
Optimizing your very large site for search - epi0Bauqu
http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2009/01/19/optimizing-your-very-large-site-for-search-part-1.aspx
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thwarted
The "remove port numbers" suggestion is misleading. It should be "don't run
your web server on a port other than the default HTTP port", especially with
the suggestion to use redirects to canonicalize URLs. Most sites that run
their web server on a different port have a good reason for doing so (although
I think a subdomain would make more sense all around).

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andrewljohnson
What did he say?

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ratsbane
Hmmm. He recommended using canonical URLs without query strings, stemming your
URLs to avoid subdomains, using all lower-case in URLs, all of which seems
mildly reasonable and is consistent with our plans.

One site I work with gets 67,000 visits from Google search for every 1,000
visits from Live/MSN search, so perhaps I should pay more attention to what
he's saying. On the other hand, the Live/MSN search traffic is so small
perhaps it's not worth trying to optimize for.

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thwarted
If Google is able to find those pages and drive traffic to them and Live/MSN
isn't, it's _not_necessarily_ the site that needs to be optimized, it may be
that Live/MSN needs to stop ignoring content or stop considering things like
uppercase or query strings to be indicators of second- (or third-) class
content. Agreed though, it could just be that Live/MSN just doesn't have the
users/traffic, in which case, why are they telling _us_ how to optimize for
them?

