Web Design in Oklahoma City

We're hitting record high temperatures here in OKC this afternoon. Here's a little screen shot from the national weather service forecast for today:

And while the heat is on, we've got more features coming your way. This time, we're adding some great new SEO enhancements that will improve on our already SEO-friendly CMS systems. Here's a look.

Avoiding duplicate content

One of the biggest conversations in the SEO space right now centers around duplicate content. Because of the problems presented by sites that scrape and republish content without permission, the search engines are really cracking down on content that is recognized as duplication. Here are links to a couple of articles on Google's webmaster central blog about this issue:

• Duplicate content due to scrapers
• Deftly dealing with duplicate content

Of course, there are ways that your site can exhibit duplicate content even if you are playing by the rules. And it is those scenarios that we want to help you overcome, so here's how we're doing it.

Redirecting domains

We're enhancing our 301 redirect functionality to include the ability to redirect domains. If you have multiple domains pointing at a single site, we highly recommend you use this functionality to choose one domain to serve as primary and redirect all other domains to that primary domain. For example, if you have mydomain.com and mydomain.net both pointing at the same website, and if you redirect mydomain.net to mydomain.com, then if the user tries to visit any page on the mydomain.net domain, they will be redirected to the corresponding page on the mydomain.com domain. It still gets the user where they want to go, but consolidates all content onto a single domain. Nice!

You may not realize it, but even the www and non-www versions of your domains count as multiple domains. If the search engines index both domains then they may consider your site to be duplicated. Avoid this by choosing either the www or non-www version of your domain to serve as primary, and redirect the other version to your primary domain. If you use Google's webmaster central tools, be sure that the primary domain you choose matches what you have selected in webmaster central.

Hiding the publishpath domain from search engines

On our CMS systems, all websites have a default web address such as [mywebsitename].publishpath.com. Sometimes, clients use this address to publish their live site, but other times clients add their own custom domains. If you use a custom domain, it is a good idea to hide the publishpath domain from the search engines. This new release will allow you to do just that. Enabling this functionality on your website will add content to the robots.txt file that will hide the publishpath version of your site from search engines.

Scheduled release

These new SEO enhancements are scheduled to go live on Wednesday morning, August 6th at 8am CDT. Downtime should be minimal as usual (last week's update took only 15 seconds), but it is possible so we want you to be aware. Keep watching our blog and our twitter feed for more information.