The User Experience Blog for Website Architecture Planning

Automated web crawlers are an important tool that will help to crawl and index content on the internet. Webmasters use this to their advantage as it allows them to curate their content in a way that is beneficial to their brand, and will keep the crawlers away from the irrelevant content. Here, you will find standard ways to control the crawling and indexing of your website's content. The methods described are (for the most part) supported by all of the major search engines and web crawlers. Most websites will not have default settings for restricting crawling, indexing, and serving links in search results, so to start off you will not have to really do anything with your content. If you would like all of your pages contained in a website to be indexed, you will not have to modify anything. There is no need to make a robots.txt file if you are okay with all URLs contained in the site being crawled and indexed by search engines.

The unthinkable has happened. Your web site has been hacked. What do you do? Where do you start? Do not worry. All's not lost, and you will be able to bounce back. Every day, hundreds of sites face the same predicament, and many are able to get back to their original glory. All you need to do is follow the below steps, and all will be alright in the end.

Driving Internet traffic to your site can be a constant battle. Thousands and thousands of sites exist out in cyberspace, and in any given Google search, hundreds of sites will show up in search results as potentially relevant to your key word search. If you want to be successful and draw people to your site, you have to know the system. Users will only go through so many different pages of search results. At some point the user will feel that he or she has looked through as many relevant search results as needed to make a good choice. As a web developer, you want your page to be at the top or at least close to the top of that search result list. However, countless other sites want the same exact thing. The problem is the methods of achieving this goal have not always been on the up-and-up, and it is for these reasons programs, such as the Penguin Algorithm, were created.

When it comes to having your own website, the first battle is bringing users to your site. Someone clicks and finds your site through a general search and clicks on your page. Now the hard part is over, right? Not so much. Now you have the task of keeping that person on your site and getting him or her to go deeper into your site’s content. Avoiding a quick view and exit can be hard, but through the use of internal links and anchor text, you, as a web developer, can find success at not only bringing in traffic but keeping the reader or user engaged in the content you are providing. It all is a matter of learning to master the art of internal linking.

A canonical link is the HTML element that will aid webmasters in preventing duplicated content mishaps, by specifying the preferred (canonical) version of a web page's link, as part of that web page's search engine optimization. It is a proven problem for search engines when trying to figure out the original source for a document that is available through multiple URLs.

Content duplication can transpire in a number of ways:

• Print versions of websites
• Accessibility on varying hosts or protocols
• Multiple URLs due to content management systems
• GET parameters