In my line of work, there has been a widespread belief that Google is unable to crawl “unoptimised” URLs and that ideally all URLs should be in a directory structure. This is totally untrue as mentioned by Google’s blog post.

In fact, Google actually says that they might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URL if you try to change it to look like a static URL.

However, this post will give you my opinion on why URL optimisation should be considered and to what extent should we optimise it to.

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You may have read my previous entry on performing a 301 redirect from Blogger to Wordpress, where I wrote a script that will capture all traffic to your old Blogger site and redirect it to your new Wordpress site. Ideally you’d want to do the 301 redirects from the web server, but unfortunately Blogger doesn’t allow you to do that and thus, you’re left with the client-side solution: Javascript.

First of all, let me clarify briefly on my previous post and inform you what the core strengths of my script are.

• Client-side redirect will not work without Javascript. Pretty obvious huh? What that means is that search engine crawlers aren’t able to follow the redirect. Nasty limitation in a simplistic sense.
• Strengths of my script are:
  1. It works.
  2. You need a client-side solution if you’re on Blogger. No other way.
  3. It captures and redirects all traffic from your old site to your new site.

That being said, let me now expand on these two major points: the limitations of search engine crawlers and why is capturing traffic important.

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The 80/20 Rule

You may have heard of the common business principle of the 80/20 rule, such as 20% of employees do 80% of an organisation’s work, or 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. The list goes on.

Well, this post is meant to address the issue of “when is too much, too much”? How can we spend 20% of our SEO/Search Engine Optimisation efforts to achieve 80% of the result from a purely page optimisation perspective?

Why Organic Rankings and Traffic?

There are a lot of theories and ideas from various people on how to optimise a page to rank organically for search phrases and drive organic traffic on search engine results page (SERP). The value of organic rankings and traffic is that it does not cost you money as opposed to spending money on advertising to drive traffic and be seen for what user’s search for (such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing).

So what does that mean? Imagine if your website is listed on the first page of Google’s SERP for the phrase “buy digital camera”, your traffic would be sky rocketing with an estimate average search volume of 135,000 (as reported by Google Adwords Keyword Tool) and thus, driving digital camera sales since the phrase shows the intent of the user, which is to “buy”.

And it hasn’t costed you anything in advertising.

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I’ve had this domain for less than 3 months now and I’ve been testing how fast I can get in the 1st page of Google and Yahoo’s search engine results page (SERP) for the term “danny ng”.

As of today, my blog is ranked #7 on Google AU and #5 on Google US. On Yahoo AU and Yahoo US, I’m ranked #1. Not bad ay?

Next step is trying to get my PageRank up. It remains 0 at the moment. I should blog more but I’ve been a lazy bum hehe.

There’s a lot of things I want to do with javascript, but haven’t found time yet juggling a job, a girlfriend, a social life and so on.

I will probably write a post on where do you draw the line between search engine optimisation (seo) and usability in the future. Frustrates me when deciding whether to neglect usability for the sake of seo.

Google US

Yahoo US

Google AU

Yahoo AU

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Normally the best practice for 301/302 (permanent/temporary) redirects are through your web server. However, you can only do this if you own your own domain. So what happens when you’re using a free webpage service such as Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad, and you want to do 301 redirects to your new website?

If you’re thinking of doing Javascript redirects, this isn’t highly recommended as Google and Yahoo web crawlers won’t be able to follow the redirects, which will affect the destination’s ranking and indexing.

Although not the best, your next best bet is using the meta refresh tag to do your redirections. It seems that Google recognises meta redirects and Googlebot should be able to crawl to the new page, according to Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Yahoo’s Search Help also seems to recognise meta redirects and the crawler will be able to follow the redirects.

It appears that a meta refresh delay of 0 or 1 second will be considered as a 301 redirect and anything longer is considered a 302.

I will try to post a javascript solution that will be able to handle redirects from your old website to appropriate pages of your new website this weekend.

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