Systems Cowboy

This is pretty basic but essential for good SEO.

If you have a site and the http://systemscowboy.com and http://www.systemscowboy.com both show up as separate URL’s, you need to redirect one to the other so you don’t have two separate URL’s displaying the exact same content.

Here’s how to use your .htaccess file to redirect non-www URL’s to www:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

This will make it so somebody who types in http://systemscowboy.com will automatically be redirected to http://www.systemscowboy.com.

Get Maximum Savings with an eBay Coupon

The other day, a friend of mine told me about how easy it is to find an eBay coupon online that gives you a discount when you’re shopping for random stuff on the eBay website. I wish I’d known this a long time ago. I guess I’ve wasted a lot of money on that site that I could have been saving all this time – I really had no idea.

After he told me about it, I still didn’t really take him seriously until I got home and started Googling about it. Sure enough, eBay offers an eBay coupon periodically, and as long as you use them before they expire, they’ll save you real money on your eBay purchases. The ones I’ve found and used are not the kind of coupons we had when I was a kid – little paper things we cut out of a magazine… No, this type of eBay coupon is just a special link you have to find and then click on. Once you click through the special eBay coupon link, the discount is assigned to you and you can go ahead and complete your purchase with maximum savings. It’s really just as easy as that – the only thing to make sure of is that the coupon you are clicking through is current and up-to-date for each month of 2011.

eBay Coupon Codes 2011 & eBay Coupons

I’ve seen plenty of items that an eBay coupon or eBay’s Daily Deals will get you 90% off. Yeah, I know. That sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. That’s unusually high, and not the norm, but you will definitely see the discount go that high. It’s quite commonplace to see discounts on eBay Daily Deals in the 60% to 70% range, which I think is also extremely high. It’s a good idea to check in periodically and see what coupon codes are available. The items are often changing and if you’re like most people you’ll probably get excited about an insane deal on something you didn’t even realize you needed. Until you saw the eBay coupon for it.

The other thing I never realized about eBay is how much brand new merchandise is on the site.  I always think of eBay as just being a site to go to find weird, oddball collectibles like comic books, musical instruments, old nostalgic toys, antiques, bicycles, cars – that kind of stuff.  But it seems to have grown into a vast marketplace for new, unused items as well.  Thousands of merchants have set up shop there to sell their wares due to the huge amount of traffic that the site generates.  So, don’t forget, you’ll often find that an eBay coupon will work for these types of purchases as well.

Since it worked so well for me, I decided to put the eBay coupon up on my site for other people to find.  If you like it, please be sure to let me know.  They seem to change every month or so, so I’m going to try to keep it as up to date as possible.  It will have a date on the coupon graphic that you click to take advantage of the 2011 eBay coupon, so just be sure to take a look at that and make sure it’s been updated during your current month.

Another cool thing that I just discovered recently for buying weird stuff online after I learned about the Ebay coupon is this service that will allow you to get email updates if an item you are interested in gets posted on Craigslist.  For example, if you live in Cincinnati, Ohio and you are interested in buying a used Trek bicycle that costs somewhere in the $500-850 range, you can type that information into this website, and it will scan Craigslist around the clock for you and send you an email whenever somebody posts an item to Craiglist in your area that fits your parameters.  That way you can make absolutely sure that you won’t miss an item when it’s posted.  How many times have you discovered an item on Craiglist and contacted the seller only to find out that the item has already been sold?  That’s happened to me countless times.  They’re not even charging for this service – it’s free.  If only Craiglist offered something like the eBay coupon so we could get discounts on everything we buy through their website…

After I discovered that service, I thought it would be pretty cool if they offered this for eBay – so I Googled it and found out that sure enough, it already exists – and it’s offered by eBay themselves.  After you do a regular search on eBay you can choose “Save This Search” and then you’ll see a pop-up that gives you an option to get the search results emailed to you on a daily basis.  And then you’ve got your eBay coupon!

This is an annoying thing about Joomla 1.5 and I always change this tag.

The default setting for the generator tag in Joomla 1.5 is:

<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Management" />

I usually change this to:

<meta name="generator" content="The Name of My Site Here" />

Here’s how to do it…

FTP into your site and navigate to libraries/joomla/document/html/renderer and find the file called head.php.

On line 83, find this line of code:

$strHtml .= $tab.'<meta name="generator" content="'.$document->getGenerator().'" />'.$lnEnd;

and change it to:

$strHtml .= $tab.'<meta name="generator" content="The Name of Your Site Here" />'.$lnEnd;

That’ll do the trick.

Intuitive, huh?

Recently I moved a couple of Joomla sites over to new domains using 301 redirects. This has confused Google a bit, and both the new site and the old site are ranking for the targeted keywords.

I’ve already done the normal things required to make this type of move work properly: set up a proper 301 redirect for all pages and notify Google Webmaster Tools of the “change of address”, etc.

But thing thing I didn’t do right away was to add canonical meta tags to my pages.

The easiest way to add canonical meta tags to all the pages of your Joomla site is to use the Auto Canonical URL plugin. It’s free. Just install it and enable it on a module that is displayed on your site (it won’t “display”, but it will work).

Auto Canonical URL plugin for Joomla.

There was a good article in the New York Times this week about J.C. Penney gaming the Google search engine results with paid links here.

SEO people have known for ages that this type of thing works. Google has penalized the J.C. Penney site because of this high profile article (and the site has thus plummeted in the Google rankings, just as they did to the terrible eyeglass shop DecorMyEyes when their article hit the New York Times a little while ago here…