Unfortunate Outcome

I'm sure all freelancers have faced this in the past. I just happened to me. My SEO client decided that, once I started getting results, he would discontinue paying me, stop returning my calls and try changing all the FTP passwords.

So, if you're looking at the previous post to check out the mod_rewrite in actions, it's not there. I took it down as soon as the client ceased all communication.

If you find yourself answering a craigslist post for some SEO help and it's this guy from chicagotitleloans.com, think long and hard before taking the job.

GoDaddy .htaccess mod_rewrite is working!!!

Ok, so I know this is a little out of the blue but a recently acquired SEO client is using GoDaddy for their hosting. Their domain name is something to the effect of www.chicago(businesstype).com. I've only been optimizing the site for a couple of weeks and we're already doing well for keyword phrases using "chicago."

However, the client wants to attack markets in the surrounding suburbs so I needed to come up with a quick way to create "city pages" for each new market. I did this by using www.domain.com/cityPage.php?city=name. Easy enough...but i needed something friendlier for Google. Enter mod_rewrite for GoDaddy.

I searched around online until I found this combination which works for me.
Original URL: www.domain.com/cityPage.php?city=name (meh)
New URL: www.domain.com/name (wonderful!)

Here's the magic code!
Options FollowSymLinks
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/?$ /cityPage.php?city=$1 [L]

You can see this code working at the Chicago Title Loans site (www.chicagotitleloans.com)

Enjoy!

thx to the following sites for your help!
http://gidden.net/tom/2006/05/26/4/
http://surf11.com/entry/153/godaddy-hosting-mod-rewrite-with-htacces
http://www.btjones.com/2007/12/09/godaddy-mod_rewrite-problem-fix/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3380566.htm

Moving and stuff

Aside from the obvious redesign, I'm in the process of moving. As an update to the current status of the Wordpress SEO project... well, I've had a mixed bag of results. Some improvements here, some slippage there.

When I get done moving, I'll have more updates. Plus, I've started another SEO project!

Wordpress Sitemap now up and running

Ok, I finally got the sitemap up and running on the site. Turns out that comment rating system wasn't blowing up because of the plugins and sitemap. It was because of WP-Cache being set to 3600 because the hosting company hates us.

All is right in the world.