Deploy New Website without losing Search Engine Rankings

Everyone goes through this at some point. You are rebuilding your web site, using a new platform, new programming language and new navigational structure. This creates new URL's and new extensions to filenames. In releasing this new web site, all your previous search engine listing will now result in 404 page not found errors.

Whaddya do?

If you are hosting on an Apache server, there is this cool configuration file named .htaccess which can give directives to the server for handling everything from hotlinking to error handling and more.

This can also be used to handle redirects. What can save your SEO is finding all your important existing pages, and, using .htaccess, redirect them with a 301 redirect (which means it's a permanent move) from the old file to the new file.

redirect 301 /old/old.asp http://www.you.com/new.aspx

The above will send the visitor seamlessly to the new file and tell the browser or crawler, that this is a permanent move.

On IIS servers there are most certainly ASAPI filters that can handle this same situation, though I can't point to any for sure. On other platforms you can just as well keep the existing files and make them only contain header redirects as well.

Having Trouble with Google AdSense Relevancy?

We see people day in and day out complaining about their AdSense ads not being relevant to their content. I'd like to briefly touch on this subject and maybe help some folks.

The first problem, and most likely, is if you have just posted your ad code and are disappointed by the lack of relevancy. You have to understand, once you post your code, it makes a request from AdSense's system for the relevant ads. It takes in the URL doing the request and looks for info about that page in their database. If your site is brand new, they will have no information on the page, so you will get irrelevant, or charity ads until they do index and analyze your content. The Adsense crawler can take a few days to get out to you and crawl the pages that have requested ads.

Patience is required at the very start.

If that isn't the case, you've been an AdSenser for quite a while and are noticing less relevant ads there are a couple options. One could be that the pool of available advertisers is shrinking in your topic. Check other web sites covering the same basic topic as yours and see if they do better.

If their ads are better, use this awesome little tool from Google, the AdWords Keyword Tool, to scan your web site, and the other web site, and see what keywords are being found on that site that may not be on yours. Perhaps just learning a different way to write your content will help.

Publishing Ads in Message Forums

It seems to me that most folks look at forums as a lousy place to publish ads for the revenue of a web site. I think, the reason so many people believe this is for a number of reasons...the majority of the reason, I think, is because people won't do what is necessary to make it successful.

The vast majority of people running forums use some open source script such as PHPBB, Simple Machines, or other such forum script. Many of those users have little to know coding experience, and, at best, can edit the primary template files of the forum. These basic edits limit forum admins to having very simple places ads in the header or footer and that's about it.

If one is ambitious enough to create their own forum script, or, learn to hack the one they use (and re-hack with every update released), much more effective ad publishing is possible.

The trick with forums isn't necessarily having an ad or two on the page, but having them buried within the conversation. If one can place an ad within the thread, every few replies, show an ad, it is much more effective then a standard, template-based header and footer ad.

A 728x90 leaderboard between replies every 3 or 5 replies gets attention and clicks as people scroll through the conversation. Depending on how your forum is built, a nice rectangle ad next to the reply/post text area for posting your messages is pretty readily visible as well.

Being creative, and taking the time to editing your script to accommodate such placements can be very rewarding financially if you have a high traffic forum.