Tag Archives: yahoo

Opinion: Traditional media is not all we should be looking at

By Martin Gill | Sun 17th July 2011 - 1:48 pm

It’s not often I agree with a Conservative MP, it’s even less often that I hear them say something that actually strikes me as truly insightful.

During the parliamentary debate on the BSkyB bid there was one such moment. At 6.25pm Dr Phillip Lee stood up and spoke to a now mostly empty chamber. This was a shame, because what he had to say was, in my view, extremely relevant and highly important. (Hansard)

He spoke on the fact that a lot, if not the vast majority, of the news people are getting today comes from not the mainstream media, the …

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , and | 5 Comments
Mark Pack

Canonical URLs: improving your website’s performance in search engines

By Mark Pack | Sun 15th February 2009 - 7:48 am

A rather more technical post than usual, but if you are used to playing around with HTML tags or fiddling with the innards of systems such as WordPress, this post has some good news that could make your website perform better in search engines…

The multiple URLs problem

It is quite common for a page on a website to be accessible via more than one web address. For example:

http://www.libdems.org.uk/news/new-government-bailout-is-blank-cheque-131421437;show

and

http://www.libdems.org.uk/news/new-government-bailout-is-blank-cheque-131421437 (i.e. without ;show at the end)

both link to the same page.

There are two reasons this might be a problem. First, a search engine may fail to realise that these are the same page and so search results get clogged up with duplicates. Second, some people may link to one version of the URL and other people to the other. Splitting links between these two versions can mean the page performs less well in search engines than if all the links were to just the one.

Search engines are pretty good at trying to deal with this sort of problem, but they aren’t perfect.

Continue reading »
Posted in Online politics | Also tagged , , and | 8 Comments
Advert

Recent Comments

  • Jack Nicholls
    Roz, I can't think of anything you ever write that I don't heartily agree with, frequently in letter and always in spirit. We've started (literally just started...
  • Peter Dunphy
    The challenge of empowering local communities/councils etc is not that this will allow the house building or wind farms or railway lines that we need - they wil...
  • Chloe
    Liberalism hasn't changed. Sadly too many who purport to be liberal have become illiberal....
  • Nick Hopkinson
    Excellent article. The line “That doesn’t mean a weak state.” could usefully be fleshed out a little more in a future article. Exactly which powers should...
  • Jana
    “ The Liberal offer is fundamentally different: people with more power over their lives, their work and the places they call home” I agree with this but,...