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Hey all,

I wanted to add one more post to this thread as I believe I've found the better solution I was alluding to a year ago: Divshot. Definitely worth a look for anyone hosting a static site, has great libraries for SEOs like redirects and slashify.

Cheers,
-Danny

Thanks for getting back, Dan! Doing these checks definitely satisfies me that it's a non-issue.. Content Keywords gives me "facebook", "strutta", "contest", etc.

Interesting bug with Adwords though, they should consider doing subdomain-specific "research", since I think that in the case of SaaS businesses especially, this makes a lot more sense.

Cheers,
-Danny

Hey all,

Was reading Dan Shure's brilliant post on the Keyword Planner, and decided to plug a few of my own pages into the URL-suggester tool as well. What I got back was nothing short of strange.

After plugging in our Features page, (which describes our Social Media Contesting Platform,) and getting back a bunch of suggestions related to Dr Seuss and Interior Design Scholarships, I realized that the Keyword Suggestion tool was being broken by our subdomains.

I looked for precedent on my particular issue, but I think I might not be searching properly. Could anyone provide any insight into whether or not this might affect how spiders see the content on Strutta.com, whether or not this is just something that will affect the Keyword Suggestions Tool or actual SERP rankings, and if this content is already present elsewhere on MOZ, a link to said content?

Much obliged

Authorship as a ranking signal! (See here)

It's inline with the algo's focus on high quality content and "users will like x because they loved y"

Mike's response pretty much covers it, I would just add that there shouldn't be any negative effects with having 1099pro.com canon to itself, so don't worry about that.

Hey Arun,

Thanks for posting! I was beginning to think that I was the only Inbound guy anywhere that had to deal with this kind of issue

Yup, I created the same bug with redirect loops trying to get around the slash issue. The problem is that S3 doesn't consider the slash as part of the rewrite data unless something comes after it.

Ultimately, my number one suggestion would be to go with a different service that allows you to install a Server App like Nginx or Apache. Others have agreed that redirections set up through a server app are the way that they feel the most comfortable that link equity is being passed.

If you're dead-set on S3, which I would understand as the load times are crazy-awesome-insane, I may have a solution for you soon. Our dev team is working on a script for Jekyll + S3 sites that will essentially create extension-less files (i.e. example.com/contact) that contain meta refresh + rel canon.

The script will use a list of desired redirections + rules that is structured the same way an htaccess file would be. I can't speak to how it will get past S3's default 302ing yet, but I know that it will use CURL. Look for a YouMoz post soon from me!

Anyways, I hope my notes here help! I'm gonna try and make that post soon after the script is created. Just as a last note, in taking a look at your site I noticed that a lot of the internal links on your homepage don't have the trailing slash in them. I would definitely start there and add those slashes, and perform a "submit page + linked page" to Webmaster Tools after!

Yup, I'm in the same boat as you, I'd much rather do server-side redirects..

As an update on this "project", we used the pageless redirects in our staging environment on S3 just now, but were unsuccessful. Certain redirects that we set up in pageless redirects, (such as adding a trailing slash to URLs without,) got clobbered by S3's default setting of 302ing to adding a trailing slash. Weak sauce, Amazon!

At this point, we're going with Apache, since it's the App that our developers know best and we've had too many problems to experiment with our live environment. This being said, our next project after we relaunch with proper redirects will be to begin testing on our stage with Nginx

Thanks for your input!

Thanks Casey!

We've actually found a different work-around that we are looking at right now, using the "pageless redirects" plugin for Jekyll. Basically it uses the meta refresh + rel canon redirection method that Matt Cutts got called out on a while ago. This would allow us to stay on S3 and maintain our blazing fast site speed.

Through my research so far, this seems to pass equity in much the same way as a Server App 301.. Have you had any experiences/heard anything to the contrary?

Thanks Jeff!

I think we're going to go with Apache for now, since it's what all of us are well-versed in. We'll probably be switching to Nginx at some point in the future, and focusing on other aspects that you mentioned, such as caching and compression, in the meantime.

Cheers.

Hey Peeps,

I've been struggling lately with a new static site, and I'm looking for anyone's opinion who's had to optimize a site using Nginx. I understand that Nginx is recommended for static sites, however I want to avoid being in a situation where I can't do things like write redirect rules the way I want to.

Considering that it will be hosting a Static site, are there any features or functions that Nginx lacks when compared to Apache, such as ability to write rewrite rules, etc.?

Hey Arun,

Thanks for posting! I was beginning to think that I was the only Inbound guy anywhere that had to deal with this kind of issue

Yup, I created the same bug with redirect loops trying to get around the slash issue. The problem is that S3 doesn't consider the slash as part of the rewrite data unless something comes after it.

