More Newbie Questions

Just a little perspective here. I'm in sales, but also responsible for our DNN site "http://www.stonefieldquery.com". I'm trying to learn as much as I can about web design and SEO. So, here are my stupid questions. Maybe someone else has these too.

Is there any difference between:
"www.stonefielquery.com" and www.stonefieldquery.com"

In the crawler is says the following link failed: "http://www.stonefieldquery.com/solutions/act/reports/TOP N SAMPLE.PDF" , however when I launch it, it works fine. Is that because IE knows to add a "%20" for each space?

How do you use the URL Check / Content / Content Tree? Does this have something to do with WC3 compatibility?

I'm sure to have more.

Sales and SEO – Very good combination that is sure to work out well for you down the road! No question is stupid – I'm one of those people that have to ask multiple times, multiple ways to get it right, so ask away!

You mean www and no www? Some search engines see this as two sites (and if you are not careful, duplicate content). Google had this problem a while back but now claim they have it fixed.

There are a ton of comments on this, by Google and others and it all boils down to this: which one has more backlinks? www or no www? Pick the one that has the most and use it.

Use a redirect to send visitors from one to the other. This is usually done with an .htaccess file, but if you're using IIS, then you'll need to do it another way. Let me know if you are interested and I'll post detail on doing with this IIS.

You found another bug (and it is now fixed). Urls with spaces will now read correctly.

The document tree provides a structured view of your site with details such as forms, meta tags, links, images, scripts, style sheets, applets, xml data islands and applets/ActiveX objects.

This HTML DOM (Document Object Model) tree can help you discover bugs in your html code, such as with one of my sites that had an include gone bad. A webpage inside a webpage – doctype and all!

I have created an example located here (many errors in the page): Spidy

Take a look at the page above in the content tree and you'll see where the tree can help spot errors. The average person is not going to use this tool, but it can come in handy!

More questions? No problem – ask away

Regards,

Jim.

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Firewall Test Internet Speed Test Sitemap Generator

I didn't ask my first question right. What I meant to ask was....

Is there any difference between:
"www.stonefielquery.com" and www.stonefieldquery.com/"

The difference is the "/" at the end?

Is there any value to using a trailing slash on directory names? Excellent question!

When you make a request for a web page that is really a directory, Apache sees the request, translates the url and sees that /02 is really a directory and not a filename.

It then passes '/02' to the alias sub-system and then sends back a redirect to add the ending forward slash to the directory.

This all happens behind the scenes and you never really notice that your browser is making two requests.

For example, type in http://www.websecurity.mobi into your favorite browser and you'll get back http://www.websecurity.mobi/

The correct way to represent a directory is with the forward slash '/' and some SEO's claim that it helps you rank higher. I don't subscribe to that and have never worried about it - no matter how you write it, it will come out the correct way.

Perhaps if you have a large site with a tons of traffic, you would notice a slight speed increase by removing the extra call, but I think it would be minimal.

If you are going to start from scratch (new links), then use the forward slash on the directory. If you already have a site not using the forward slash, no big deal.

Hope that helps,

Regards,

Jim.

__________________
Firewall Test Internet Speed Test Sitemap Generator