| LED Digest 2618: Spidering and Bandwidth |
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The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom http://www.AudetteMedia.com : the LED's Publisher Boutique Internet Marketing: SEO, SEM, Social Media http://www.SEOToolSet.com/training/ : the LED's Premier Sponsor Bruce Clay's Search Engine Optimization Training & Certification ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. April 3, 2008 Issue no. 2618 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Bandwidth and Spiders ==-- ~ Barb Radisavljevic "My site became one of the top ten referrer sites to tomfolio last month." --== Help A Reporter ==-- ~ Brad Waller "[This is] a cool free service to help match reporters with sources..." --== Interesting Ad Blocking Discovery ==-- ~ Ron Coble "...ad blockers look for the word 'banner' in the name of the image file..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Anti-Spam Company Spamming ==-- ~ Reg Charie "I recently found a very interesting site which uses the spammer's own system against them." --== Mailto Links with Web Email ==-- ~ Eddie Teo "For those running in ASP scripts and such, you may wish to consider this solution..." ~ Will Bontrager "I'll answer to the group, as others may have similar questions." ========= NEW ===================================== From: Barb Radisavljevic Subject: Spiders vs. real people and effect on bandwidth I have a web site with no shopping cart which I designed using FrontPage years ago before I knew anything. Meanwhile, I have become a charter member of tomfolio.com, an independent used bookseller's cooperative which has a great category search system and a shopping cart that works very well for my needs. Recently I started linking as many of my titles as possible to my listings on tomfolio to enable my customers to use the shopping cart to complete a purchase they might abandon if they had to contact me by email or phone. An interesting thing happened as an unintended consequence of this. My site became one of the top ten referrer sites to tomfolio last month. But there's a lot I don't understand about that. First, could this be partly a result of search engine robots following my links to tomfolio instead of real people clicking on the links? Second, during last the two months since I put the links up, I exceeded my allowed bandwidth for my site enough to get substantial over bandwidth charges. Most of the links I put up lead to a listing on tomfolio that has an image hosted on my site. I'm assuming there's a connection between the links being followed by a person to the listing on tomfolio ,and my increased bandwidth, as the site hosting the images. Is that reasonable? Those links are the only thing that's been different this past two months, and I've never exceeded my bandwidth before in ten years. But in my own statistics, I'm seeing My Space as a major referrer -- right after Google and Yahoo, and I'm wondering if hotlinking to my images is also part of the bandwidth problem. I know MySpace members have linked to my images in the past, but it's almost impossible to find which members of MySpace are linking to me, since the referrer is the main domain. I've only been able to trace one individual page. I'd like to stop the hotlinking, since I think it's also stealing some bandwidth. I'm also changing web site hosts to get more bandwidth for less money. I guess my questions are these: 1. When a search engine spider comes to my site, does it follow my links to other sites? 2. If so, does its visit to those other sites actually open the pages, thus triggering opening the images on my listings and using bandwidth from my hosting site? 3. When someone is a referring domain to another site, does that mean some real person has come from that domain to the other site from a link -- not just a spider? 3. Would these links from my site help tomfolio's ranking with Google and other search engines? I have several good links from other sites to my site that I've never sought -- links from teacher colleges and universities and other organizations, and my traffic is good for a site like mine. But I'm hoping my links to my products on the tomfolio site are helping, not hurting it, since the product I'm linking from and the product I'm linking to are the same. My site is certainly not a mirror of the tomfolio site, since I'm one bookseller and tomfolio is over 200 booksellers. My site has a lot of content outside of my product listings, whereas the site I'm linking to is nothing but product listings and my dealer terms. I'm just wondering how search engines might evaluate this type of link. Thank you for any insight you could give on these matters. Barb Radisavljevic www.barbsbooks.com -The best books for children and education -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Brad Waller Subject: Help A Reporter A friend and PR professional, Peter Shankman, has started up a cool free service called HelpAReporter.com to help match reporters with sources for their stories. With the variety of members here, I figured that this group might have a lot of people who might want to get on the list. You get up to three emails a day with the press queries. You either respond directly to the reporter or Peter if the reporter is keeping their contact info private. Peter's doing this for the karmic value. He even tells you that if you want to send in a donation, send one to an animal hospital or rescue society. If you are a reporter, you can post queries here: http://www.helpareporter.com/press/ You will benefit because when you see a post asking for something where you are the expert, you might get into print, on video, or into a blog. http://www.HelpAReporter.com/ Brad Waller Manage and Sell your own site advertising http://adjungle.