Google "Page Rank" Hiccup

marker126 — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:57:00 GMT

I recently worked on a complete web site redesign project, converting the site from classic ASP to ASP.NET. Many of the page URLs were going to change (despite the fact I kept the .html extension), so I whipped together a "redirection system" in the form of an HTTPModule. The module simply checked that the file exists (or will be handled), and if not, queries a database to determine if the requested page has a "new" location. It then sends a "301 Moved Permanently" response with the new URL (and logged the referrer so they can be notified of the new location, etc). This system was meant for internal redirects only. Of course, someone put an entry into the database redirecting an old page to an external page.

I then noticed the site has the #1 page rank on Google for keywords "acrobat reader setup," and the site redesigned is a university medical library.

There used to be a page named "acrobat.html" that gave basic instructions on the installation of Adobe Acrobat. During the redesign, we decided there was no need for this page to exist anymore, and someone put in a redirect to Adobe's installation page (www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html).

The Google query: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=acrobat+reader+setup

Google's cached page: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=clnk&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2F64.233.169.104%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dcache%3APdCI1Oj1oNUJ%3Awww.hshsl.umaryland.edu%2Facrobat.html

My page (redirected to Adobe): http://www.hshsl.umaryland.edu/acrobat.html

If anyone has any ideas on how this happened (it has been like this for over a month now), I'd love to hear them. I'm tempted to redirect a couple other pages to see if I can duplicate this.

Changing Links List In SharePoint 2007 To Open In New Browser Window

marker126 — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:29:00 GMT

I was recently looking for the easiest way to modify the links list in SharePoint 2007 to open the links in a new window. In my case, every link in a links list points to an external site, so they should all be opening a new browser window.

There were a couple custom features I found, but most required modifying (or replacing) the existing links lists, something that I did not want to do. Anyway, here's how to make the change (note: I modified the original files, this probably isn't a best practice, and the changes could be lost by updates from Microsoft).

First, open the schema file for the links list feature. In my case, it was located at:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\LinksList\Links\schema.xml

In this file there should be two instances of the following:

<Column Name="URL" HTMLEncode="TRUE" /><HTML><![CDATA[">]]></HTML>

Replace them both with this:

<Column Name="URL" HTMLEncode="TRUE" /><HTML><![CDATA[" target="_blank">]]></HTML>

Then restart IIS (or just the application's worker process), and now all the links in your links lists should open a new browser window!

A Piece of Glass

Google "Page Rank" Hiccup

Changing Links List In SharePoint 2007 To Open In New Browser Window