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Hi Keri,

It's the site of a regional newspaper, so the audience is certainly mixed. I don't see any other suitable model than using cookies.

Nobody here who implemented a metered model before?

Thanks for your reply, Keri.

have a good day.

Jan

Hi,

I'm scratching my head over how to best implement the "metered model" on a site without users being able to game it all too easily.

Has anybody in this QA forums implemented one before and is willing to share his/her best practises and findings?

Currently I think raising the bar to force everybody to login is a bad idea + we would still need to open the site for google and other engines and can be tricked that way. Also this might lead to some penalty (cloaking)?

Using cookies might not be enought as I think almost every Internet user these days knows that this might be the #1 place to look and they are deleted in a second.

Counting based on a users IP-adress is also a bit critical as this is not accurate enough.

Should we just use cookies and hope for the best?

Not necesesarrily. If he has no suitable mobile content (for example videos that can't play on mobile devices, or pictures / sites that are many MB in size (adult content, lots of pics probably)) but the other site has - the user would profit from that.

There are a lot of different reasons why they chose this way to place the blog (software, hosting-limits, easiest out-of-the-box setup, etc..) It does not do too much "damage" though. Having a sub-folder is the best-practise but using sub-domain is the second best. It would be "harmful" if they used another domain, which is not the case.

Hello Petra,

The "right" question to ask would rather be - how will this be in the (close) future - and the answer is that it will be more and more important to have mobile optimized versions.

You should use a rel=canonical back to your desktop/web version though. Here's an excellent QA which hints at what I wrote above as well: http://www.seroundtable.com/single-url-mobile-seo-13521.html
It's okay to redirect to a subdomain or subfolder but if you aim for the 100% you should not (it's not always possible, I know).

best regards,
Jan

301 redirecting an old, no longer existing page to the homepage or any other page (I'd suggest using the closest matching existing page) is certainly not a violation of google's guidelines.

One does not always have the option to use a canonical. If you have the option; always go with the 301-redirect in such a scenario.

If your concern is about the SERP's only you can try this bit of code in a htaccess file (if you use apache):

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$
RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robotsssl.txt

Then add this code to your robotsssl.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Have a good day!

Jan

Hi guys,

I hope somebody can help me figure this out. On one of my sites I set the charset to UTF-8 in the content-type meta-tag. The file itself is also UTF-8. If I type german special chars like ä, ö, ß and the like they get displayed as a tilted square with a questionmark inside.

If I change the charset to iso-8859-1 they are getting displayed properly in the browser but services like twitter are still having the issues and stop "importing" content once they reach one of those specialchars.

I would like to avoid having to htmlencode all on-page content, so my preference would be using UTF-8..

You can see it in action when you visit this URL for example: http://www.skgbickenbach.de/aktive/1b/artikel/40-minuten-fußball-reichen-nicht_1045?charset=utf-8

Remove the ?charset parameter and the charset it set to iso-8859-1.

Hope somebody has an answer or can push me into the right direction.

Thanks in advance and have a great day all.

Jan