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Posts tagged Webmasters
For years, the "common wisdom" (as this not-especially-wise person understands it) has been that duplicated content harms SEO. For example, asking a question on Quora and then reposting it on SO, ...
I've noticed that it's possible to use DNS Name multiple times, so that a TLS certificate will cover multiple domains. Alternatively, you could generate a separate cert for each domain. What are ...
What exactly are the steps to creating your own TLS certificates such that they create minimal error messages for users? For example, a simple self-signed certificate will trigger a lot of errors ...
I only have a working knowledge of TLS. TLS today supports name constraints, to restrict which domains a CA can issue certs for: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5280#section-4.2.1.10 I've seen ...
Since self-signed server certs are discouraged nowadays, often people create their own root CA and sign server certs with that. Obviously client apps won't trust the root CA, so the admin must the...
In the last 5-10 years, I've noticed that many searches (especially Google) about technical or semi-technical questions, have the results clogged with "content farm" results. It's hard to precisel...
If I want to use chat GPT or other large language model AI to generate content for my website, will that be a good strategy for SEO? Can search engines detect and penalize content that was written...
I visited a site that I use infrequently and got a certificate error, specifically NET:ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID. I contacted the owner, who asked for a screenshot. That surprised me, as I had a...
I have a Q&A site where users can upvote and downvote the questions and answers. Does Google use these votes as a ranking signal? Will pages that my users vote up rank better than pages that ...
Are there any negative effects[1] when sending an email wherein the From header is an email address on my server's domain but the Reply-To header is an email address on a different domain, specific...
How come country and state/province is often excluded from WHOIS privacy? So everything else is redacted, but not country and state. However, apparently there's no special requirement from ICANN, s...
I've heard that I should create an XML sitemap containing all the URLs from my site for SEO. My site needs to improve: The number of URLs that get crawled by search engine bots The number of U...
Site name Webmasters (Meta discussion of the name) Description Questions and answers about building, deploying, maintaining, operating, monetizing, and marketing websites. Topics Topics covere...
I recall that back in the dark ages of web search (Altavista), search engines were naive and keywords were a huge thing in SEO. People would even create landing pages stuffed with keywords in tiny,...
I've seen recommendations that search engines like "fresh" content and that I should be continually launching new content on my website for SEO. Is that always the case? That seems to directly co...
I've been working on improving my site's domain authority as reported by Moz in the hopes that it helps our Google rankings. I have some doubts about it though. Google won't be able to see Moz's c...
I am setting up a domain that uses a CNAME record so that is hosted on the same server as another site. I seem to be able to set up the www subdomain just fine with a CNAME but I'm having trouble ...
In the old Universal Analytics, I was unable to show stats from a "domain" property that I had created in Google Search Console. I was only able to integrate a "prefix" property. I haven't tried ...
When I use content from other sites on my own website, I don't know if I should call that "content aggregation" or "content syndication." What are the definitions of "content aggregation" and "con...
I have a website hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) that uses Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). The load balancer is the newer "application" type. I've...
Canonical URLS are highly recommended for SEO and to prevent competition between duplicate pages. I've been trying to implement this, but I'm unsure how to implement this for pages which repeat but...
I've seen a lot of domain names expire or hosting go dark when a website owner stops maintaining the site. Is there a way to prevent that for my own site? I'd like it to remain up, well after I'm ...
Let's say I want to host a public website, for use by anyone on the internet. I am deliberately leaving the exact nature of the website vague, because I want to ask for general things that are appl...
Apache has modules for both digest authentication and basic authentication. I've seen recommendations to use digest authentication because it doesn't send the password in clear text. However, if ...
I've been told that I should get a WordPress website. Looking into it, there is an open-source content management system available from wordpress.org and hosting available for it from wordpress.co...
I'd like to have a backup of my WordPress website. It looks like I'll need to back up the database, some settings, and some uploads. How do I create backups for my site?
My web host only lets me upload static files. They don't support .htaccess or dynamic scripting. As such, I can't implement 301 redirects between pages. I should be able to put some JavaScript in...
I'm hoping to move my website to cloud hosting using AWS. Can I use my existing domain with AWS, or do I need to buy a new domain at AWS? If I can use the domain I already own, how do I transfer ...
I have several alternate domain names that I would like to redirect to my site: misspelling.example -> example.com longer-domain-with-hyphens.example -> example.com old-brand.example -&g...
I'm building a company with a website about widgets. The .com domain name with just "widgets" is already taken, and so are a lot of other keyword related domains. I could get a domain on an alter...
I looks like either RewriteEngine on RewriteRule (.*) http://localhost:8080/$1 [P,L] or ProxyPass "/" "http://localhost:8080/" ProxyPassReverse "/" "http://localhost:8080/" would allow...
I've read that for usability and SEO, the the <title> tags on your pages should contain both the article title and your brand name. I'm wondering which order is better for them? Which of th...
It would be much easier if our website could use a single page application (SPA) framework such as React or Angular without relying on server side rendering (SSR). I've heard that some search engi...
I've seen SEO advice that the ideal length for a page title is 50 to 60 characters and that the maximum length is 80 characters. Our site relies on user generated titles for our content and our us...
I recently implemented hreflang tags in my website to tell search engines about content translations in several languages. I was very surprised to find that a self-referencing hreflang is required...
Some of the posts in Incubator Q&A are tagged [Webmasters] (with a capital W) and some are tagged [webmasters] (with a lower case w). The posts with capital letter in the tag have that tag sh...
Codidact has tried importing questions from other Q/A sites like Stack Exchange. However search engines have not liked that. Those questions and answers don't usually get indexed on Codidact, and...
I have an XML sitemap containing all the URLs that I want search engines to index. Unfortunately Google is indexing some URLs that are not in my XML sitemap. Is there a setting in Google Search C...
I've been hosting my website on shared hosting, but I'm tired of paying their monthly fee. I want to move my website to my home computer. How do I need to configure my DNS records to make that ha...
I have a physical machine available and I don't want to pay hosting fees. What if I just host my website on my home server? What are common pitfalls of doing so?
My web server is logging in combined log format and my host gives me SSH access to my server where the logs are stored. I see entries in the log file for 404 errors like: 10.10.10.10 - - [10/Jun/...
Our website relies heavily on user generated content and power users that edit, curate, and moderate that content. Recently the amount of content contributed to our site has taken a nose dive. Loo...
I've been bitten several times by cumulative layout shift (CLS) issues with my website. I've found out about them when I view the reports in Google Search Console. We have a good set of tests for...
I've been looking through Google Search Console trying to find a place where it shows me broken links to my site, but it may be that the information I'm looking for isn't available there. I've fou...
My website has long articles. Many users click to a single article, read it, and leave our site. I want more of these users to engage more with our site. I have Google Analytics installed and I'm...
In Drupal, I've configured my home page to be served from /node/1 as recommended in Setting up your home page | Drupal.org. However https://mysite.example/node/1 shows the exact same content as th...
My .htaccess files doesn't seem to be doing anything. I've created one in my document root directory and put a redirect into it: Redirect 301 / https://othersite.example/ However, the redirect...
My website host gives me a single document root directory for all my domains. I'd like to separate out each of my domains into a separate subfolder. Can I use .htaccess in this directory to confi...
The XML sitemap protocol defines a priority field that is says "... is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site." It doesn't give any guidance on how I should rank my URLs for...
I recently received and email from Google AdSense that says: Starting later this year, Google will requiring all publishers to use a Consent Management Platform (CMP) that has been certified by ...
