For just $35, you can have your site permanently inked into Mr. Vaillancourt’s skin, as well as linked to from his fast-growing list of sponsors on his personal site, back2thelight.com. Major sponsors (the ones that get the large tattoos in the prime real estate seen above) have to shell out $500.

According to his site, more than half the money he raises for the project will go towards charitable organizations to help in places like Haiti and Somalia.

Those who know me will agree that I’m a spontaneous guy, a man of real conviction and passion who’s not afraid of getting involved in unconventional projects. I want to break a world record and become the man with “the most Websites tattooed on his body.” But more importantly, I want to help others. That’s why I’m going to donate more than half the money raised through the project for Haïti.

Vaillancourt already has over 15,000 URLs tattooed all over his body, and he claims that over 16,000 more have already reserved a spot. Apparently, the first 50,000 URLs will be inked traditionally, as black text. The second half will be tattooed in fluorescent ink so that he can be “very noticeable in nightclubs.”

Each 100 URLs take about an hour to tattoo, so the entire 100,000 will end up costing Vaillancourt between 10,000 and 12,000 hours of his life. The entire project will hopefully generate a total of around $3.5 million.

While “over half” the money will go to charity, the rest will go to paying old debts and helping him raise his son, he says. With almost 150,000 likes on his Facebook page, it looks like Vaillancourt is generating enough publicity to make his goal a reality.

This would be something like http://www.facebook.com/chriscrum. MySpace and Twitter both offer this kind of URL, but most users have no such luck with Facebook. More people are starting to get them now though, like Kevin Rose of Digg and Ashton Kutcher of The Butterfly Effect.

It’s unclear if this will become a feature more widely available to general users, but the business potential for Facebook would certainly be helped if it did. "There is not only a loss of branding or individuality with the Facebook random number generator URL string, but it sucks for SEO purposes," says Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal. "Furthermore, when looking past personal profiles and into Facebook fan pages (which are now set up similarly to profiles), the end result is worse."

"Brands are stuck with profiles which have the name of the brands in the URL strong, but no differentiation from the official brand page and fan pages set up by Facebook users," he explains. "There is no differentiation in the URL string what-so-ever to give the real brand page more value in search results or at first glance."

Even without vanity URLs, there are plenty of ways to get value out of Facebook from the business perspective. If the social network made these widely available, perhaps better Google rankings could be added to the list.

What is the difference between an absolute URL and a relative URL? For newbies out there, a relative URL points to links on a server in a local manner like this – a href="contact.html" – where you just point to the page link like you are right there working on the server.

An absolute URL includes the actual domain name – a href="http://www.sampledomain/contact.html" – as though it is being pointed to from elsewhere.

The problem that can occur is most pronounced with e-commerce sites that have some pages that begin with https: rather than http: because the https pages are secure. All of the links within the secure pages must be absolute or what can happen is this. Let’s say you click on a link to a secure, https: page but decide you want to go back to where you were. If the link on the https: page that goes back to where you were is a relative URL (doesn’t include the domain information in the link) you’ll wind up on what appears to be the same page you came from, but if you look at the URL, it will now be an https: URL.

So, what’s the problem? The problem is that Google and the other search engines can see that single page as two identical pages – one https: and the other http: – and consider them duplicate content. Worse, if the spiders have access to that https: page through even a single misplaced link, they can follow those relative links, potentially indexing a duplicate https: version of your entire web site.

Here’s an example. Take a look at the following Google search for "https" that I ran:

Notice that the URL for SourceForge.net that came up in this search is an https URL – https://sourceforge.net?

A search in Google for "sourceforge" brings up their site without the https:

As I write this article, they’ve got two URLs showing up as identical pages with identical content. In fact, if you click around on the https version, it appears the entire site has been spidered as https, too. That means that in the eyes of most search engines, they’ve got two identical web sites indexed.

Most of us don’t want that to happen.

If the spiders follow the relative links on a secure (https) page, you’re off to do damage control.

My client has had this problem more than once. All it takes is one secure page created with relative links on it to go live.

Absolute links are the best solution to the problem. Make sure that each and every link on your secure (https) pages is absolute. That way once a visitor goes into secure pages, when they leave they are directed out of the secure area and onto non-secure pages.

Naturally, you should block the secure areas of your site from the spiders through robots.txt. Adding no index, no follow meta tags to your secure pages would be added insurance that those pages won’t get indexed or followed.

What about the multiple development servers I mentioned? Using absolute URLs could become a nightmare with those.

One possible solution is the base href tag. The development team could add the following to their standard meta tags:

The code above would be for their live server. If they have a development server, instead of http://www.sampledomain.com as the base, it might be something like http://sampledomain.dev.
Now, as long as appropriate paths are included with all relative links, every page with this code included in the head section will consider http://sampledomain.com to be the "base" from which to point relative links (in the case of the live server).

One downside to using the base href tag is that your team will have to come up with linking conventions and stick to them. For instance, using the base tag above, you’ll have to make sure that your internal links to pages, files, images, stylesheets and so forth all start with a "/" and that the URLs specify the full path to the file.

So, using the base tag above, you’ll need your relative links to be like this:

a href="/contact.html"

If you add the "/" to the end of the domain in the base tag (http://www.sampledomain.com/), then you can link like this:

a href="contact.html"

Just take care while setting it up and run tests using something like Xenu LinkSleuth to check for problems. Of course, links to and from secure pages should still always be absolute.

In a nutshell, absolute links can keep your secure pages secure and your other pages, well, not secure. The base href tag can help you avoid broken links from relative URLs and, as you know, broken links are bad news for SEO.

Now, if I can just get the development team on board…

Comments