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It's an old question that had the SEO community split* for a long time, however at a recent live questions and answer chat with Google's Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye didn't seem to agree either.

Ohye: Having a site for a long period of time can establish credibility with users, and as a search engine we also want to reflect this type of credibility.

Matt Cutts: In the majority of cases, it actually doesn't matter--we want to return the best information, not just the oldest information.

Ok, I am taking the quotes a little out of context and its to make a point about what they were really saying. They did not really have different opinions as webpronews would like us to believe: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/11/10/google-answers-some-tricky-questions#comments would suggest

Most think this relates back to the problems in 2006 where many old and established domains abruptly dropped down the rankings giving rise to claims Google had taken the age of the domain out of the algorithm trying to stop mature domain selling. In 2008 it was then assumed to be back as old domains started to performing much better again. Was it due to age? I think not.

My conclusion of this is that Google is trying to get a balance using content, backlinks and traffic to determine a website's authority which can be linked in some respect to domain age. A domain must be around for a while to achieve most of the objectives above, right? Typical A affects B where it was C all along.

Where can we find one?

Over the last few weeks CFconversations has some very informative podcasts on frameworks. Personally I am not the biggest fan of frameworks, however I am forced to work with some of the more poplar ones. I can see where they come in to place and on projects involving teams they do have an advantage, but for me most of the time on small projects they are a hindrance and add an unnecessary complextiy to my life. I find that by following my own methodology I can get smaller projects done quickly without having to send the junior developers on a crash courses in using Fusebox or Model Glue. I am aware it would be harder for someone to just pick up my code, but am not in a situation where that happens much and I think most small developers like me are in the same boat (all in house)

However the podcast roundtables had me thinking more about all the CF frameworks and the ones I have not tried and some none intrusive frameworks I had never heard of such as onTap and SOS.

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The galleries created in Sava do not produce any alt text on the images. I dont see anywhere in Sava where you can insert alt text for the images so you will need to edit the /default/includes/display_objects/gallery/index.cfm file and add them.

You can add an empty alt attributes to the IMG elements there however that would means the page will still not validate so the best option is to add the image summery and strip out the HTML. This works ok if you dont have a long summery for the image.

This is something that will need to be address in Sava as with the latest accessibility laws alt text has never been some important.

Before I begin....

I am really starting to enjoy Sava CMS the guys/girls are a credit to the CF community. The helpfulness on their forum is also very commendable, there were cases where I asked a question or made simple feature requests and they updated the version of Sava with fixes or the features within hours of the request.

I have decided to start making some little write ups and contribute in anyway I can. I don't fully know the system yet or make claims to be any CF guru as i am just starting out, however I like to learn so don't shoot me down straight away.

There also maybe other ways in Sava that I have not yet investigated do so some of the things I suggest here or in anyother post I make. The main problems I have found are with SEO in Sava, however I will post bits on that as I play.

Content Ratings Portal Inheritance

The first thing I wanted to write about was a simple fix on an issue I had setting up a portal and adding the content rating to it.

In Sava to stop the repetitive task of manually adding objects like the 'content rating' to every new page created under a portal you can you setup a portal with Inheritance Rules such as 'Start New Cascade', this means that anything added under that particular portal will inherit the display object(s) by default of the Portal its under.

However the portal page itself also has the display object on it when you do this. Its only the content I wanted to be rated not the actual portal page so this needed removing.

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PageRank (PR) is Google's way to measure the importance of a page. This system for weighting importance helps Google search engines to identify sites which clearly show relevance to its contents.

Page rank is measured on a scale of one to ten; ten being the highest a site can be awarded (although only a hand full of sites have a ten).

To obtain PR your sites have to have casting votes, worked out on this simple formula, (simple, well not for me)

Quoting from the original Google paper, PageRank is defined like this: We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations).

The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

The Robots Exclusion Standard or better know as robot.txt is a way to instruct search engine spiders that certain URLs on a site are off limits to them.

Sometimes it is necessary to make URLs off-limits to spiders. A webmaster may not want certain URLs indexed by a search engine; these could include URLs where sensitive information is stored like a backend admin.

Robots.txt is a standard .txt file that must named 'robot', and should always be uploaded to the root domain of a site.

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Some more ramblings don't pick on me..... much, its late and I have a bit of time on my hands and its cheaper than a therapist.

