Data Center Hub

William Laakkonen, AVATAVA

One of the most important things to avoid in creating a dynamic web site is the use of session IDs in your URLs or pages with an ending of ?parameter. Here’s an example:

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?PHPSESSION_ID=123456

PHP Session IDs may be suppressed in your .htaccess file using: php_flag session.use_trans_sid off

The reason to avoid using PHP variables and session IDs as well as URLs ending in question marks is due to the fact the URLs may be ignored by some web bots and search engine spiders. It’s best to avoid anything that even resembles a session ID. Here is a direct quote from Matt Cutts also known as Googleguy: “sites shouldn’t use “&id=” as a parameter if they want maximal Googlebot crawlage, for example. So many sites use “&id=” with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids URLs with that parameter,” See: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29720.htm for the full article.

Another thing to avoid is the use of variables in URLs. Here’s an example:

http://www.mysite.com/page.php?var1=a&var2=b&var3=somethingelse

Using even one variable in the URL can decrease your search engine results and multiple parameters likely make it even worse; per Googleguy: “The number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our MAIN index’ (IOW parameters = relegated to a supplemental listing)”.

Another thing to avoid is serving all your content from a single page or a set of pages. As far as a search engine is concerned it sees the same pages or sets of pages over and over again. This will likely relegate your web content to either the supplemental index or even out of the index altogether.

Example:

keys.php?SiteCounty=Lee

keys.php?SiteCounty=Martin

or

index.php?Category=Apples

index.php?Category=Pears

What should be used instead is a server side rewrite to create static page names and links such as:

Buy-Product-Name.html or Buy-Another-Product-Name.html

With the Apache web server you can use the Apache module mod_rewrite to do the rewrites. For Microsoft® Windows® IIS you must look for a third party module to do a rewrite of your URLs. On IIS there are several ISAPI modules for rewriting URLs, including one which requires no changing of your web pages at all. Most of the IIS modules are commercial but there is one free module available from Antonin Foller of Motobit.com.

Commercial ISAPI rewrite modules for IIS

• ISAPI_rewrite from Helicon (they also have a free “lite” version”)
• OpURL from Opcode
• IIS Rewrite from Qwerksoft
• IIS Mod-Rewrite from Micronovae

I’m sure you may find additional ISAPI rewrite modules for IIS, these are the ones I found available during June, 2007.

URL Rewriting schemes to avoid

You should avoid using underscores in file names or URLs. See: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

The Google Supplemental Index

If you find your site is guilty of doing all the things listed here earlier as ‘not-to-do’, your site is likely already in the Google supplemental index. How do you know you if your site’s pages are in the supplemental index? Go to google.com and type in the search form: site:your_site followed by *** -sjpked Example: site:www.domain.com *** -sjpked

Here are some other reasons your pages may not show up in the indexes or end up in the supplemental index:

• You have little or no unique content on pages
• Your pages have no or identical titles and descriptions
• Your site still has dynamically generated pages without static URLs (use mod_rewrite or similar to solve)
• You have used the same header, side navigation bars, and footers on all your pages
• Your site has many unlinked (orphaned) pages
• All links to your site are reciprocal rather than natural one way incoming links.

How do you check where you stand?

Checking where you stand and will depend on who you ask. The actual raw data of the number of visitors to your site is really not as relevant as is the quality of the visitors to your site. It really does not matter if you only have 100 visitors to your site each month if your goal is to have 10 sales and 10 out of the 100 visitors purchase your product. That would be much better than having one million visitors and no one purchasing your product. Use your web site statistics (log file analysis) as a guideline. People should be finding your site both as a result of a natural search, and additionally as a paid search result listing for you to have the highest conversion rates.

Some easy things to do for checking your site:

• Install and use the Google Toolbar to check your page rank.
• Visit http://www.Alexa.com/ to check your site rank and overview.
• Check your site listing at http://www.siteadvisor.com/ - you’re judged by the company you keep here.

What else to do?

Optimize the content on your pages once you have created static pages using mod_rewrite or a similar product. You can choose appropriate key words and key word phrases using wordtracker.com or goodkeywords.com. A handy tool for analyzing your existing web pages is WebPositionGold (you should note that the use of WebPositionGold on google.com in an automated fashion violates their terms of service).

One of the best ways to get a good idea of what the search engines see when they visit your web site is to view your web page in a text only web browser such as Lynx. You might be surprised how the semantic presentation differs from your visual layout. The search engines treat HTML semantically. As an example, a H1 tag takes precedence over a font-size tag. Keep this in mind when viewing your pages in the text browser and consider adjusting the HTML accordingly.

When designing a web site, you generally want to test your pages consistent appearance in any type of browser. In other words, your work of art should not look different depending on the color of eyeglass frames someone is viewing it through.

In general, designing using XHTML, CSS, and validating your design using the w3.org validator will get you very close to a consistent appearance among many browsers on various operating systems. Once you’ve done this part, the more difficult task is checking your site presentation on multiple platforms and web browsers.

