"A URL should be a service that provides a visitor with access to the information that he/she wants, and not a hurdle that he/she must pass in order to access that information". I'm paraphrasing there, but it's what Rasmus Lerdorf was saying in his "do you PHP?" lecture last month.

Ours is a "sales and marketing" site, and I want visitors and crawlers to be encouraged to find the information they require, and index it appropriately - so the concept described above is particularly attractive to us, and I posted up here a couple of weeks back about how to implement this in practice.

We've implemented the scheme outlined on our main domain, and our "Error 404" traffic has been halved; it was already low, accounting for perhaps 1 access in 200, but it has now been reduced further - just 10 requests in 18000 yesterday (that's 1 access in 1800).

I'm voting it to be a success, but not blindly so. Failing requests are checked to see if they're calling for a known file in the wrong directory, or if they're calling for a URL that does exist except they have the capitalisation wrong. Such cases are diverted, and send out a "200 OK" header. Requests for html pages that consist of alphabetic names that don't otherwise exist result in a search of "The Horse's mouth" and an appropriate results page if there is indeed a "hit", again with an OK status. And users who try to call up Microsoft's FrontPage technology to update our site (!!) get a polite page asking them to let us know of any corrections that they feel are needed.

If none of these situations allows us to return a good page, we still return a "404", but as you see from my stats above that's now a tiny minority of cases.

Where did all the errors that we previously had come from? A lot of them came from poorly written spiders, or from accesses to pages that had briefly appeared on our site or brief incorrect links that the search engines had found (we also have a table of about 10 specific URLs with specific diverts for such situations). And now we *can* be helpful.

Is our scheme going to give us long term issues with search engines? The concern has been expressed that search engines can now index the extra URLs since they're getting code 200s back. Well - that's fine by us. It's a resource through which the page can be found and a route that lets the user mine the information they need. It's more likely to drive the traffic to our site, which provides us with much of our sales and marketing, up rather than down.
(written 2004-11-04 07:40:54)

Commentator	says ...
David Corking:	Graham wrote "Is our scheme going to give us long term issues with search engines? ... getting code 200s back" I love Graham's scheme. I tried to find a page on his wellho.net by typing a directory URL - and got a very polite page on my browser saying that there is no index page there, but I was very welcome on the site and I might like to browse here or there. However some search engines might penalize the entire site for duplicate content. I don't know PHP - but I can't help wondering if the scheme can be altered a little to return a 301 redirect to the returned page, instead of the 200. Perhaps another blog reader know the answer? David (comment added 2004-11-25 09:03:57)
Graham:	Interesting point about search engine ranking, and I'm keeping my eye on it. However - we are *not* publicising huge numbers of extra duplicate links so the search engines will actually find very few of them and will see little duplicated content. I'm going to go away and check "301" though (I'm familiar with 302 and 304), and I'm also going to consider sending back "noindex" tags in the pages sent back by our 404 handler. (comment added 2004-11-25 10:44:41)

G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility

Back to A typical morning

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to Friday, busy week!

A Parallel for Perl 6
Avoid the wheel being re-invented by using Perl modules
Training notes available under Open Distribution license
Friday, busy week!
URLs - a service and not a hurdle
A typical morning
Taking Equipment offshore to run a course
Far from the sea, but close to the heart
Distance Learning
mysql_connect or mysql_pconnect in PHP?
Link to page ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 at 50 posts per page


This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

Link to Ezine home page (for reading).
Link to Blogging home page (to add comments).