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: RonCoble Subject: Interesting Ad Blocking Discovery Just thought I would pass this along - it might be something others have already experienced but it is completely new for me. Last evening I surfed to our web site to look something up in order to reply to an emailed request. When the page had loaded I noticed our 5 small (125x125) banner ads in the navbar area of the page were missing. So after replying to the email I began looking around other pages within the site since several of the banner ads are paid advertisers and I certainly need to address this since it appeared to be site wide. Knowing that I had seen the ads appear OK just a few days ago I determined after looking at the standard coding on 2 or 3 pages that it was correct that it must have been something in my browser. I checked the pages with Firefox and they were not showing in it either. I then checked with Netscape and they showed up fine? I then did a couple of searches in Google on banner ads not showing up and determined from the results that it may have been caused by some automatic change within my McAfee anti-virus software that was blocking the ads. I had to dig deep within the McAfee program to find that it had indeed "somehow" had the "ad blocking" option checked off. But that is not the BIG discovery. The BIG discovery while looking for the problem was someone who had experienced the same problem and was told in a forum that some of the ad blockers looked for the word "banner" in the name of the image file and by changing the name it would allow the ads to show up. I wanted to check this theory out since if it happened to me, it probably happened to a lot of other folks who use McAfee (or Norton or other program with ad blocking capability). I did not look forward to having to change the code on 270 pages from the image term that included the word banner but unfortunately, my tests proved this to be correct. Before changing my personal McAfee settings I ran several tests where I uploaded a test page with the missing banners loaded on it - they did not show - I then went in and changed the image text with 'banner' in it to 'baner' and the ads showed up. I never gave this any thought when the web pages were being built over the last 7-8 years with these banner ads on them but now all of a sudden it is coming back to haunt me. I am going to have to change this on all 270 pages since this little McAfee apparent automatic action (I surely did not select it) may very well be affecting all other (or many) of the visitors to our site. Just thought I would pass it along and hopefully save someone else from having an advertiser get angry with them or lose them all together. Kindest regards, Ron Coble Coble International - International Marketing Services http://www.ImportExportHelp.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Reg Charie Subject: Anti-spam Getting back at the spammers by messing with their harvesting systems. Being online since '94 I collect my fair share of spam, mostly to spoofed or harvested address. While I have learned how to control the majority of it, the harvested addresses are the worst as the spam *could* be a legitimate message. As a site designer, I only use captcha protected forms now, no more publishing email addresses, even if cloaked. I recently found a very interesting site which uses the spammer's own system against them. You place a link on your site to http://officeofstrategicinfluence.com/spam/ and the page has a script that loads the harverster's bot with endless, useless email addresses. On their site they say: -------------- "Once a spammer hits this site, they enter an infinite loop of randomly created email addresses (starting with the ones it generates when it first comes to the site) Once a mailing list has been poisoned with a number of invalid e-mail addresses, the resources required to send a message to this list increases, even though the number of valid recipients has not. This forces the spammer to exhaust more resources to send e-mail, in theory costing the spammer money and time. A best-case scenario would cause the spammer to throw out the mailing lists completely." -------------- Reg Charie http://0grief.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Eddie Teo Subject: Mailto > I had not thought of this before, if you > find a solution for a Windows server (not > using PHP), I would be interested to hear > about it. - John Barendrecht, LED 2617 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/2032/190/ For those running in ASP scripts and such, you may wish to consider this solution which I found. It is free and seems to work pretty well for our web sites under Windows environment. Has been working pretty well for the past couple of months. Please do test it and give some feedback. Here's the URL: http://www.syronex.com/antispam/help/form-spam eddie teo www.online-technology.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Will Bontrager Subject: Mailto > But the problem is, if you click a mailto: > link, you get a nice error message... - John Smart, LED 2616 > As far as I remember, he [Will Bontrager] > fixed that and and you may be able to use > similar code on your website. - John Barendrecht, LED 2617 I'll answer to the group, as others may have similar questions. John, it was a work-around rather than a fix. When the flow-to.com email link is clicked, two things are supposed to happen. (1) A web page opens with information about the service such as maximum email size and (2) the email client opens with To address pre-filled and optionally subject and body content pre-filled. It took a bit of research to consistently have one link do both in every popular browser. In the end, it was a simple solution, as most things are once the complexity has been navigated. (The solution may be something LEDers using regular mailto: links can use. I'll address that in a moment.) In step (2), the link can not open an email program when none is there or the local system is not set up to recognize a default email program. And it can't open a web-based email page for the user without knowing where the email web site is and, probably, the login information. The work-around, then, is to publish the self-expiring, one-time-use email address on the web page that opens in step (1). Those with web- based email can copy that address and paste it into their own email composition form. Now, for LEDers with regular mailto: links and concerns about them not working for web-based email systems -- The mailto: link can be replaced with a regular link to another web page. That second web page publishes the email address those with web-based email can copy and paste. That second page also has a meta refresh tag, with mailto: link instead of http://... URL, to launch the email programs for site visitors who have them. If you'll click the email link above this post and then view source, you can see how the meta refresh tag is coded. That solution would open the web page with the meta refresh whenever the replaced link is clicked, whether or not the site visitor has a default email program. The URL to the meta refresh web page can also be published on forums and discussion emails and blog posts without publishing the actual email address. The email address would then be subject to harvesting only on the web page with the meta refresh tag, not on the forums, etc. Will Bontrager Copy 'n Paste Spam-Free Contact Form http://www.willmaster.com/software/commercial/webform/ (c) Copyright 1995-2008 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Live to the point of tears." - Albert Camus |
