phpld seo recommendations (some advice suitable for other scripts too)

[Bernard]

[Note: I posted this at DP originally. Hope it's OK to repost here]

OK. So I used to own a phpld 3.x directory some time ago before I got real busy with my main business and I didn't have the time to devote to properly developing and promoting it. I made a number of small modifications to the script for SEO purposes, but never got to see the results within the time that I owned it.

Recently, however, I visited the site and saw that every single category page - even the ones without listings, had PR 3/2 (home page PR4). As increasing the PR of inner pages is something that does not come easy for some directories, I was happy to see that the results of my efforts seemed to have paid off, but Mike made me feel guilty for gloating a bit, so I got the idea to share what I did.

I'm offering these tips for free now mainly because I have a lot of listings out there in phpld directories and if some of you who own these directories implement these changes, I hope to reap some benefit from it.

OK. So here are the recommendations (some links point to phplinkdirectory supporters forum):

Make sure your site is easily crawlable

I know this seems like a weird thing to say because the phpld script is pretty well designed out of the box for seo, but I discovered a potential issue with the gzip page compression feature. Try running several of your directory pages through the W3C page validator. If, after the first page you check, you get error messages indicating that no source code (or a blank page) was found when attempting to check subsequent URLs, I would highly recommend turning gzip page compression off.

I don't know if search engine bot requests for the page source may be hitting the same problem (ie. does googlebot have the same problem that W3C bot has?), but I suspect it could.

Optimize your internal link structure and eliminate duplicate content

This one is actually fairly obvious if you think about it a bit. phpld allows for showing sorting options on every category page for pagerank, alphabetical and hits. Most templates that I have seen incorporate these options too. IMO, this just introduces a lot of duplicate content to a directory - especially for directories that don't have enough listings to cause category pages to be paginated. It also alters the internal linking structure of a directory to funnel PageRank through all these alternate sortings and dilute the link equity for the main (default) category page (or sorting option). So, I recommend you pick the sorting option you like best and eliminate the links to different sorting options.

Unless you are using the RSS syndication of your category pages for some specific purpose, I'd disable that feature too and eliminate another link on the page. I don't think too many people are actually using RSS feeds from directories, so the cost/benefit analysis to me is very clear. Save the link equity from the RRS feed link and funnel it to the rest of the directory.

I also removed the links to the "top sites" and "new sites" pages from the main menu. The only visitors that are interested in these pages, IMO, are folks looking to submit sites (to verify that the directory is active). Once you get some PR and promotion going, submissions will not be an issue, so these pages are superfluous IMO. Save that link equity by removing these pages/links and funnel the PR to the rest of the directory.

Check your other pages and remove unnecessary links (like a link to the submit page that appears ON the submit page!).

Misc/Other tidbits

- Send a valid 404 error header for incorrect URLs. At least at the time that I got the script, phpld was returning 200 headers for invalid pages that were being redirected to the index page.

- Optimize your code. Check your templates and eliminate unnecessary tags/codes/tables. Try using CSS where possible.

I hope that info is helpful for some of you directory owners!