Tag: msn

SEO Experiment: Let Google Sort it Out

Posted on May 10, 2009 in Optimization by Jeff Starr

One way to prevent Google from crawling certain pages is to use <meta> elements in the <head> section of your web documents. For example, if I want to prevent Google from indexing and archiving a certain page, I would add the following code to the head of my document:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,noarchive" />

I’m no SEO guru, but it is my general understanding that it is possible to manipulate the flow of page rank throughout a site through strategic implementation of <meta> directives.

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CSS Implementations of the Rich and Famous

Posted on October 26, 2008 in Presentation by Jeff Starr

[ Robin Leach of 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous' ] A great way to improve your CSS skills is to check out the stylesheets used by other websites. Digging behind the scenes and exploring some applied CSS provides new ideas and insights about everything from specificity and formatting to hacks and shortcuts. Learning CSS by reading about ideal cases and theoretical applications is certainly important, but actually seeing how the language is applied in “real-world” scenarios provides first-hand knowledge and insight. While there are millions of standards-based, CSS-designed websites to explore, studying a few of the Web’s elite players and CSS experts helps to put things into perspective by providing context for subsequent CSS investigations. Prime candidates include industry leaders, standards buffs, CSS specialists, professional bloggers, and other successful establishments. In this article, we reveal the CSS implementations used by the following “rich and famous” websites:

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Unexplained Crawl Behavior Involving Tagged Query Strings

Posted on June 4, 2008 in Websites by Jeff Starr

I need your help! I am losing my mind trying to solve another baffling mystery. For the past three or four months, I have been recording many 404 Errors generated from msnbot, Yahoo-Slurp, and other spider crawls. These errors result from invalid requests for URLs containing query strings such as the following:

  • http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=spam
  • http://perishablepress.com/press/page/3/?tag=code
  • http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=email
  • http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=xhtml
  • http://perishablepress.com/press/page/4/?tag=notes
  • http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=flash
  • http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=links
  • http://perishablepress.com/press/page/3/?tag=theme
  • http://perishablepress.com/press/page/2/?tag=press

..plus hundreds and hundreds more 1. The URL pattern is always the same: a different page number followed by a query string containing one of the tags used here at Perishable Press, for example: “/?tag=something”. The problem is that there are no such links anywhere on the site. The site employs permalink format for all WordPress-generated links (e.g., post/page links, search queries, tag queries, etc.). In an effort to locate the source of these URLs, I have performed multiple, thorough searches through every aspect of my site (files, database, code, examples, etc.), and the results are always the same: nothing. UGH! What is the source of these misguided URLs? Hopefully, you will be able to help shed some light on this unexplained crawl behavior (please, I beg you!!).

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How to Verify the Four Major Search Engines

Posted on October 9, 2007 in Websites by Jeff Starr

Keeping track of your access and error logs is a critical component of any serious security strategy. Many times, you will see a recorded entry that looks legitimate, such that it may easily be dismissed as genuine Google fare, only to discover upon closer investigation a fraudulent agent. There are many such cloaked or disguised agents crawling around these days, mimicking various search engines to hide beneath the radar. Thus, it is a good idea to implement a procedure for scanning and checking select agents for authenticity. In general, the verification process involves a “forward/reverse” DNS lookup, which is then cross-verified with the search engine in question. Let’s have a quick look at how to do this..

First, visit and bookmark the following articles (and/or this article). These resources explain how to identify and verify the agents for each of the four major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, and Ask.

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Get Back

Posted on June 14, 2006 in Nonsense by Jeff Starr

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is a trip into the online past, offering glimpses of ancient website relics. Reaching back through the virtual dark ages of 1996, the Wayback Machine chronicles over 55 billion pages. Although many of the pages appear incomplete due to missing images, the Wayback Machine provides an invaluable resource, enabling users to experience and learn from the arcane internet of yesterday.

Check out these archaic online offerings:

Robots Notes Plus

Posted on April 3, 2006 in Function by Jeff Starr

About the Robots Exclusion Standard 1:

The robots exclusion standard or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website. The information specifying the parts that should not be accessed is specified in a file called robots.txt in the top-level directory of the website.

Notes on the robots.txt Rules:

Rules of specificity apply, not inheritance. Always include a blank line between rules. Note also that not all robots obey the robots rules — even Google has been reported to ignore certain robots rules. Also, comments are allowed (and recommended) within any robots.txt file when written on a per-line basis. Simply begin each line of comments with a pound sign “#”.

Prevent Robots from Indexing the Entire Site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Prevent a Specific Robot from Indexing the Entire Site:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

Prevent all Robots from Indexing Specific Pages/Directories:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /privatedir/
Disallow: /tutorials/blank.html

A Specific Example:

In this example, no robots are allowed to index anything except for Google, which is allowed to index everything except the specified pages/directories. Note the required blank line between the rules.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /privatedir/

Another Specific Example:

In this example, no agents are allowed to index anything except for Alexa, which is allowed to index anything. Note that there is a blank space after the colon, which enables this rule to work.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow:

Prevent all Agents Except for Google:

Here is Google’s preferred way to disallow all agents anything except Google, which is allowed everything. Note that “Allow” is not a standard parameter and therefore is not recommended.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

Notes on the “meta robots” Tag:

Certain robots rules may also be included in the head section of a web document. Examine the following examples:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
<meta name="googlebot" content="none" />
<meta name="alexa" content="all" />

Here is a general list of values available for the “content” attribute of the “meta robots” tag:

noindex, index — Determines indexing of site/pages.
nofollow, follow — Determines following of links.
nosnippet — Do not display excerpts or cached content.
noarchive — Do not display or collect cached content.

Additionally, Altavista supports:

noimageindex — Index text but not images.
noimageclick — Link to pages but not images.

References