| LED Digest 2224: Good Bot... or Not? |
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When bots get aggressive... Also: placing meta tag keywords in an
include file and avoiding spam penalties. Plus a SES report and more...
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========== NEW ===================================The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................. August 14, 2006 Issue no. 2224 ............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Site-wide Keywords and Includes ==-- ~ Andy Johnson "Our web master wants to build an include file with our keywords in it..." --== Good Bot... or Not? ==-- ~ Cheryl Berry "Can someone tell me the difference between MSN and Hotmail crawls...? --== Search Engine Strategies ==-- ~ Mike Banks Valentine "All-in-all a great show and extremely valuable..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Proprietary CMS [was: Re-design...] ==-- ~ Marty R. Milette "During the past couple of years, I have had to 'rescue' several sites..." --== Usability Factors ==-- ~ Kathy Wilson "[This site is] sending the message that they really care about their website visitors..." <Moderator Comment> --== Font Sizing ==-- ~ Steven Birk "...if you have CSS controlling your font size, IE will NOT override this but Firefox will." ~ Michael Martinez "I suspect your CSS is incomplete." ~ Jim Sullivan "Can we code to force an initial font size that would then be re-sizable by the user?" --== Reciprocal Linking ==-- ~ Barb Radisavljevic "So I'm very picky about whom I will link to..." From: Andy Johnson Subject: New Topic - Keywords on Page Knowledgeable Persons, Our web master wants to build an include file with our keywords in it and then the same keywords will be on every page. Will this be considered spamming or have a negative impact on our search engine rankings or listings? Our site is crawled frequently by many spiders including Google. Thank you all for your response. Regards, Andy Johnson Greenleaf Software, Inc. -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Cheryl Berry Subject: Good Bot or NOT? About a year ago, the MSN bot became pretty aggressive on our site, sometimes visiting multiple times a day, every day. We still see this activity from IPs 65.54.188.XX. More recently we're experiencing similar automated activity from Hotmail - IPs 64.4.8.XX. Can someone tell me the difference between MSN and Hotmail crawls and is Hotmail a good bot or not? Cheryl Berry cheryl, bookkeepinghelp.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Mike Banks Valentine Subject: SES coverage from LEDer > I know of several LEDers who are attending SES. Hey, fill > us in! I know there are multitudes of updates at different > sites online, but none from LEDers (at least that I've found...) - Moderator Comment, LED 2222 Glad to oblige Adam! I covered the show for WebProNews and you can find it all at their site if you like, along with lots of team coverage. But if you want the direct LEDer perpective, I put it all on my blog, including photos from the Google Dance, and a couple of shots of SearchEngineWatch editor Danny Sullivan interviewing Google CEO Eric Schmidt along with coverage of that discussion. http://realityseo.com I have four stories up on the 2006 show as of this email, may have another on the excellent LinkBaiting session by the time you run this post, plus the photos. - Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Privacy, Outhouses & Proprietary Algorithms - Google, Yahoo & MSN Research Laboratories: What Makes it from Idea to Product? - Can you Please Them All? Universal Search Engine Ranking Algorithms - Leveraging Social Media, YouTube, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg & Blog Tagging I've got a couple of stories still left to complete now that I'm back home and can gather my notes. If anyone wants to see those other stories, I'll add them to the blog after I get caught up on email and client phone calls. This was one of the best shows I've attended. I covered the first SES show in August of 2001 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and looking back at it is very instructive of the pace of change in the search industry. Paid Inclusion was the big story that year as the engines looked for ways to monetize search. http://website101.com/arch/archive105.html GoTo.com was the PPC king then, (soon to become Overture before Yahoo bought them) AllTheWeb and Inktomi were offering paid inclusion (before Yahoo bought them both), not to be left behind, AltaVista was also doing paid inclusion (Until Yahoo bought them). Now Yahoo is the only major engine still doing paid inclusion (can't throw away that investment, I guess). Yahoo was charging only $199 for DIRECTORY submission (Now $299). There was an excellent session on local search marketing that I'll be doing another story on within a week or so - also to be put up on my blog when done. All-in-all a great show and extremely valuable to attendees. I hope the coverage is useful to those who couldn't attend this year. Adam, I'm glad you are interested in the LEDer perspective on SES and that I had the privilege of attending and reporting on it this year. Mike Banks Valentine http://seoptimism.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Marty R. Milette Subject: Content Management Systems [was: Re-design...] Anyone thinking about selecting a CMS (Content Management System) should be extremely careful to NOT get locked into a closed, 'proprietary' solution offered by a hosting company or service provider! During the past couple of years, I have had to 'rescue' several sites hosted on these types of CMS and the work has NOT been fun or easy. Some scenarios: a) where the site is still up and running, but you want to move it to new hosting; b) when the site is dead -- either because the company folded or shut it down deliberately. In the first case, you have two options: 1. Screen-scrape the site (copy and paste or import) into another program like FrontPage -- one screen at a time. 2. If you have an 'open' CMS, try to get a copy of the database and move it to another identical CMS hosted elsewhere. In the case of a closed or 'proprietary' CMS or an open-source one that has been butchered (aka 'improved' or 'customized') you can forget about the second option -- even if you could get the data, it would be virtually useless. In case b) where the site is dead and/or you can't get the data at all -- you're toast. Plan to rebuild the entire site from scratch. Keep in mind that screen-scraping the site isn't all fun and games either. Sometimes the CMS will generate horrific page names like: 4BDE-FEAD-2341-FFEA-4323-FFEE.htm and image names like D123-ABCA-2341-AAAA-1AFE-AFFD.jpg and you'll have to review every one of them individually and change them to meaningful (search-engine-friendly) ones. Also, all themes, styles, borders and such will have to be recreated. Like I said -- NOT FUN and very time-consuming at 30 minutes or sometimes longer per page. With open-source CMS you at least stand a chance of changing hosting if / when needed -- as long as you can get access