Google Wants To Help You Succeed by
Frank Sousa -All too often, we see Google pictured as the "evil" company who’s just out to get you, and to make your life miserable.
While at times it might seem that way, it's just not true.
No… Google is not going to come banging on your door to sit down next to you and help you design your website, but they do provide a wealth of traffic assistance for the webmaster who’s willing to look for it.
Take the Google sitemaps program for example.
Google wants to know about ALL your pages. When you consider the billions of webpages that are on the Internet now, that’s a daunting task. The way that they discover YOUR pages is by "spidering" your website. This is also called crawling. This is done through automated robots that will look through your website and follow the links to discover other pages. When it does, it puts those pages into a database, which they will use to ultimately decide which page will get listed and which one doesn’t.
If you make this process easy for them, they can reward you with much faster spidering of your website. This is especially advantageous if you have a large website.
Google has a program called their "sitemaps" program. What you do is place a specially formatted XML file on your computer that includes links to all of your web pages, and other information related to your website, such as how often you update your website and so on.
We’ve found that compiling the datafeed the way Google requires it can be a little bit intimidating.
There are programs available that will help you to do that.
When you’re building a website, it’s very easy to make a mistake in a link, especially when building a large site. This can be disastrous when Google comes around to view your website and it can hurt you tremendously. The better programs not only spider the site as Google would and builds your Google sitemap.xml file automatically, but if it encounters errors, it gives you an error log so that you can correct the errors BEFORE you submit your sitemap to Google.
This is VERY important. If Google tries to spider a site that has bad or missing links in it, then your chances of being listed in their search engine are VERY slim.
Google’s official website on this subject is at this URL: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login you’ll find a good explanation of their sitemap program.
Google sitemaps should be a part of every webmaster’s website submission plan. It does not necessarily help with your search engine positioning or ranking, but it will help you to get all your pages spidered quickly, which is the first step to getting your pages listed in the search engines.
Frank Sousa is the developer of the "Secret Spider Generator" which will automatically spider through your entire website, check for errors, and then create your specially formatted Google xml sitemap file, as well as create a specially formatted sitemap for Yahoo! as well. He can be reached at:http://www.secretsidergenerator.com
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Google Wants To Help You Succeed
The Robots Text File Or How To Get Your Site Properly Spidered, Crawled, Indexed By Bots
By Andrei Smith
So you heard about someone stressing the importance of the robots.txt file, or noticed in your website's logs that the robots.txt file is causing an error, or somehow it is on the very top of the top visited pages, or, you read some article about the death of the robots.txt file and about how you should not bother with it ever again. Or maybe you never heard of the robots.txt file but are intrigued by all that talk about spiders, robots and crawlers. In this article, I will hopefully make some sense out of all of the above.
There are many folks out there who vehemently insist on the uselessness of the robots.txt file, proclaiming it obsolete, a thing of the past, plain dead. I disagree. The robots.txt file is probably not in the top ten methods to promote your get-rich-fast affiliate website in 24 hours or less, but still plays a major role in the long run.
First of all, the robots.txt file is still a very important factor in promoting and maintaining a site, and I will show you why. Second, the robots.txt file is one of the simple means by which you can protect your privacy and/or intellectual property. I will show you how.
Let's try to figure out some of the lingo.
What is this robots.txt file?
The robots.txt file is just a very plain text file (or an ASCII file, as some like to say), with a very simple set of instructions that we give to a web robot, so the robot knows which pages we need scanned (or crawled, or spidered, or indexed - all terms refer to the same thing in this context) and which pages we would like to keep out of search engines.
What is a www robot?
A robot is a computer program that automatically reads web pages and goes through every link that it finds. The purpose of robots is to gather information. Some of the most famous robots mentioned in this article work for the search engines, indexing all the information available on the web.
The first robot was developed by MIT and launched in 1993. It was named the World Wide Web Wander and its initial purpose was of a purely scientific nature, its mission was to measure the growth of the web. The index generated from the experiment's results proved to be an awesome tool and effectively became the first search engine. Most of the stuff we consider today to be indispensable online tools was born as a side effect of some scientific experiment.
What is a search engine?
Generically, a search engine is a program that searches through a database. In the popular sense, as referred to the web, a search engine is considered to be a system that has a user search form, which can search through a repository of web pages gathered by a robot.
