SEO Tycoon

**ForrestCroce** · 02-10-2007, 09:00 PM

Exif Harvester is software I wrote to automate photography analytics. Example: out of about 30 K photographs, I used my 100/2.8 Macro (lens) a few hundred times. So I sold it.

Anyway, I released the program as freeware to get some attention for my site. As of the 6th ( my web stats are having trouble ) I've had 50 viewers this month to its page. It's also one of the top searches that people use to find me.

Only, when I do a search for Exif Harvester ( no quotes ) I'm not in the first five pages of Google's results, and I'm not doing very well on Yahoo or MSN, either. At least I turn up in those, although it's an old version of the page, from when I broke my DW template and lost my titles. A lot of what does turn up is about my software, and links back to its page, which is even more puzzling ... that should help flow it toward the top, no?

Part of that is probably because I've got two domains, and can't set up 301s. Would using mod_rewrite let me consolidate links to the same page but at two different domains ... maybe four between www subdomains? That seems like the best thing I could do?

**astrojith** · 02-16-2007, 06:53 AM

Maybe because Google is updating its index or something. Or, is it a new site ? Some sites find it difficult to get into Google. Maybe in the sandbox. I wish it was open source.

**ADAM Web Design** · 02-16-2007, 08:39 AM

I wish it weren't. astrojith, what you forget is open source is open to EVERYONE...including idiots who would exploit it for their own gain (which is about 90% of the SEO world.)

Think of a few people on this board (who shall remain nameless but generally have low or red Talkupation if you want a hint.) Would you want THEM having access to the secret sauce, as it were?

Forrest: you know classic ASP, right? If you do, the 301 code is stunningly simple in it (it's just hard to find).

Code:

Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", your new page here
Response.End ' Don't forget this.  Googlebot will choke if you do.  Trust me on this.  I already made this mistake.

Anyway, not sure if that helps you any, but what I use it for is to consolidate a non-www with a www domain so that the non-www links 301 to the www links. It can be used across domains as well.

Hopefully, that gets you started.

**travelagent** · 02-16-2007, 10:42 AM

Forrest - I'm not sure if this will accomplish what you're after, but it's what I use for doing mod_rewrites and it's free to use

**ForrestCroce** · 02-17-2007, 06:18 AM

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I've been meaning to consolidate my domains ( I have two, not counting www/non-www ), and it looks like the links are split between them, so using 301s should help with this query in particular, but also the site in general.

I appreciate the asp code, it's interesting to know this is all done with response headers. But my asp knowledge comes from work; I'm running my site on a linux box at bluehost. But I figured out how to use mod-rewrite to turn landscapephoto.us to http://forrestcroce.com, and in Google Webmaster Tools I set the non-www version of FC.com to my "preferred" domain. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but intimidated with mod_rewrite, especially since I really don't know much about regular expressions. But it turns out to be pretty easy:

Code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^forrestcroce\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://forrestcroce.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The site is probably 9 months old, and the domain I'm using is about 6 months. So it's probably not the sandbox, and I used to come up as the #1 result. Actually I think it's pretty ironic that I got knocked completely out of the results for software that I wrote ... but now I'm #1 again for this phrase. I'm glad, but very confused.