Need help with base href and navigation

[cgmsys]

There has been a lot of discussion on one of the big webmaster boards
about adding the base href tag to all of your pages. This is to prevent
some types of hijacking and also to solve some situations where google
has canonical issues with your site.

I'm using FP 2003.

I added the base href tag as http://www.mysite.com and
http://www.mysite.com/ via the page properties dialog. That works ok.

However, I have a number of sites with a total of several thousand
pages. I intended to use the find and replace feature to insert the
tag. i.e. change all of the head to head base href="www.mydomain.com"
(I left off the<> for this post).

When I do that I found that all of the FP navigation was broken. The
nav bars said "add this page to your navigation".

I played around a bit more and found that you can add the base href
only through the page properties dialog. Any attempt to add that tag
manually or even move it somewhere will break the navigation bars.
Tools, recalc web does not work either.

Is there any way around this so I can do a sitewide add of the base
href tag without visiting the page properties of each individual page?

thanks

chris

 

[Murray]

I'm not sure I see any real benefit to adding the <base> tag, and I see some
disadvantages. It makes local previews troublesome....

 

[cgmsys]

I agree, I would prefer not to mess with things like base href or
htaccess. However I have a couple of sites that are inexplicably lower
in the search results than they should be. Both of them seem to be
targeted somewhat by scrapers. The discussion at
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3184965.htm (2nd message down)
seems to indicate that the base href tag would help.

I don't fully understand the mechanics of how pages are hijacked but it
appears that the hijacking site does a 301 or 302 redirect to your
content. Google thinks that the hijacker is the origninal content and
your site starts to disappear. I believe that the base href prevents
this somewhat when it is on your pages by giving google a better idea
of which site really owns the content.

Right now it seems that the base href tag might help but would be
unwieldy to implement if you can't add it with a search and replace
into the html. Apparently the page properties tag does something
special when it inserts the base tag.

chris

 

[Murray]

I don't fully understand the mechanics of how pages are hijacked but it

appears that the hijacking site does a 301 or 302 redirect to your
content. Google thinks that the hijacker is the origninal content and
your site starts to disappear. I believe that the base href prevents
this somewhat when it is on your pages by giving google a better idea
of which site really owns the content.

This sounds very wrong. It's your domain, and there would be no opportunity
to do a 301 on it for someone who doesn't have access to the Control panel
or FTP login.