Five Questions, vol. 3 … Can You Answer Any?
Time for another “five questions” post, where I toss out a handful of items and call on the collective wisdom of SBS readers to provide answers for the benefit of all (but mainly me!).
For background purposes, you can read volume one and volume two in the archives.
Okay, here we go:
1. Very often, the AdSense block in the left column of this blog looks like the image at right: Just one ad, from Text Link Ads. Is that happening because Google is having trouble targeting ads here (and can only find one to match), or is it because Text Link Ads is doing the “Advertise on this site” thing, where they can target individual sites to have their AdWords ads appear?
2. Let’s say I decide to switch this blog to newdomain.com. What should my .htaccess file look like here on SBS so that every post, every category, every page, etc., is 301ed to the new domain? Do I need to use wildcards? If I just 301 at the domain level, will everything below also be 301ed? (Pardon my ignorance; I’ve never done much server-level programming myself, just recommended it to tons of clients!)
3. How do you think a search engine would handle plus signs in a URL? We know that hyphens are better than underscores, but where does the + sign fit in? If the URL is something like www.domain.com/green+widgets/, is that the same as www.domain.com/green-widgets/?
4. When I’m reading my blog feeds, how come on some blogs I can see their graphics/images right in the feed reader, and on other blogs I can’t?
5. Ever see anything like the image below? My U2 site, which has had the same URL since 1998, is suddenly (to me, at least) being indexed by its IP address. I have no idea how or why. And if I use Webmaster Central to get that URL removed, should I be concerned the whole site will be removed?
Matt,
I’m definitely not an expert on 301’ing; particularly for a site of this size, or one that is using WordPress. BUT, I did just 301 a client’s entire site to a new domain & this seemed to work. I just put it in the top level directory.
RewriteEngine on
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomainhere.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
One thing to keep in mind is that you’ll need to keep all of your category & post slugs the same, but if you are copying your SQL DB, I assume that will be automatic.
I’m particularly interested in question #2 Matt, so be sure to share your best answers later.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^((www.)?)olddomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
I believe this will take any folder like olddomain.com/categories and redirect it to the same folder on the new domain: newdomain.com/catgories. I’m not a pro at this either so you may want to test it first 🙂
Maybe this answers your RSS question (the weird thing is that I was asking myself that question as I clicked on your feed!)
http://snook.ca/archives/rss/add_logo_to_feed/