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Archive for the category ‘search engines’

Double slashes in Analytics URLs

18th October 2009

double-slash

I’ve just been dealing with an issue on a site where Google Analytics is logging a lot of pages twice, once normally and once with a double slash—”//”—at the end.

Obviously this is worrying. If Google is seeing the same page in two “places” via two technically different URLs, duplicate content penalties and PageRank squandering are distinct possibilities. It also seems to break a lot of the Analytics “Site Overlay” functionality.

Here I’m going to go through what I’ve done to isolate the cause of the issue, and approaches to fixing it.

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Permalink  |  Posted in search engines, WordPress  |  10 comments »  | 

Google, SEO & CSS image replacement

9th June 2007

I’ve just been reading about possible clashes between the CSS “image replacement” technique that I use and Google’s rules about spam techniques.

Image replacement involves using CSS to hide the text for an element (e.g. a <h1>), and setting the background-image for that element to replace it with an image. Users with visual browsers with CSS get the image; text-only browsers, bots, etc., just see plain text.

It’s not without its detractors and slight drawbacks, but it’s a widespread technique. A quick scan of big-name sites as of writing found it in evidence on stopdesign.com, mezzoblue.com and adobe.com.

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Permalink  |  Posted in search engines, XHTML/CSS  |  Comments closed  | 

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