by Brian LaFrance on November 1, 2011
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been learning quite a bit about nginx. Most of AuthorityLabs has been running on nginx, with the most notable exception being the part of our site running on WordPress. I’ve been a long time fan of having a LAMP stack and when we migrated the site to AWS earlier this year, that’s what I wanted set up.
While Apache is a great server, I’ve come to realize that it can be bloated and many times it ends up costing time and money to work around the bloat and quirks. As Chris Lea put it, “Apache is like Microsoft Word; it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache.” A lot of people don’t NEED Microsoft Word, just like they don’t NEED Apache.
As of October 2011, nginx is serving up 11.28% of sites. Not a staggering figure by any means, but for something that had its first stable release a few months ago, that’s pretty good. They also recently received $3 million in funding. It should be interesting to see how that works out. Considering their growth, funding, and the fact that nginx is powering some high profile sites such as Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, and WordPress.com, it shouldn’t be long before a lot of people take notice and start making the move.
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by Dawn Wentzell on October 27, 2011
A friend of mine is engaged, and I am to be one of her bridesmaids. As a four-time bridesmaid, I’ve unfortunately been to more wedding blogs and bridal shop websites than a sane human should. Some are fantastic, doing everything SEOs recommend: engaging and well-written content, a solid back link profile, good information architecture, attractive designs and clean code. And as with any industry, a large number are poorly designed and built, and even more poorly optimized.
Recently, my friend and I were going wedding dress shopping, and she sent me to the website of the bridal store she’d chosen. I was slightly horrified.
I’d like to say this was one of the worst wedding sites I’ve seen, but the errors they were making are quite common to sites across sites in all niches. From keyword stuffed content pages, to duplicate content, and spammy back links, this shop was doing nearly everything SEOs consider to be wrong.
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by Dawn Wentzell on October 17, 2011
Don't use rel="canonical" as a bandaid solution
There has been some recent discussion in the SEO community about whether Google and Bing have different rules for the use of the rel=”canonical” tag. Google has said it is fine to have self-referential canonical tags (ie. the rel=”canonical” tag specifies the same URL as the page you are on), whereas Bing indicates they’d prefer the canonical tag be left blank in that case.
The proper use of rel=”canonical” can be confusing at best, and can produce devastating results at worst. So what is an SEO to do?
First of all, realize that using rel=”canonical” isn’t necessary in many cases of duplicate content. The canonical tag is a great tool for extreme situations and enterprise-level sites, but on small to medium sized websites there are often other solutions.
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by Brian LaFrance on October 6, 2011
Unless you live completely off the grid or are baked out of your mind, you’ve likely heard of Salesforce. What you may or may not have heard is that they are buying up companies to compliment their existing products like a Beverly Hills housewife buying shoes. Many of the acquired companies have been rebranded to fall in line with the Salesforce brand, which seems to be working well for them. They’re much more than just a CRM now.
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by Dawn Wentzell on September 29, 2011
One of the most common problems I see in websites is the same content being available at both the WWW and non-WWW versions of a domain. I’ve encountered this in nearly every website I’ve done an SEO audit for, and I see it every day when browsing the web. Despite it being so prevalent, it is indeed a problem.
Having the same content available on both the WWW and non-WWW versions of a domain (such as authoritylabs.com and www.authoritylabs.com) is called canonicalization. While you and I might realize they are in fact the same page, search engines mistake them to be unique pages.
Most of the time, search engines can figure out that they are the same page and only include the canonical URL in their index. SEObook explains the canonical URL as:
The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines typically use PageRank or a similar measure to determine which version of a URL is the canonical URL.
Regardless, canonicalization can result in indexing problems and duplicate content issues. Most importantly, canonicalization will split the link juice between each version as people link to and share both.
What you want to see is a redirection from the WWW to the non-WWW, or vice versa, so that if the wrong version is entered or linked to, the user is automatically taken to the canonical URL. Fortunately, this is relatively easy to set up.
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by RebeccaKelley on September 23, 2011
The latest “Meh, it’s a slow news day” story comes courtesy of Mark Davidson, a self-described “Internet marketing and sales professional” who managed to scrounge up over 55,000 Twitter followers. Is he an Internet rock star? Does he hold the secret to making millions of dollars from the pantsless luxury of your home office? Is he BFFs with Lady Gaga? It’s a mystery as to how he accumulated so many followers, but regardless of his method, Davidson has a pretty strong Twitter account. Must be a lot of work for one dude to maintain such a popular profile.
Or so we thought. A couple nights ago, Davidson’s Twitter account supposedly got hijacked while he slumbered, no doubt dreaming of high conversion rates and new Facebook layouts. It turns out that the so-called Internet marketing expert employed not one, not two, but three ghostwriters to maintain his Twitter account for him. Because you know, we Internet marketers are as busy as Jay-Z and need to hire a whole PR team to manufacture 140 character tweets on our behalf. Either Davidson has too much money than he knows what to do with or the economy is really that bad that people are desperate enough to pretend to be a middle-aged white dude for a pittance. Read more >>
