Mark’s Blog

My feelings that Web sites should be designed after (and around) the content and not before the content have finally been validated and put into words more graceful than any I could have produced in a recent article on A List Apart entitled, “Reviving Anorexic Web Writing.”

I’ve noticed this throughout my career (albeit pretty short, so far) in Web design that when a person thinks of getting a Web site built for his or herself or company, the first concern that comes to mind is “I want it to look good.” Content usually comes in at a distant second, or even third (because, they want high search engine rankings, too!). And no one wants to write her or his own content either. So if I guess if I could be a Web designer, developer and writer, I’d be off to a great start!

One critique I have of the article, is the author’s assertion that footers “…usually contain a handful of throw-away links, maybe a copyright statement, and contact information. Nobody reads them, because they’re not worth reading.” Obviously the author doesn’t concern herself with SEO or accessibility very much, because those “throw-away links” have a great deal of usefulness to ensure that a site is navigable for both users and search engine bots alike. I also often look at a Web site’s footer to see who (if it’s even listed) built the site.

However, at the risk of sounding like a flip-flopper, I do agree that more could be done with the footer. The visitors who actually read a Web site’s content are a Web site’s best friend and therefore should be catered to (in terms of design and content) in hopes of creating more friends of the like.

I’ve been trying to figure out this question for quite sometime; how, if at all, does having multiple domains pointed towards the same site affect page rank? I think I’ve found the answer. After briefly speaking with Richard John Jenkins, a Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Web Search Engineer, the head IT guy at my work, and searching through various Web design and Google forums, I’ve come to a conclusion. Yes, it does affect your page rank, but not in a positive way.

Say you have a Web server, with domain.com on it, and you also want to point domain.org to the same site. If you just have both domains pointed to the same site, then you’d be able to browse the site under either of the domain names you’ve pointed to it. To Google, as far as I can tell, this is considered Black Hat SEO, because you are giving yourself an unfair advantage in Web real estate. Both domains can be indexed, both containing the same content. This is bad.

Instead, what you should do is have one of the domains point to a 301 redirect page. This way, people can still use that second domain name to get to your site, and any external links your second domain receives will be passed on to your main domain name.

This question arose when I found out that Montage, Inc. (the company for which I currently work), had two domain names pointed to the same site (montagefs.com and montagefurnitureservices.com) and our page rank was going nowhere, even though I had optimized the site to the best of my ability and it had been a few months since the new design was uploaded.