When making my contact form I enabled a feature so that when clicking a link after one of my blog posts, the subject of the email would be filled in for you. This is all well and nice as I put a cool little get clause in the page for it to work. However, I know that Google can, at times, get a little over excited. Google follows all links, whether they have unfriendly URL's or not. It will index all of these pages no matter what the URL structure. This is of course through no fault of its own because not everyone has nice urls.
I didn't want Google to index that page thousands of times with different urls, so instead I used its own function to make itself clever. rel="nofollow" If I put this in the link it would only pick up the link that is straight to the contact page (In the navigation) and not the dynamic one.
If you have ever used a forum you know that you can view a page to see posts then when you click reply you see another page with the same content. So for all forums Google will have two entries for each page.
How can this be stopped? If you put a rel="nofollow" on the link to reply the pages will only ever get hit by Google once. This will also stop results in Google showing the reply form. What this means: Not only will it clean up Google but it will ensure people only get sent to the right place. With a use like this not many people link to the replay pages so Google will never know they exist.
Over the past year I have seen a decrease in the activity in most of the forums I used to frequent. Now I can only see two possible theories as to why they are no longer popular:
One, I am out of date and the technologies being discussed in all of the forums is no longer relevant so the forums naturally died.
Two, it is now so easier for people to stay up to date with content all over the internet, there is no longer a need for a central place to ask questions. For example, if you wanted to know how to do something would you go to another site and ask or, would you ask it in your own blog knowing many people are subscribed to your blog in their aggregators of choice. Then people would reply in your blog comments and everything would be resolved quickly.
However, saying this some forums are definitely not going anywhere and are receiving more posts than ever. The trend mentioned above only seems to be true with blogs that focus on a web (Geek) topics. Then again, maybe I am not moving with the times enough.
It has long been fought that you should structure your pages in a semantic way. Along with the idea that you should use logical names which don't identify the style of an element: <div class="navigation"> rather than <div class="left">. This is all good and now people are using improved markup. One point that seems to be scraped over is the logical or semantic order in which to put you code in. An example of a bad order you should avoid is:
- Site Title
- Navigation
- Page Title
- Page Content
- Footnote
So what is wrong with that? To decide on the best order that pages should follow I went into a text only browser. In the text only browser you have to scroll down to get past the title and navigation (which is often large) before you get onto the content (as in my text only browser, everything will be rendered into one singular column). So depending on how many different pages the site has, depends on how far it is that you have to scroll before you get to anything meaningful.
If this page has lots of meaningful content people will most likely arrive via searching the internet or by being sent there by someone talking about the content on another site. So what are they going to be looking for first? Are they going to want to see what the site is called? Are they going to want to see what else is on the site? Or are these both things that you will want to see after you have read the rest of the page?
My Suggested order:
- Site Title
- Page Title
- Page Content
- Navigation
- Footnote
While this still isn't ideal it means that if someone views your site with a text only browser (or a search bot for that matter) they will first be given the content that they are probably looking for.
Update
After I wrote this article I ran over this article (pointed by Anne). The problem discussed in this article would be avoided if navigation is put after any content that people would want to read.