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Article I found about PixelSilk in my Blog rounds. It does look pretty slick and user-friendly. I'll be very interested to see how easy it is to work with from a development perspective, how it's coded, etc. This article is interesting and insightful because the person is unfamiliar with CMS/coding in general, but knows SEO, and finds it very easy to use and likes the SEO features.

Domain Moving Day the Key Relevance Way by Mike Churchill So, you're gonna change hosting providers. In many cases, moving the content of the site is as easy as zipping up the content and unzipping it on the new server. There is another aspect of moving the domain that many people over look: DNS. The Domain Name System (DNS) is the translation service that converts your domain name (e.g. keyrelevance.com) to the corresponding IP address. When you move hosting companies, it's like changing houses, if you don't set up the Change of Address information correctly, you might have some visitors going to the old address for a while. Proper handling of the changes to DNS records makes this transition time as short as possible. Let's assume that you are changing hosting, and the new hosting company is going to start handling the Authoritative DNS for the domain. The first step is to configure the new hosting company as the authority. This should best be done a couple or more days before the site moves to the new location. What does "Authoritative DNS" mean? There are a double-handful of servers (known as the Root DNS servers) whose purpose is to keep track of who is keeping track of the IP addresses for a domain. Rather than them handling EVERY DNS request, they only keep track of who is the authoritative publisher of the DNS information for each domain. In other words, they don't know your address, but they tell you who does know it. If we tell the Root level DNS servers that the authority is changing, this information may take up to 48 hours to propagate throughout the internet. By changing the authority without changing the IP addresses, then while visiting browsers are making requests during this transition, both the old authority and the new authority will agree on the address (so no traffic gets forwarded before you move). Shortening the Transition The authoritative DNS servers want to minimize their load, so every time they send out an answer to a

This Blog Google Blogs Web Blog News This Blog Google Blogs Web Blog News Make your 404 pages more useful Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 10:13 AM Your visitors may stumble into a 404 "Not found" page on your website for a variety of reasons: * A mistyped URL, or a copy-and-paste mistake * Broken or truncated links on web pages or in an email message * Moved or deleted content Confronted by a 404 page, they may then attempt to manually correct the URL, click the back button, or even navigate away from your site. As hinted in an earlier post for "404 week at Webmaster Central", there are various ways to help your visitors get out of the dead-end situation. In our quest to make 404 pages more useful, we've just added a section in Webmaster Tools called "Enhance 404 pages". If you've created a custom 404 page this allows you to embed a widget in your 404 page that helps your visitors find what they're looking for by providing suggestions based on the incorrect URL. Example: Jamie receives the link www.example.com/activities/adventurecruise.html in an email message. Because of formatting due to a bad email client, the URL is truncated to www.example.com/activities/adventur. As a result it returns a 404 page. With the 404 widget added, however, she could instead see the following: In addition to attempting to correct the URL, the 404 widget also suggests the following, if available: * a link to the parent subdirectory * a sitemap webpage * site search query suggestions and search box How do you add the widget? Visit the "Enhance 404 pages" section in Webmaster Tools, which allows you to generate a JavaScript snippet. You can then copy and paste this into your custom 404 page's code. As always, don't forget to return a proper 404 code. Can you change the way it looks? Sure. We leave the HTML unstyled initially, but you can edit the CSS block that we've included. For more information, check out our gu

Great ideas on how to preserve link juice of expired content.