I learned a few things while using the websiteGrader service.

1. Chances are 92 out-of 100 that Ryan Stewart’s DigitalBackcountry blog has a better grade than your blog. Trust me on this.

2. Search engines see your website at www.yourwebsite.com as a different website than yourwebsite.com. And that’s not a good thing.

To fix issue number one you’ll just have to write about 25 posts per day, every day, for the rest of your life.

To fix issue number two you’ll just need to add two lines of code to your htaccess file.

Here’s what you do: In your htaccess file – located in the root of your server – add the following two lines of code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^youwebsite.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourwebsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

What that does is take any attempts to visit www.yoursite.com and send them to yoursite.com.

Here’s my htaccess file that fixes the problem as an example.

I’m not sure what this might do to sub domains if you have them. I did test and make sure that links such as: www.polygeek.com/videomaru/ still sent browsers to polygeek.com/videomaru/ and that seemed to work fine.

Note to Ryan: you beat me by one percentage point this time. But you just wait. You, just, wait!

polyGeek SEO

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search made a joint announcement that they are going to all support sitemaps .90 – official site.

And what does that mean?

from AjaxWorld:

How Sitemaps Work
A Sitemap is an XML file that can be made available on a website and acts as a marker for search engines to crawl certain pages. It is an easy way for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. It does this by conveniently allowing webmasters to list all of their URLs along with optional metadata, such as the last time the page changed, to improve how search engines crawl and index their websites.

This all sounds like good news, especially for Flash and Ajax developers who have had issues getting their dynamic sites accurately crawled.

What I’d like to know is what safeguards there are to prevent abuse. Guess we’ll find out.

polyGeek SEO, sitemaps