March 07, 2008

Quinnipiac University Doesn’t Have A SEO Friendly Website

Posted at: 11:45 pm by Timothy Haroutunian
Categories: Tech and Web

One of the the biggest ways to be recognized on the web is through search engines like Google. Search engines like words that they can use to better increase search reliability. A big factor in that search is the url that it grabs.

‘Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.’

I am going to use my alma mater as an example. Let’s say I was looking for the hours of the Lamson Library at Plymouth State University (PSU). What would make more sense as a url for those hours.

Quinnipiac University’s Library Hours - http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x956.xml or
Plymouth State University’s Library Hours - http://library.plymouth.edu/hours

Obviously PSU’s Library hours are more recognizable when you are looking in your browser history would you rather remember a number or a phrase that correlates to what you were looking for.

Let’s try athletics and Men’s Basketball

Quinnipiac University’s Men’s Basketball - http://www.quinnipiacbobcats.com/SportSelect.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=17500&KEY=&SPID=10471&SPSID=87999 or
Plymouth State University’s Men’s Basketball - http://www.plymouth.edu/athletic/winter/mbb

I mean PSU’s url is not what I would say the most SEO friendly, but it is a lot better than Quinnipiac’s. They don’t even have it under Quinnipiac’s domain which is a big lose your site ranking. The only thing I would change about PSU’s is the ending: http://www.plymouth.edu/athletic/winter/men/basketball.

If it was Quinnipiac’s plan all along to make their site not be SEO friendly, good for them, they did it. However all they would have to do is throw some apache rewrites into their configuration file and they could make their site much more search friendly.

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    3 Responses to “Quinnipiac University Doesn’t Have A SEO Friendly Website”

    1. pingback pingback:
      Posted: Mar 8th, 2008 at 6:50 am
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      Buy Domain » Blog Archive » Quinnipiac University Doesn’t Have A SEO Friendly Website

      [...] Original post by Armenian Eagle [...]
    2. AvatarAlex
      Posted: Mar 8th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
      2

      Agreed. It’s not just SEO unfriendly, the mangled URLs are user unfriendly. Worse yet, when content changes, it’s easy to end up on the wrong page by the same identifier. The main site is pretty, but could certainly be improved in a number of ways.

      It’s not, however, as easy as mod_rewrite. First, that would require that the servers were running Apache ;). Second, I’m not sure what they are using for their CMS, but it would have to allow for more descriptive URLs.
    3. AvatarTimothy Haroutunian
      Posted: Mar 8th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
      3
      Author Comment

      good point about assuming that it was hosted on Apache, it turns out it runs off of IIS 6.0 which means ASP.net since that’s the framework it is using. However, there must be some way in IIS to replicate apache rewrites or else that is extremely dumb of them.
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