The other day I noticed a pretty significant SEO related problem with using a built in Rails construct. I noticed a problem when I started getting application errors that were letting me know that the user agent was none other than our friendly Googlebot. A closer look at the app shed light on a problem you may not have even expected. When using

[source:ruby]
redirect_to :back
[/source]

it will take a look at the HTTP_REFERRER and redirect the user to that url. The problem, however, is that Googlebot doesn’t send a referrer and neither do a whole bunch of other search engine spiders. The result is that when they visit your site they get a nice 502 server error because Rails raises an exception. It doesn’t know what url to redirect to so it send a 502 error. Googlebot then sees your site as a bunch of 502 errors in the situations where you’re using redirect_to :back. Take a look at the Rails API and you’ll see the last line clearly mentions this.

The solution is to catch the RedirectBackError the redirect_to raises when there’s no referrer. Its a simple fix but one you need to be on the lookout for or else you might end up with a few 502 errors giving you bad mojo with the Google gods.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite a long time but somehow never seemed to get around to it. I started a SEO, online marketing, and web development company called Onomojo a while ago. I’ve just been so busy since its conception that I found it hard to find the time to blog about it. I’ve decided to take a break from the hustle and bustle of the routine and say a few words about us.

We offer a complete marketing package for online businesses who are looking to increase their exposure and increase their revenue. A lot of businesses throw money at expensive marketing firms and end up with little to show for it. We found that in most cases the marketers weren’t developers and the developers weren’t marketers. Onomojo is different. We are all programmers, designers, and marketing professionals. This gives us an edge and the ability to offer complete marketing packages that complete the necessary learning loop to achieve success.

Any successful business must learn from what it does right and learn from what it does wrong. When your marketing agency has to communicate their wishes to developers the intentions are often lost. Programmers aren’t typically interested in the marketing aspect of development. Marketers usually have no clue how to program or design. We are different. Our developers have a passion for SEO, marketing, graphics design, and everything else it takes to make a company successful. Our feedback loop of what works and what doesn’t is extremely short with a complete package. We learn from the marketing and SEO and we directly apply that learning to your site design and content. We take learning from CPC ads and traffic analysis and we apply those lessons learned to make your site more effective. Onomojo offers complete online marketing packages for business looking for a competitive edge. Visit our site at http://onomojo.com and fill out the contact form for more information on what Onomojo can do for you and your company.

Google called me out of the blue the other day asking if I wanted a job. It sounded like a good idea at first so I followed through with my updated resume and such. At some point they said they had 3 separate positions for me and that I should try to get in their core team first. I had a brief interview with the core team where they judged my qualifications based on 3 questions. I don’t remember what they were but I answered them all wrong. Well, the second one I didn’t even try and just said I don’t know because I was pissed that they were giving me a pop quiz and I got the first one wrong. No googling. After that interview it took less than 1 minute to find the answers. I never responded to the other requests from them because I don’t really want to work for a company who is so full of themselves that they honestly think that pop quizes are the best way to weed people out. Pass. Good luck though google. Now, onto the real meat of this post.

Google’s index seems like its continuously updated. That’s great for search if there were so many junk results.

• Internal linking – Google loves internal linking which is one reason why there are so many junk results in their search. From my experience, tossing in link dumps all over your site actually helps it do better. The result? Everyone link dumps and gets better rankings so you get a bunch of crappy search results.
• Sensitivity – For get search for now, lets focus on Google from a developer’s perspective. Google continuously updates their index. Great. What does that mean for a developer? It means that if you forget an apostrophe on an anchor tag you end up with dozens of 404s. No big deal if you catch the mistake early right? Wrong. What happens is the missing apostrophe bleeds the link on to whatever follows causing invalid links. If the Google god happens to see your mistake they will try adding those invalid links to their index. They won’t be valid so you will be penalized for having 404s on your site. That’s a sure fire way to see your rankings drop off the map for some ridiculous mistake that was corrected a few hours after it was made.
• Poor tools – Luckily Google provides you with a way to remove invalid links from their index but good luck using that thing. Lets say that one mistake created 50 404s across your site. You have to copy and paste each 404 url to the url removal form, one at a time. Not only that but you have to remove the domain name from the pasted version. So its copy paste edit, copy paste edit, 50 times in a row. Yay! Or you can copy paste them to a text editor and global replace the domain and then copy paste them into the removal form 1 by 1.
• Poor responsiveness – Ok so what? At least they provide a way to remove your urls from their index instead of waiting around for weeks right? Well, kinda of. Its not the same continuous updating that they do themselves. They’ll eventually listen to your request but only on their time. When they’re good and ready. I’ve had a request pending removal for over 2 weeks. That’s 2 weeks of being penalized for a missing apostrophe that was only live for less than 1 hour. Way to go Google.

