Stop Words
It is true that Google (and other search engines) does not count some very common terms (like ‘the,’ ‘a,’ and ‘for,’) for the sake of efficiency; while search engines index entire copy of a page including stop words but they are said to be not counted (to be ignored) to determine how relevant a page is to a specific search query same thing is true for the other way around; meaning that stop words in search queries are usually not counted (they are ignored) unless omitting a stop word makes a big difference in the information the user is looking for; in this case they won’t be ignored.
One example that omitting a stop word would make a big difference in the returned search results can be observed by Googling these two queries “the who” and “who”. If you search these two on Google you will see that “the who” returns results related to an “English rock band” and “who” returns results related to “Word Health Organization”
On the other hand, It seems that having or not having stop words in a text link do not make a major difference in the final rankings of a website for one specific targeted key phrase. For example if you are targeting “orthodontist in Miami, FL”, you can both link back to your site using “Orthodontist Miami” or “Orthodontist in Miami” as the text link (anchor text).
But in your link building efforts you must use both versions (with and without the stop words) and even you have to use other versions of the same key phrase such as reversed version (Miami Orthodontist) or plural version (Miami Orthodontists) to look natural to Google in order to avoid being penalized for one specific key phrase.
If you have a set of keywords that you want to write an article based on, as far as content developers are concerned, if a stop word in one of your key phrase get in the way of writing naturally and omitting it won’t make a big difference in the returned search results I would advise to omit it.
How to Remove Email Addresses Remembered by Gmail
Gmail will memorize and remember the addresses you have previously used to send email to and will pop out a list of matching email addresses as you type the address in “To:” field when you compose a new message, this is very useful in terms of auto-completion but the problem is that if you misspell an email address, or if a friend change his email address the incorrect, in case of a mistyped address, or old email address, in case of a deprecated email address, is yet remembered by Gmail and would show up while you type the first couple of letters of an email address that you want to send your email to. Read More »
Alexa Incorrect Merged Listings Problem
Have you ever tried to get your Alexa ranking and you were amazed by seeing Alexa giving you the traffic rank of a site that is different than the site you were trying to get ranking for?
This is called Alexa incorrect merged listings problem. Why this happens?
Alexa spider, identified as ia_archiver in the HTTP “User-agent” header section, crawls the Web whenever it notices that the content of 2 websites are identical it will merge listings for those two sites, this might happen even for more than two sites and is called merging site listing or aliasing. When this happens the traffic of all those listings will be summed to form one ranking that would be listed under only one domain, the one with the most incoming traffic. With a huge number of websites on the Web, this procedure of identifying which domains are displaying the same content may go wrong or become outdated.
Now how to get this Alexa merged problem fixed? Continue reading below. Read More »
Word Press Redirect Loop Problem After Upgrading to 3.1 for Sites Hosted on Windows Servers
If your WP site is hosted on a windows server and you want to upgrade to the 3.1 you might end up a redirect loop error while attempting to access your site homepage after the upgrade is completed. However you can get to the WP back-end with no issue. Even if you try to install a fresh 3.1 on a windows server you will face the same problem.
All pages that have /index.php at the beginning of their permalinks come up with no problem means that the post pages if permalink is set in such a way that the /index.php is at the beginning of it would be accessible.
Deactivating all plugins, switching to Word Press 3.1 default theme won’t fix the issue because this is not a theme-related or plugin-related problem. Even altering the permalink structure would not resolve it. Clearing the browser cookies also won’t fix it. Read More »
Exporting and Importing Your Emails Via Horde Web-based Email Client
If you want to change your web hosting server and if you are among those people that use Horde to manage emails by storing them into different folders then you might need to transfer those folders over to your new hosting environment before you proceed to the server migration.
What you need to do first is to download every single folder in MBOX format and then create each folder in the new Horde environment and after that import each downloaded file to its corresponding folder in the new server. Read More »
Different Methods of Redirection
There is one main reason you might decide to redirect a page to another one and that is moving the location of files or changing the URLs. On the other hand there are 3 major methods for setting up a redirection which include 301 (permanent), 302 (temporary) and Meta redirect.
301 redirect: is the server side, permanent and search engine friendly redirection.
302 redirect: is used for temporary redirection. This means although the requested page now resides under a different URL but the preferred address to be used in the future is the original one (source one). This means when a URL returns a 302 redirect the users are asked to continue using the source URL as the redirect is temporary and could be modified in future. Read More »
Web Inspectors
Web Inspector has made web development and debugging easier by allowing web developer to simply browse the live DOM structure of a web page in a collapsible compact structure user-friendly interface.
Different web inspectors have different features but most of them have some main common features and that are as follow:
- Highlighting the node on the page while it is being selected in the DOM hierarchy.
- By clicking a node you can dig deep into the DOM hierarchy which is perfect for debugging web pages with nested structures.
- All the CSS rules applied to a selected node can be viewed under the “style pane” with the overridden properties crossed out. This live easy access to CSS styles is perfect for fixing cross-browser issues.
Latest versions of most of the major browsers have their own built-in web inspector tools. Read More »
Goodbye to Web Directories
For a couple of years Web directories played a crucial role in the field of search engine optimization for building high quality back-links or even to gain some direct traffic.
A web directory is defined as a Web site containing list of other Websites assorted under different categories and subcategories. Web directories were intended to send traffic/visitors to the websites at the very beginning but later on they were mostly used to build back-links rather than sending direct traffic.
The first thing about directory Web sites is that Google treats them the same as any other web site. So if you submit your Web site to a high page rank good quality web directory then the back-link is going to be helpful for your website other way around a low page rank poor quality directory might not be useful or even might damage your Web site ranking on Google and other important Search Engines. Read More »
