HTTP headers

At the end of last year, a new HTTP status code saw the light. This status code, HTTP 451, is intended to be shown specifically when content has been blocked for legal reasons. If you’ve received a take down request, or are ordered by a judge to delete content, this is the status code that »

There was a bit of tweeting in the SEO community today because Bing introduced an HTTPS version of their site and people thought that would mean they’d lose their keyword data. That’s not true, if you take the right precautions. I thought I’d write a bit of an intro in how all this works so »

Last week I got a few messages from Google Webmaster Tools, saying it couldn’t access the robots.txt file on a site of a client. Turns out the client didn’t handle scheduled downtime correctly, causing problems with Google. While this article covers some rather basic technical SEO the last bit might be interesting for more advanced »

It keeps amazing me that I keep seeing people use robots.txt files to prevent sites from being indexed and thus showing up in the search engines. You know why it keeps amazing me? Because robots.txt doesn’t actually do the latter, even though it does prevent your site from being indexed. Let’s go through some terms »

I make mistakes. You make mistakes. We all do. And some of these mistakes end up providing our readers with a 404 page. Chances are that page says “Error 404: file not found”. How does that help your visitor? Instead of just identifying the problem, your 404 error page needs to offer a solution. In »

Ever since the announcement on the Google Blog and more recently Yahoo’s announcement that they’ve enhanced their support for it, I’ve been meaning to play with the X-Robots-Tag header. This HTTP header allows you to do what you’d normally do in a robots meta tag, in an HTTP header, which has some pretty cool appliances. »