NYCPHP Meetup

[Michael B Allen]

I just found a major mistake in one of my websites. The Google rank
for the primary page has always been inexplicably horrible. Then I
found out that Google decreases the ranking of a page if it contains
content that is largely duplicated elsewhere such as on an adjacent
page. Turns out that index.html was just a symbolic link to the page
with a bad rank. Meaning Google was indexing the same exact page
through two slightly different URLs.

I now generate the pages separately with one containing <meta
name="robots" content="noindex"/> (which unfortunately has to be
index.html because the other page has good external links) so
hopefully that will clear up any penalty for duplicate content.

Anyway, if anyone knows of other Google rank pitfalls to avoid, I
would be delighted to hear about them.

Mike