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Links to Folders vs Files better for optimization

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cicorp

cicorp

MIS
Mar 6, 2003
5
US
Usually, when I reference another page I have been linking just to the folder, versus the file. For example a <a href> link for ACT would go to
instead of

Of course the page comes up either way because the browser looks first for a default.htm, index.htm, or index.html, etc.

But am I hurting my search engine placement this way? Would it optimize my placement to always include the "index.htm" in the <A HREF> or does it really matter? I suppose this short cut cuts down on the number of links to my index.htm?

I'm thinking of going through all my web pages with a VB script to change all links to folders into links to index files. Will it be worth the effort?
 
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yes it would, especially for the home page.

For the deeper folders it will not matter a lot for SEO but it's extremely useful if you need to change server technology as the links will not change.
To ease the server load marginally do not forget the trailing "/".

The home page will make a difference to the SE placement, as hostname.com/ and hostname.com/index.htm are two different pages.
External links will (generally) be to hostname.com and internal links will be different it splits the link pop and breaks the "mesh" of the navigation so link pop and PR (for what it's worth) will not "flow" through the site effectively. Also they will be seen as duplicates and one will be buried by the dup filter.


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.
 
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OK, that's good to hear that it matters. I went ahead and made a program, to save the hours of tedium of opening up each index.htm one by one to insert and edit the META tags. I have a W2K web server with about 100 web sites pointing to static IPs. Maybe my EXE program will help others - called HTMLTags.Exe

My Microsoft Visual FoxPro EXE runs on the desktop of the Server. It searches all the web site folders for Index.htm files. It opens up each Index.htm and looks in the <Head> area to see if it has the "description" and the "keywords" metatags. Then it creates an editable data spreadsheet with columns for Domain/Folder, Description, and Keywords.

From a datasheet, I'll fill in the Description and Keyword fields, using copy and paste/fill to ease the process for similar pages. For example all the ACT related htm pages can get the Keyword "ACT" in one swoop.

It was easy to see that most of my index.htm's had no Description or Keywords. After filling in rows of the datasheet, FoxPro scans the rows, opens each index.htm and places Description and Keywords in the appropriate <META NAME tag automatically. It edits hundreds of index.htm files within seconds.

Did I just re-create the wheel, or is there something that does this already? I didn't see anything in FrontPage or DreamWeaver to do this. Anyway it was fun to program it.

I read from the posts that Keywords are not used much by Search Engines. I could adapt the program to get the 10 most common words (other than words like "the") to put in the Keywords. That way the Keywords would be seen as appropriate to the body of the page. Would this win some points with Search Engines?
 
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It may well be a useful tool for some aspects more among the webmasters who are just discovering SEO and updating their sites. To be of real value it would need to scan all relevant files rather than just index.htm.

It wouldn't "win points" with SEs but it wouldn't create any problems either with the SEs that read meta KW.


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.
 
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So. it would be just as well to leave the Keywords="" blank, rather than filling them in with the 50 most common words on the page, correct? Plus it would keep the htm file size down.

As you suggested, the program now processes all htm files in the folders.

It also makes any href's to folders in to href's to a specific .htm file, assuming index.htm if none is specified.

I found a KeyWord Generator program at

But from what most people are saying, Keywords are not really such a key factor any more?
 
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