Ultimately, my number one suggestion would be to go with a different service that allows you to install a Server App like Nginx or Apache. Others have agreed that redirections set up through a server app are the way that they feel the most comfortable that link equity is being passed.

If you're dead-set on S3, which I would understand as the load times are crazy-awesome-insane, I may have a solution for you soon. Our dev team is working on a script for Jekyll + S3 sites that will essentially create extension-less files (i.e. example.com/contact) that contain meta refresh + rel canon.

The script will use a list of desired redirections + rules that is structured the same way an htaccess file would be. I can't speak to how it will get past S3's default 302ing yet, but I know that it will use CURL. Look for a YouMoz post soon from me!

Anyways, I hope my notes here help! I'm gonna try and make that post soon after the script is created. Just as a last note, in taking a look at your site I noticed that a lot of the internal links on your homepage don't have the trailing slash in them. I would definitely start there and add those slashes, and perform a "submit page + linked page" to Webmaster Tools after!

Mike's response pretty much covers it, I would just add that there shouldn't be any negative effects with having 1099pro.com canon to itself, so don't worry about that.

Been getting bizarre Redirect Loops from Chrome after I log-in to MOZ. Has anyone had something like this happen? I've tried clearing cache, rebooting, etc. but no luck. Thanks in advance!

Hey all,

Came across a bit of an interesting challenge recently, one that I was hoping some of you might have had experience with!

We're currently in the process of a website rebuild, for which I'm really excited. The new site is using Markdown to create an entirely static site. Load-times are fantastic, and the code is clean. Life is good, apart from the 302s.

One of the weird quirks I've realized is that with oldschool, non-server-generated page content is that every page of the site is an Index.html file in a directory. The resulting in a www.website.com/page-title will 302 to www.website.com/page-title/.

My solution off the bat has been to just be super diligent and try to stay on top of the link profile and send lots of helpful emails to the staff reminding them about how to build links, but I know that even the best laid plans often fail.

Has anyone had a similar challenge with a static site and found a way to overcome it?

My advice would be:

• Resubmit key pages to index through WMT (Google & Bing)
• Make sure your Sitemaps are up to date with the proper page URLs, and submitted to WMT
• Set up the 301s if you have the time. You can create redirections using your .htaccess file, as long as you have an Apache-based site. This page is a great guide to writing .htaccess commands, including 301s and others

I had a similar problem with a slightly different manifestation, related to trailing slashes on my URLs. It was hard, but after doing the first two steps and setting up redirects, it was just a question of waiting for Google and MOZ to catch-up. Redirects took care of bad SERP links, and at this point (just over 2-weeks after launch with bad links), everything has been updated with the correct page URLs. Good luck!

Thanks all,

I think the problem is coming from the fact that we're hosted on Amazon Webservices, and the devs are using the "aws bucket config" settings to institute redirects instead of htaccess. SEO vs Dev Battle time.

Follow-up answer:

Our new website (Strutta.com) is entirely static, hosted on S3. No Apache, just straight HTML files. No apache means no htaccess.

Instead of using htaccess, we have to use the S3 Console: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-page-redirect.html

As far as I can tell, this sets up redirects the same way. Although this doesn't answer my initial question, I'm going to try using the control panel later on today to see if 301ing the directories there to include the / will get recognized before whatever is causing the 302 currently

Hey all,

Recently launched a new site on S3, and old pages that I haven't been able to redirect yet are showing up as 403s instead of 404s.

Is a 403 worse than a 404? They're both just basically dead-ends, right? (I have read the status code guides, yes.)

As a follow-up to my own post...

After a ton of research today, I feel like I've come to a couple of resolutions that might be of interest to anyone who is considering possibly running a static site on S3 and reading this forum:

• S3 probably isn't the place for your website if you're a Moz user. Although it's the only static website host that actually does provide a way to create 301s, it limits you to 50. Additionally, the process for creating 301s involves writing lengthy XML documents. Not fun

• An additional thorn in the side of static sites is the SUPER oldschool web practice of instituting 302s to add trailing slashes. I.e.:

• _http://www.examplesite.com/page_ 302s to _http://www.examplesite.com/page/_

So, at the end of the day, I would say it's probably best to avoid this kind of setup until some solutions for these kinds of issues come up. Not fun times.

Hey Peeps,

I've been struggling lately with a new static site, and I'm looking for anyone's opinion who's had to optimize a site using Nginx. I understand that Nginx is recommended for static sites, however I want to avoid being in a situation where I can't do things like write redirect rules the way I want to.

Considering that it will be hosting a Static site, are there any features or functions that Nginx lacks when compared to Apache, such as ability to write rewrite rules, etc.?