Method 1: mod-rewrite/path_info

Commonly called the friendly URL technique. Using friendly URLs all the URLs are replaced by more simple, static looking URLs.

For example a dynamic query may look like this www.domain.com/?proId=1, but with friendly URLs the same is achieved like this www.domain.com/proID/1.html.

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Having now had some time to play around with Sava CMS, and even used it in the development of a couple of recent websites, I want to say a big thank you to the Sava Team.... finally a FREE Open Source CMS written in CF that I found very simple to use yet flexible enough to add complex functions (Farcry CMS not for me, sorry.)

First, very happy with the level of freedom to make complex changes without technical knowledge, and as a developer I found it straightforward to implement my own functionality as I needed.

The frontend design was simple, all the hard work had already been done. Our designer just picked the layout, edited the CSS, and the end result was one great looking site in half the normal time.

I want to start off my Sava section by writing about problems as I come across them (I have to start somewhere), so for this first post lets talk about adding static links...

There were a few times in Sava I needed to manually add a static link in the template to a page that had been created in Sava. Now I know there are a number of way I could have achieved this, but sometimes you just want to add a link, right?

However the above code assumes my other Sava users will not change the name of the page in the Administrator for the account page. So what I needed was a link to the page using something that cannot not change, how about the page ID (linkServId)?

This fixed the problem of the user changing the page name, but the user could still delete the page! The only way I found to stop them doing that was to restrict the other users from deleting the page in Sava using permissions. Simple

Drawbacks: It's not very search engine or user friendly to have something that looks like a session ID in the URL. So I only used this method to link pages that I did not want to be indexed.

I have not found a better way other than writing a query to output the links directly, but in this case I just wanted to manually add a link.

I am often asked as a professional, how I manage my AdWords campaigns. The answer I guess is - experience, now this is not too helpful when you are wrestling with your first AdWords account and failing to make it work profitably. Most of my clients first approached me because they had spent a packet and had no worthwhile return.

Therefore, I intend to make this AdWords thread a diary of the life and times of an AdWords manager. Subscribe and, over the coming months, you may pick up a few tips and tricks that will help you with your own AdWords campaigns. Post a comment if you want, Tell me about your AdWords management problems and I will try to help.

I recently won back an old account. She had wanted a local touch, (being London based) and had read about a London Internet Marketing 'Guru' "Don't you just hate that word"? The 'Guru' had optimised her PPC campaign for greatest number of visitors at the lowest cost per visitor. The client is a Private Doctor so Conversion tracking is virtually impossible. However, when the client returned to me, a primary reason was that the number of patient consultation booked had not increased.

Looking closely at the miss-managed campaign revealed a number of possible reasons:

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I am a huge fan of Dreamweaver it's been my main editor of choice for over 5 years. It helps me to conveniently manage all my projects and websites in one place, a feature sadly lacking in Eclipse. I got a change to try out the Beta release of Adobes Dreamweaver CS4, the second release of Dreamweaver since Adobe absorbed it 3 years ago. I have been using the Dreamweaver CS4 Beta now for just over a month, with the final release looming I wanted to review my experiences so far.

The first thing I noticed was how quick Dreamweaver CS4 loaded in comparison to Dreamweaver CS3, however my old version has well over 100 site definitions and many extensions which the fresh copy did not, so it's not an exact evaluation of its performance.

The most obvious change to Dreamweaver CS4s is the new user interface. The new interface now looks like rest of Adobe's Creative Suite, and is much more intuitive to use than before, you can customise it for yourself or pick from a list of predefined workspaces such as coder, designer, coder plus, app developer and so on. It's seems highly flexible in creating a working environment which best matches your own needs.

Dreamweaver appeal has always been because its designed for both the beginner and advanced user, while the designers can use the new integration features such as Smart Objects, coders like myself have always needed something closer to what Eclipse has. Well its now seems like DW has caught up for web languages anyway. The new related files bar, which appears between the document toolbar and the document itself, lists all CSS, JavaScript and server side files linked to the page, you can split the page using live view and watch changes as you make them, very cool. Setup correctly with my ColdFusion server I found the live view very helpful.

I will post more reviews as I play more

Dreamweaver CS4 Requirements

• 1GHz or faster processor
• Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 (Service Pack 3 recommended) or Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (certified for 32-bit Windows XP and Windows Vista)
• 512MB of RAM
• 1GB of available hard-disk space for installation
• 1,280x800 display with 16-bit video card