Collection of 'Huh?' - ideas, tricks and tips for website owners

Don't just believe it - test it.



Articles available from oy-oy.eu

In no particular order - for your viewing pleasure :-). Please let me know what you think about them, I appreciate all feedback!

How to set up a canonical redirect with IIS 5.0
Find out how to add a clean 301-redirect to help solve canonical issues to your website using IIS 5.0 (requires console access).

What is Yahoo's secret site information?
Where do those numbers come from and what do they mean? Beats me :-)

How to sign a Firefox extension with a Windows-style key
Getting the certificate was the easy part. How do you get Firefox to accept it?

Google Sitemaps and the priority setting
Is it used? What could it be for?

Redirects, Mirrors, Framing, Pointing and more
A short introduction to various forms of redirects and content duplication

How to move to a different domain name and keep your value
By just opening up a website on a new domain name and deleting the old one, you lose all value attached to that old website.

Setting up custom error pages
ven custom error pages must return result-code 404 instead of 200. A search engine thinks that pages with 200 are good URLs and keeps them in the index. With 404 you can be certain that everyone knows that this URL is no longer valid.

Different forms of redirects: 301, 302, javascript, meta-refresh
Many websites need some simple and automatic way to move visitors and search engine crawlers from one URL to another. Each redirect has it's specific place. Find out when to use them and how.

Uppercase and lowercase URLs (Windows vs Standards)
Windows operating systems (for workstations and servers) do not differentiate between upper and lower case in file names and URLs. The internet, however, is case-sensitive. This inconsistancy can cause problems.

Proper handling of IfModifiedSince with asp.net 1.1
Proper handling of IfModifiedSince HTTP requests (including the setting of the Last-Modified date) can help save bandwidth. This is an example in asp.net 1.1.

Proper handling of IfModifiedSince with classic asp
Proper handling of IfModifiedSince HTTP requests (including the setting of the Last-Modified date) can help save bandwidth. This is an example in classic asp.

Proper handling of IfModifiedSince with PHP
Proper handling of IfModifiedSince HTTP requests (including the setting of the Last-Modified date) can help save bandwidth. This is an example in PHP.

Bad results in Google Site Search
Google Site search depends on the normal Google index in order to function. What can you do if the results are incomplete or completly empty?

How to redirect static files in IIS / Windows servers / asp / asp.net
IIS does not offer the functionality of the Apache .htaccess file when it comes to redirects - but with simple tricks, you can achieve the same result.

Optimizing your web pages for common misspellings
There is a fine line between optimizing a page for common mispellings and the website still looking professional enough in the eyes of your visitors. You do not want a company website to appear amateurish because you misspell your own product names.

Background information to the supplemental datacenter tool
So you want to find out how many supplemental pages you have across the datacenters? The tool here will tell you - but keep the following in mind when looking at the results ...

Information to the Google Geotargeted World-Wide Search
Googles search results contain geotargeted components - meaning that sites which are close to your location might rank slighly higher than sites further away. This tool lets you test these factors.

Problems with sites using framed hosting
Some web hosting companies offer framed hosting, where the domain name only displays a frameset that points to the actual content which is stored elsewhere (often on a free web-hosting provider). This type of hosting is bad, search engines can't connect the content to the domain name.

Technical ideas for moving a site to a new domain
Sometimes a 301 redirect for the whole site is not the best solution. There are ways to make sure that a transfer to a new domain is processed fast and successfully.

Searching Google's information
Several known ways to search through Google's information

How to redirect from "/default.aspx" to the domain root
ASP.NET and IIS do not provide a way to recognize if the user is accessing a page through the default file handler or explicitly with the file name. How can you redirect appropriately?