tactic of keyword stuffing, including “dead-dies-died-killed” in the URL in hopes to get a little extra search traffic is particularly insensitive and vulgar.

Filed Under: Rants Tagged With: , , ,
May 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Review of Caphyon’s Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager

Google Analytics screenshot

The Challenge

You are looking at your Google Analytics dashboard and can see that you have more unique visitors this month than last month. That’s good, right?

Maybe. Online marketing offers far more insight into customer behavior than traditional sales channels. In fact, the amount of data is so overwhelming that most marketers simply ignore it. Free tools, such as the popular Google Analytics, are very helpful for answering the question: “What happened on my site yesterday, last week, last month…” But by itself, this data is of limited value as it offers no context. Are your competitors’ websites attracting more or fewer visitors than yours? How is your company’s website positioned relative to your competitors’ in terms of relevant keywords? Are you really just shooting in the dark, or can you identify actionable best practices by observing the online practices of companies you admire?

If Google Analytics is your marketing dashboard, where is your marketing GPS to offer direction?

Map Your Competitive Landscape

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