Category: SEO

SEO tips and guides

WordPress: Disable 404 Redirect to Homepage

If you don’t know what 404 error is, It is an error displayed on when a user requests a web page that couldn’t be found on their server (i.e. the requested webpage is not available). In this case, If you are redirecting (302 redirects) to home page then it is confusing for end user. Definitely, you should avoid 302 redirecting for non-existent URL. Probably you don’t want to send a low quality signal to Google and other engines if they are testing how 404’s are being handled by requesting a noexist page. The best solution is to create custom 404 page having search box saying “Did you mean …?”

In this post, we will see how to prevent 404 Redirect to Homepage in WordPress.

HTTP to HTTPS Migration, WordPress and SEO

Before I start this article, I would like to ask one question to you, How many HTTPS links do you see in first page of Google search result? Generally, I get more than 50% for my search queries and major top links belong to HTTPS. It is self explanatory how important HTTPS and SSL is. As SSL is mandatory for safely processing transaction e-commerce website, but here I am not going to talk about security and safety, my concern is SEO. The web is moving toward using HTTPS encryption by default and it is encouraged by Google with announcement HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014. Chrome and Firefox browsers started to display warning for HTTP (Non secure) websites. So you decided to move on HTTPS. Hold a minute and see the challenges. you will get many examples on Google saying huge drop in traffic after moving HTTPS if not implemented properly. So you must aware of the challenges. In this post, we will move a WordPress website to HTTPS, Setup free SSL and update dependencies to meet SEO guidelines. It is assumed Apache server is used in Ubuntu server.

How React.js is good for SEO (Server-side React with ASP.NET)

The problem with the javascript frameworks is that they are NOT perfect search engine friendly. Although Google can crawl and index Ajax content but it is not so reliable and need to follow the guidelines. The advantage of React.js is that you can run it on the server and the virtual DOM will be rendered and returned to the browser as a regular web page. In this post, we will implement a sample in ASP.NET to pre-render the initial state of your React components server-side and the outcome is already rendered page of markup. So it will be indexed just like any other static page by search engine.

If you are new to React.js, I strongly recommend to read following tutorial:

React.js: Introduction and Hello World with ASP.NET MVC 5

Add Social Slider (Facebook like box, twitter and Google+ Widgets) in Your Website

Today, Social media is a great way to promote websites, blogs, apps and events. For a website, Facebook, Twitter or Google+ widgets become must have parts to get public interaction, generate traffic. If you add Facebook Like box, twitter status and Google+ widget in your web page, it takes too much spaces and it makes webpage too complex. So, alternate is to use icons only and on mouse over display corresponding widget. To attract user, make these icons fixed floated.

Google Adsense: Leaderboard (728 x 90) vs Link Units as Navigation Menu

In my recent post, I shared my Google Adsense placement experiments. I have updated my theme several times to make it more user friendly and focusing on content and to experiment Adsense placement. Ads shouldn’t irritate the user, so I decided to keep one of Ad Units (Either Leaderboard or Link Unit) in header. I used Link unit as navigation menu with theme colour combination and supposed to have Good CTR and LeaderBoard unit just below the menu as in following image.

How to Add Your Facebook Page To Your Profile

It’s not about copy and paste Facebook page link into profile options. I see some Facebook profiles having their page list in left side bar. So, I decided to add my TechBrij page to my profile in left side bar. If you are a Facebook page owner and want to show or hide your Facebook page link with your profile, See following steps:

Site Traffic Increases After Google Panda Update

To reduce the search engine rankings of low-quality sites, Google announced a new update ‘Panda‘ on Feb 24, 2011 in Google US. The change impacts approx 12% of search queries. It is rolled out globally on April 14, 2011 to all English-language Google users.

Google Adsense Tips: My Adsense Placement Experiments

If you are regular user of this blog, you notice that the theme and Google Adsense placement are changed many times. I have done many experiments related to Google Adsense placement. Here I am sharing information regarding the impact of Google Adsense ads position on different places.