Nerd Life

Matt from WordPress was holding a casual WordPress meetup in Paris today. I thought I should drop by and say hello... Meet the legend, you know! ;)

(Do you realize WordPress and b2evolution actually both spun off the b2 blog software at the same time?)

It was nice chatting with Matt as well as Tony (Sphere), Xavier (NetVibes), StuFF mc (Pomcast) and the others.

(maybe I should go out more often? ... or sleep more, judging by the picture! :roll:)

When looking at the sitemaps protocol which is now endorsed by Google, Yahoo and MSN, I can't help but crying about how obscure the documentation is, especially for the <priority> element.

Please note that the priority you assign to a page is not likely to influence the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages.

Okay, so what's the point?

Granted that setting all priorities to 1.0 will not make the urls rank higher than urls from other sites. But we're talking about position of URLs here, not sites.

Sometimes, the same site appears multiple times in search results, with different pages/urls. In that case, if priority doesn't influence which URL comes first, compared to which other comes second, then what's the use?

For example, on a blog, the same info can be found on a post's permanent url, on the homepage, on the category page, on the archives pages, the RSS feed, etc.

Sometimes the search will return several of these locations. If the priority can't be used to tell that the permanent url would be the best choice to put first, then... I don't get it! |-|

Does it mean that priorities are only used to determine what gets crawled first? If it does, then it means that maybe the 100 top priorities will be indexed and the others won't! So the top 100 may appear in search results and the other may not!

Present vs. not present! That's what they call "not influencing the position'?

Again, if it doesn't do that, then what does it do?

All I can think of at that point is the priority being an alternative to <changefreq> : a site gets a certain number of reindexes a day, and high priorities pages will be refreshed more often that low priority pages.

That would comply with the definition of that <priority> does NOT do...

But then... it doesn't make sense with what it is *supposed* to do:

it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers.

Or by "most important", are we supposed to understand "most frequently updated"?

I really wonder who it helps to have that spec being so obscure... :>>

One of the cool things you can do with b2evolution 2.0 is redirect older posts to a new URL.

I've put this to use by redirecting some of my first English posts on fplanque.net to fplanque.com.

Here's an example: http://fplanque.net/Blog/devblog/2003/01/21/quote_of_the_day_computers_and_programme

If you click on that link you go straight to France and bounce back immediately to:
http://fplanque.com/dev/dev/computers-programmers-dangerous-match

All that automagically with a nice 301 Permanent redirect! ;)

I have already observed in the past that Page Rank would follow 301 redirects when moving pages on the same site. I'm quite curious to see how moving posts to a different server, heck a different country, will affect the PageRank.

If all goes well, PR should follow... someday ;)

So... this is like my first post in my brand new b2evolution 2.0 English only blog.

One of the nice things when you start a new blog is that you can write sentences like the above. Sentences that are almost impossible to read. Worse: sentences no one cares about! :>>

Who cares? No one is reading this yet! And I bet my first reader will be the Google bot...

Of course my plan is to move all my previous English posts from my French site over to this one.

I gotta do this carefully though...

• First, I wouldn't want the Google bot to see any duplicate content.

• Second, I need to redirect from the old location to the new one.

• Third, I'd like to take that redirect opportunity to clean up the URLs a little bit.

One thing I'm having a hard time deciding on is whether or not to keep the /2007/03/11/ parts inside of my URLs. The alternative is to use category names...

As part of the b2evolution project, we spend a lot of time evaluating hosts for our users. We think we have finally reached a decent shortlist of companies providing the best service for a reasonable price.

If you're currently looking for a host, you may want to check out our top rated hosts in the following categories: cheap web hosting, shared web hosting, virtual private servers, dedicated servers and also: green web hosting!

As of today, our prefered choice is AN Hosting.