What are spiders and crawlers?
Spiders and crawlers are robots, only the names sound cooler in the press and within metro-geek circles.
What are the most popular robots? Is there a list?
Some of the most well known robots are Google's Googlebot, MSN's MSNBot, Ask Jeeves's Teoma, Yahoo!'s Slurp (funny). One of the most popular places to search for active robot info is the list maintained at http://www.robots.org.
Why do I need this robots.txt file anyway?
A great reason to use a robots.txt file is actually the fact that many search engines, including Google, post suggestions for the public to make use of this tool. Why is it such a big deal that Google teaches people about the robots.txt? Well, because nowadays, search engines are not a playground for scientists and geeks anymore, but large corporate enterprises. Google is one of the most secretive search engines out there. Very little is known to the public about how it operates, how it indexes, how it searches, how it creates its rankings, etc. In fact, if you do a careful search in specialized forums, or wherever else these issues are discussed, nobody really agrees on whether Google puts more emphasis on this or that element to create its rankings. And when people don't agree on things as precise as a ranking algorithm, it means two things: that Google constantly changes its methods, and that it does not make it very clear or very public. There's only one thing that I believe to be crystal clear. If they recommend that you use a robots.txt ("Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server" - Google Technical Guidelines), then do it. It might not help your ranking, but it will definitely not hurt you.
There are other reasons to use the robots.txt file. If you use your error logs to tweak and keep your site free of errors, you will notice that most errors refer to someone or something not finding the robots.txt file. All you have to do is create a basic blank page (use Notepad in Windows, or the most simple text editor in Linux or on a Mac), name it robots.txt and upload it to the root of your server (that's where your home page is).
On a different note, nowadays, all search engines look for the robots.txt file as soon as their robots arrive on your site. There are unconfirmed rumors that some robots might even 'get annoyed' and leave, if they don't find it. Not sure how true that is, but hey, why not be on the safe side?
Again, even if you don't intend to block anything or just don't want to bother with this stuff at all, having a blank robots.txt is still a good idea, as it can actually act as an invitation into your site.
Don't I want my site indexed? Why stop robots?
Some robots are well designed, professionally operated, cause no harm and provide valuable service to mankind (don't we all like to "google"). Some robots are written by amateurs (remember, a robot is just a program). Poorly written robots can cause network overload, security problems, etc. The bottom line here is that robots are devised and operated by humans and are prone to the human error factor. Consequently, robots are not inherently bad, nor inherently brilliant, and need careful attention. This is another case where the robots.txt file comes in handy - robot control.
Now, I'm sure your main goal in life, as a webmaster or site owner is to get on the first page of Google. Then, why in the world would you want to block robots?
Here are some scenarios:
1. Unfinished site
You are still building your site, or portions of it, and don't want unfinished pages to appear in search engines. It is said that some search engines even penalize sites with pages that have been "under construction" for a long time.
2. Security
Always block your cgi-bin directory from robots. In most cases, cgi-bin contains applications, configuration files for those application (that might actually have sensitive information), etc. Even if you don't currently use any CGI scripts or programs, block it anyway, better safe than sorry.
3. Privacy
You might have some directories on your website where you keep stuff that you don't want the entire Galaxy to see, such as pictures of a friend who forgot to put clothes on, etc.
4. Doorway pages
Besides illicit attempts to increase rankings by blasting doorways all over the internet, doorway pages actually do have a very morally sound usage. They are similar pages, but each one is optimized for a specific search engine. In this case, you must make sure that individual robots do not have access to all of them. This is extremely important, in order to avoid being penalized for spamming a search engine with a series of extremely similar pages.
5. Bad bot, bad bot, what’cha gonna do...
You might want to exclude robots whose known purpose is to collect email addresses, or other robots whose activity does not agree with your beliefs on the world.
6. Your site gets overwhelmed
In rare situations, a robot goes through your site too fast, eating your bandwidth or slowing down your server. This is called "rapid-fire" and you'll notice it if you are reading your access log file. A medium performance server should not slow down. You may however have problems if you have a low performance site, such as one running of your personal PC or Mac, if you run poor server software, or if you have heavy scripts or huge documents. Is these cases, you'll see dropped connections, heavy slowdowns, in extremes, even a complete system crash. If this ever happens to you, read your logs, try to get the robot's IP or name, read the list of active robots and try to identify and block it.
