Archive for February, 2009

xcache Revisited

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

In an earlier post, I complained about xcache 1.2.1 doing nothing but bad things to my server. I ended up moving to eAccelerator for a while instead. Recently, I moved to some better hardware to handle my ever-increasing traffic, and decided to give xcache another try. Low and behold 1.2.2 is out (and has been for a while it seems).

With the aid of a few plugins, I now have over 500 var caches running in xcache along with many php scripts themselves in the cache. My loads are WAY down (but, most of that can be contributed to the better hard ware) and page load times is MUCH faster.

I like it. And i retract my previous statements about it. Well done.

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Posted in Server Administration | 6 Comments »

SEO in a world where the “SE” doesn’t “O”

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

I spend a ton of time working on SEO aspects of sites I work on. I’m also a pre-release team member over at vBSEO, a 3rd party SEO software add-on for vBulletin forums. Today, I question why I do this.

The ‘big daddy’ Google can’t even seem to get their sub domains correct.
ie,

http://maps.google.com/webmasters/

http://mail.google.com/webmasters/

and

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

all go to the same place.

Both the maps and mail sub domains should 301 re-direct to regular www.

This is an epic duplicate content failure on all accounts. It is possibly the greatest oxy-morons of all time. No one “searches” for Google (ok, maybe a few random’s go to Yahoo.com and search for “google” to get there…), so they seem exempt from anything relating to SEO. Yet, their algorithms penalize websites with duplicate access points.

This is not a difficult ‘final tweak’ either. This is an entry level SEO consideration. Moreover, it can have negative effects on the application itself, such as cookies hitting mix-matched domains.

Maybe Matt Cutts will grace us with a reply here :)

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Posted in SEO | 7 Comments »