In the past, the only way of checking your site for presentation in multiple browsers was to have workstations (or virtual machines) running each type of OS along with each web browser, at each screen resolution, with various plug-ins (such as Flash) which you desired to check against. As you can well imagine, this can be out of reach for the average small business or designer both on the basis of budget and time constraints.
One solution to this issue has been conceived and implemented thanks to Johann Rocholl. It is a free web service called BrowserShots and it allows you to submit your site for snapshots in many different browsers in only a few seconds. What happens then is the web site is visited via many computers running the selected OS, browser, screen resolution, and plug-ins which you selected. Depending on the length of the queue, you may have a wait of 30 minutes or so for the results, but it is worth the wait. Once you have your screen shots you will know what additional work you (or your web developer) need to complete. No technical aptitude is needed to use the site so I invite you to check the job your developer is doing by submitting the site for snapshots and looking at what the rest of the world sees when visiting your web site.

The entire service is volunteer and free so you may want to limit the frequency of submitting jobs to the queue to allow resources to be available for others. The service is in beta stage at the present so there may be issues form time to time. Hats off to Johann Rochall and his volunteers for a great and idea and service with BrowserShots.org

One of my favorite sites for quality free images is pixelio.de. I have posted some of my data center and other photos there under the profile AVATAVA. The photos are of the US Wireless Louisville, Kentucky and the Columbus Ohio Data centers. The Louisville Data Center is no longer in existence and the Ohio data center is no longer part of US Wireless.

The web site is in German only- even if you don’t speak German you should still be able to figure out the photos. Over the next few weeks I will upload more photos to the site under the key word rechenzentrum. All the photos are free for commercial and private use (copyright retained) as long as they are not used in association with illegal or immoral activities.

Every one of us is at risk for extended power outages after storms, tornadoes, or hurricanes. In the event you do experience the power outage, how long your power outage will last will depend on the severity of the storm as well as where you are in relationship to the grid itself. When your local area is experiencing widespread power outages, there are certain steps that are taking to restore power beginning with facilities which provide critical services.

As a general rule power plants and power lines from the plants are going to be restored first. It should be obvious that without power to the main power lines power cannot be restored elsewhere.

The second groups which will have power restored are those which provide services such as hospitals, fire stations, and public safety such as police. Next after this group is grocery stores and gas stations as well as traffic control systems.

Next in the list are the major power lines that serve large amounts customers followed by smaller power lines that provide power to individual streets, and last among the groups to be restored are individual homes and businesses with out power.

So where does your home or business fit in relationship to the grid? If your business is located in a residential area, you can expect that your business will be a low priority for restoration. If however, your business is located directly next to your local hospital, it is very likely your business will be among the first to have power restored.

How do you begin to assess the risk? The first thing you should do is take a look at how power is fed to your building. If you have an above ground wiring you can simply follow the wiring with your eye up to your power pole. What kind of power pole do you have? Is it wood or steel? If the poll is wooden, you should take a look at it to see what its physical condition is, is it rotted or damaged? If the pole is made of steel, you should check it for rust and for proper fastening at the ground. Take a look around the wires on your pole, are there any tree limbs resting on the wiring? If so, you should inform your power company to have the trees trimmed back before they cause an issue.

It’s important to note, even if you are located directly next to a hospital, you can still have a situation where the last mile to your home or business is filled via one of these old wooden power poles-in which case power would be restored very quickly to the grid but should the line into your home be damaged you can still be without power for an extended period of time. Homes and businesses with power feeds which are underground are obviously going to be at the least risk for extended power outages.

Keep all these factors in mind when assessing your risk for extended power outages along with the need for your home or business to have power during these times. The size of generator system you purchase, the capacity for fuel storage, the type of fuel your system is powered by, along with such aspects of automatic power switching will all affect your choice of emergency power and UPS systems.

One way to assess risk of being without power is to simply take your annual revenues and divide it by the number of HRS in the year to come up with an average value per hour that you may be without power. For example should your business have annual revenues of $1.5 million, you can divide that by 8760-the number of hours in the year. This would give you a value for each hour you are without service of roughly $171 in revenue. Of course, this assumes your working 24 hours a day which you’re not-so the real figure of lost revenue would likely be much higher. It’s more likely a correct figure would be closer to three times your revenue divided by the number of hours in the year.

Given the above figures, one can estimate the average revenue to be in the neighborhood of $4000 for each 8 hour day so a five day power outage could cost you $20,000 in revenues. These rule of thumb figures should help you put your budgeting in perspective.

Other items to consider:

1. Take steps to minimize impact if suppliers upon which you depend for products or services are disrupted during weather related events.
2. Plan for alternate communication, transportation, and courier services.
3. Create a plan for your employees to follow in the event of sever weather, tornado, or hurricane.
4. Create a plan to restore your business operation after the storm has cleared
5. Take a look at your current insurance policies and assess the sufficiency of coverage.
6. Determine in advance methods for assessing and reporting storm damages.

Even if you are not located in an area likely to be affected by severe weather it is still possible for your business to be impacted by it. In our office we waited one year to get a new door. Why? The factory which made all the doors in our building is located in New Orleans; well, they were in New Orleans.