Seo Articles

Update July 30, 2008: The Google crawl appears to be fixed, the search results look good now, so this issue is resolved! Hoorah.

 Update July 23, 2008: There is great discussion going on on Sphinn about this issue.

I was shocked after searching Google today, Google is currently redirecting to my homepage and not the actual page searched for.

"Why is this?" I thought to myself.  I tried the url that you should get... http://marcgrabanski.com/pages/code/jquery-ui-datepicker ... ok that works fine.

Now try the old url that has most of the link juice attached to it which has a 301 redirect to the new page... http://marcgrabanski.com/code/ui-datepicker/ ... ok that works fine too.  So what is going on?

First, I go to Google Webmaster and see this, an SEO's nightmare:

Time to check my 301 redirects:

And on another 301 redirect tool:

Well that worked great.  Still, what is the issue?

To make absolutely sure my 301 redirects work, I dumped the text redirects into a htaccess file.  My htaccess code now looks like this:

Apache:

<FilesMatch "\.(htm|html|css|js|php)$">
   AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
   DefaultLanguage en-US
</FilesMatch>
 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php http://marcgrabanski.com/articles [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^code\.html http://marcgrabanski.com/pages/code [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^code/beyond-flash(/?) http://marcgrabanski.com/pages/code/beyond-flash [R=301,L]
# MANY RedirectRules ... ALL WORK FINE
 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.marcgrabanski.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*tags.php.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://marcgrabanski.com/$1 [R=301,L]
 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$
RewriteRule (.*) $1\.php [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ /$1 [R=301,L]
 
RewriteRule    ^$    webroot/    [L]
RewriteRule    (.*) webroot/$1    [L]
 
AddHandler php5-script .php

Update July 23, 2008 @1:24AM: I changed all of the Rules to RewriteRule's which has cleaned up most of my 301 redirects.  One issue remains, I need to figure out how to make a RewriteRule to convert:
http://marcgrabanski.com/tags.php?tag=FreeTools
to...
http://marcgrabanski.com/tag/free-tools