to the raw data and either know how to move it, or have someone who can do it for you. You can also have additional modules, features and functions developed very cheaply off-shore through places like rentacoder.com or, for the most popular open-source CMS systems, there are also hundreds of modules (including many different shopping carts) available off-the-shelf for very reasonable prices. I'm not saying that all proprietary CMS systems are evil -- I even had my own .NET system built to generate huge (30,000+ page) sites like ambh.com from vendor-provided databases. However, this is a fairly special-purpose system where I own the source code and have a developer on-line any time I need additional features or functionality, but this is not generally the case for most people. Marty R. Milette -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Kathy Wilson Subject: Usability While visiting this website - www.learninglight.net - I noticed a nifty little onboard tool they have for easily changing the size of the fonts to a larger size. Just scroll down a bit and you'll find it on the left side of the webpage, right under the navigation links. With this tool these people are sending the message that they really care about their website visitors, which leads me to also believe that they have a very high level of customer care. And isn't that a goodly part of what usability is all about? Love, Kathy Wilson http://www.under-one-roof.net Life Purpose Coaching ~ Spiritual Teaching ~ Vibrational Healing <Moderator Comment> The new LED site has this function, too. Check it out in the upper right of the page -- for instance here: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/735/54/ (a link to Stephen Mareches's post on Usability from issue 2221). Hope you find it useful! I use it all the time, I'm usually increasing font size by the evening since my eyes start to tire out... -Adam -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Steve Birk Subject: Font sizing > I have actually viewed my site on several computers > -- 3 macs and 2 PCs -- and am able to re-size the > font as desired. - Mary Lee, LED 2223 Mary Lee, I don't think it's a matter of what type of computer you use to view your site, but what browser you are using. I viewed your site on a PC using IE 6.0 and could NOT re-size your fonts. I viewed your site using Firefox 1.5.0.6 and was able to re-size your fonts. Looks like if you have CSS controlling your font size, IE will NOT override this but Firefox will. Don't know about any of the other browser that may be out there. > If you had looked at my site you would know > that CSS is not taking that away. I don't know how you would know if Tom looked at your site or not, but if he said he cannot re-size your font then maybe he is using a browser that will not over-ride the font size. If you are using the IE browser and you are able to resize your fonts on your site as stated, then maybe there is a setting that can be changed to allow this in IE (I cannot find one)... Regards, Steven Birk, FF/EMT http://publicsafetyhub.com/FreeCard Emergency Contact Card - Don't Leave Home without It! -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Font sizing Re: Mary Lee and Font Sizing Using Internet Explorer, I can go to the site in your signature and reset my font size. Nothing happens. LARGEST, SMALLEST both look the same. I had complained to SEOMoz about some of their action links not working for me. Matt, the tech guy, was unable to reproduce the problem, but when I described it in a comment to one of their posts, someone else suggested a missing piece of CSS code that, when Matt put the code in place, enabled me to click on the links. I suspect your CSS is incomplete. This probably reflects a deficiency in Internet Explorer, which is a pretty old piece of software. Microsoft is due to release a new version soon. I don't know enough about CSS to suggest what you can do on your site to help the older browsers adjust their font sizes. Michael Martinez "Cuando Maria canta, canta para mi" http://www.michael-martinez.com/ http://michael-martinez.blogspot.com/ -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Jim Sullivan Subject: Font sizing Mary, on my XP box with IE 6 I cannot re-size fonts. In Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9 on XP and in OS X with Safari I can re-size them. A new question: Can we code to force an initial font size that would then be re-sizable by the user? I work with a shop that installs and upgrades to XP (with IE 6, of course) daily. Upgrades from Windows 98 result in a carryover of the default font size in IE 6 set to Medium. Most (but not all) of the new installations of XP give a default font size in IE of Smaller. Let's hope Microsoft fixes that in IE 7. I agree that most users open a browser and take what they get. I'm sure there are a lot of folks wondering why the font is so small. Jim Sullivan -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Barb Radisavljevic Subject: Linking > Never threaten to remove links at some deadline. > How obnoxious is that? Site owners have more to > do than update their link directory on your schedule. - Dirk Johnson, LED 2220 I am so busy selling and listing books most days that I have little time to devote to link exchanges. When I get requests, I sometimes check out the site, and if it looks like a possible match, I put it in an email file of link requests and go back and look at them when I have time. Most of the "threats" to remove me if I don't reciprocate by a certain deadline just cause me to not bother putting those requests in my link request file because I knew I probably won't have time to follow up and place a link by a deadline. It's obvious that most of these requests are coming from programs that have not really taken the time to see if the link would be a good match. I am in a very competitive business. So I'm not likely to link to a competitor or anyone -- no matter how good their site or how well I know and like them -- who links to or is an affiliate of a main competitor such as Amazon.com. I do sometimes link to those who have complementary products or services I cannot or do not want to offer myself. Sometimes I just see sites I like that I think will interest my site visitors and I link to them. I often don't even ask for a reciprocal link, even though I know I should. I used to when I started. But now I'm not too keen about sending my customers away from my site to go somewhere else. I'd like to keep those visitors on my site. So I'm very picky about whom I will link to, and if someone is worth linking to, I don't demand they reciprocate or I will remove them. Sometimes I let them know I have placed their link on my site, and sometimes they do reciprocate. But that is up to them. I usually don't have time to check up on links to me anyway. Which is why the people who give me deadlines for linking turn me off so much. Barb Radisavljevic http://www.barbsbooks.com -The best books for children and education http://www.barbsteachinghelp.com -Our site with electronic commerce
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