This wouldn’t be complete without some suggestions. First, get a clue about hiring good developers. You’re going to eventually end up with a crap gene pool like Microsoft and Yahoo and be usurped by my new search engine. Next, don’t be so harsh on the occational 404 and at least provide a quick way to remove them. Your index is updated continuously, if you want feedback then use it. Don’t sit on my feedback for weeks. Next, give your web developer tools some love. They’re so primitive with little thought put in to usability. Also, internal linking shouldn’t count for nearly as much as you give credit. Look at the sites coming out these days. Huge link dumps that people pass right over. You’re forcing the creation of millions of junk sites on the internet. That’s not a good thing. And finally, your search obviously uses some type of machine learning and appears to be in a rut. People have your search figured out and are taking advantage of that. You need a smarter machine learning algorithm.

There are plenty of people talking about how you can make your WordPress blog titles more SEO friendly. No one I’ve found however has mentioned what I’ve stumbled upon by accident. Pseudo-indented listings in Google search results. What I’ve started doing on my blogs is making my title like this:


<title>
<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; <? } ?> <?php wp_title(''); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; < ? } ?> < ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
</title>


This adds a » in front of your post title. The result is that when the search results show up in Google your links look like it stands out more because of the » in the title. It almost makes it look like your site is more official and Google is giving you a little arrow in front of your link to prove it. It won’t effect your rankings as far as I know. Its more of a psychological advantage than anything else but I have no scientific data to back up that claim. Take a look at the title of this post to see an example title.

For some strange reason, I have this funny feeling that Google will be doing some updating this weekend. If you have an Adwords account, you may have noticed the message that some services may be unavailable on January 13. It’s been a while since the last PR update so we’re about due for something from Google. All of you who constantly watch your rankings, pay close attention in the next few weeks if its not this weekend. Its coming soon.

The internet is being filled with junk. Sure, there have always been a lot of useless pages and sites out there but there are new trends happening and we have only Google to blame. Google ranks sites based on how many links come into a site (a simplified explanation I admit). The result? The internet now has millions more web directories than it did. People in the quest for better rankings visit these sites or hire some SEO people to do it for them. There are even people promoting the addition to a large number of these web directories at once. Yay! Lets be honest. Who visits these random web directories? Sure someone may stumble upon one from a search engine and happen to click through it but its purpose and usefulness is extremely limited. I consider them junk sites that clog up my search results on occasion and make the quest for rankings as meaningless as the millions of web directories themselves. Lets fill the web with decent content like this site instead of useless junk like web directories shall we?

Another trend of junk sites are sites that just contain a bunch of Google Adsense links. These sites are everywhere these days and are always coming up in my search results on Google. These sites are even more useless than the web directories. They fill up the internet with ads that and screw up rankings and search results for everyone. If you’ve ever used Adsense and tried out the content networks you’ll see how pointless they are. Sure you’ll see a huge amount of impressions and maybe even a few click-throughs. If you actually take a closer look at that traffic and where its coming from you’ll see that it comes from these pages with just Adsense crap on them. Really good ad targeting there. Where do I sign up? I wonder if I had a few thousand Windows zombies out there if I could make easy money by having them all click-through my ads whenever their ips changed. Maybe I could just use Tor and save myself some time. I place the value of a content click-through at negative or at the most 0. I think they are just a waste of advertising money.

Which is why I have Google Adsense running at the top now? I’m not adverse to advertisements on legitimate sites that have content. Sites that are filled up with ads are not legitimate content in my opinion. Its rubbish. I think the content network is a good thing and should be more targeted to the site’s content but that’ll only work if Google could somehow get rid of all the junk sites.