New project - Comments very welcome - www.RainbowsWillBeShat.com

[MrDude]

I'm very interested in what you think about it.
- How can I improve?

URL: rainbowswillbeshat.com

Thanks!

[Sujan]

Amazing look & fell. The collection of the products are are also incredible. I think there is a canonical issue. Please solve this. Please also improve the font style & color of "Rainbow will be shat" text, compare to your site this is unimpressive.

[MrDude]

Thanks
Unfamiliar with the term "canonical issue" I asked google and I think I understand what it's about now. However I don't see how it would have occurred, since different urls are routed very precisely to different content (I built it using Symfony). Unless maybe the pages with the only difference being the sorting of the items can trigger this?

About the "Rainbow will be shat" text. Thanks for pointing this out to me. Graphics really is my big weakness, but I'll be sure to look into this at some point. Probably gonna have someone do it for me.

[weegillis]

One canonical issue relates to your site accepting both www.example.com and example.com requests. This can result in your site being split in two in the indexes, with some SERPs referring www.example.com/mypage.html and others referring example.com/mypage.html.

For details on how to create a server directive to fix this, check this thread: Canonicalization Prevention Guide

[MrDude]

All right. Thanks for pointing it out. I'll look into it at some time, but it's probably not gonna be a priority xD
I doubt a lot of people will actaully type out the index.php part. And I definitely won't.

[weegillis]

How do you want your site indexed? In one relatively straight forward pile? Or in two, independent and disjointed piles? One ventures this is a priority question, and it has nothing to do with URI, but URL. That is where the canonical issue is, at present.

[MrDude]

Well, since the URL protocol is a subset of the URI protocols all URLs are URIs. In other words it cannot have something to do with only URL but not URI.
I don't see how distinguishing between the two is relevant though.
I've told google to use the non-www URLs (support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44231&topic=2371325&ctx=top ic). It'll probably take some time to update though. If the problem persists I can setup some redirects.

[weegillis]

Telling Google what to index still won't keep your site from responding to www requests. You need the server directive to rewrite the URL's. The thread shown has very good information in it, and bears little repeating here.

My distinction between URL and URI is that URI doesn't have the domain in the string, only the path to the resource from the server root. It's possible I misinterpret this, but it is for the moment what I mean by the above.

[williamc]

Enough people have said what I would have already, so just let me add: I LOVED a good many of the products displayed. Have not had that good a laugh in a while

[MrDude]

Enough people have said what I would have already, so just let me add: I LOVED a good many of the products displayed. Have not had that good a laugh in a while

Thanks man!

Telling Google what to index still won't keep your site from responding to www requests. You need the server directive to rewrite the URL's. The thread shown has very good information in it, and bears little repeating here.

My distinction between URL and URI is that URI doesn't have the domain in the string, only the path to the resource from the server root. It's possible I misinterpret this, but it is for the moment what I mean by the above.

All right. I may not yet have understood this correctly, but I'll try explaining why I believe it's fixed. But the problem with this canonical issue as I understand it now is (as you put it) that my site is being indexed in to piles so none of them get "maximum credit" from google (and other search engines). I have now set the preferred domain name at google which means that:

Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as www .example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as example.com, we follow that link as www .example.com instead. In addition, we'll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs.
- source: support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44231&topic=2371325&ctx=top %20ic

IMO the only problems remaining is that
- I may not get max credit from other search engines
- The unsolved issue that rainbowswillbeshat.com/some-page is actually the same as rainbowswillbeshat.com/app.php/some-page and rainbowswillbeshat.com/index.php/some-page. (This I should fix at some point.)