Optimization, SEO Style
I used to think of SEO as a dirty word until my current job. The truth is, search engine rank does matter a great deal to many online businesses. There are unethical ways to boost your rank, and there are some things that you could legitimately call optimization. Like optimizing code, sometimes these fly in the face of efficiency or elegance:
- If a page is indexed multiple times by a search engine, it dilutes the overall value of the page - essentially, the page's "importance" is divided among shadow copies.
- Relative links apparently cause MSN to index the page multiple times - that is, MSN views http://example.com/foo and /foo (contained in a document on example.com) as different resources. This penalizes sites that use relative links.
- Same for http:// vs. https:// - the same content exposed as HTTP vs. HTTPS is considered "different", diluting the value of the affected pages. As a result, resources that require HTTPS should be linked to with https:// and not rely on redirects to force the right behavior.
- Search engines may not account for redirects when building their index. If a crawler requests a document and is redirected, the original URL may be considered as the source URL, thereby diluting the value of the indexed content.