What's in a robots.txt file anyway?
There are only two lines for each entry in a robots.txt file, the User-Agent, which has the name of the robot you want to give orders or the '*' wildcard symbol meaning 'all', and the Disallow line, which tells a robot all the places it should not touch. The two line entry can be repeated for every file or directory you don't want indexed, or for each robot you want to exclude. If you leave the Disallow line empty, this means you are not disallowing anything, in other words, you are allowing the particular robot to index your entire site. Some examples and a few scenarios should make it clear:
A. Exclude a file from Google's main robot (Googlebot):
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /private/privatefile.htm
B. Exclude a section of the site from all robots:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /underconstruction/
Note that the directory is enclosed between two forward slashes. Although you are probably used to see URLs, links and folder references that do not end with a slash, note that a web server always needs a slash at the end. Even when you see links on websites that do not end with a slash, when that link is clicked, the web server has to do and extra step before serving the page, which is adding the slash through what we call a redirect. Always use the ending slash.
C. Allow everything (blank robots.txt):
User-Agent: *
Disallow:
Note that when a "blank robots.txt" is mentioned, it is not a completely blank file, but it contains the two lines above.
D. Do not allow any robot on your site:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
Note that the single forward slash means "root", which is the main entrance to your site.
E. Do not allow Google to index any of your images (Google uses Googlebot-Image for images):
User-Agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
F. Do not allow Google to index some of your images:
User-Agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images_main/
Disallow: /images_girlfriend/
Disallow: /downloaded_pix/
Note the use of multiple disallows. This is allowed, no pun intended.
G. Build a doorway for Google and Lycos (the Lycos robot is called T-Rex) - do not play with this unless you are 100% sure you know what you are doing:
User-Agent: T-Rex
Disallow: /index1.htm
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /index2.htm
H. Allow only Googlebot..
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
Note that the commands are sequential. The example above reads in English: Let Googlebot through, then stop everyone else.
If your file gets really large, or you just feel like writing notes for yourself or for potential viewers (remember, robots.txt is a public file, anyone can see it), you can do so by preceding your comment with a # sign. Although according to the standard, you can have a comment on the same line with a command, I recommend that you start every command and every comment on a new line, this way, robots will never be confused by a potential formatting glitch. Examples:
This is correct, as per the standard, but not recommended (a newer robot or a badly written one might read the following as "disallow the # We... Directory", not complying to the "disallow all" command):
User-Agent: * Disallow: / # We decided to stop all robots but we were very silly in typing a long comment which got truncated and made the robots.txt unusable
The way I recommend that you format this is:
# We decided to stop all robots and we made sure
# that our comments do not get truncated
# in the process
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
Although theoretically, each robot should comply to the standards introduced around 1994 and enhanced in 1996, each robot acts a little differently. You are advised to check the documentation provided by the owners of those robots, you'll be surprised to discover a world of useful facts and techniques. For instance, from Google's site we learn that Googlebot completely disregards any URL that contains "&id=".
Here are some sites to check:
Google: http://www.google.com/bot.htmlYahoo: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspxA database of robots is maintained at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active/html/contact.htmlA robots.txt validation tool - invaluable in finding potential typos that can completely change the way search engines see your site, can be found at: http://searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi
There are also some extensions to the standard. For example, some robots allow wildcards in the Disallow line, some even allow different commands. My advice is: don't bother with anything outside the standard and you will not be unpleasantly surprised.
A final word of caution:
In this article I showed you how things should work in a perfect world. Somewhere along this article I mentioned that there are good bots and bad bots. Let's stop for a moment and think from a deranged person's perspective. Is there anything to prevent one from writing a robot program that reads a robots.txt file and specifically look at pages that you marked as "disallowed"? The answer is absolutely not, this entire standard is based on the honor system and is based on the concept that everyone should work hard to make the internet a better place. Basically, do not rely on this for real security or privacy. Use passwords when necessary.
In conclusion, do not forget that indexing robots are your best friends. While you shouldn't build your site for robots, but for your human visitors, do not underestimate the power of those mindless crawlers - make sure the pages you want to be indexed are clearly seen by robots, make sure you have regular hyperlinks that robots can follow without roadblocks (robots can't follow Flash based navigation systems, for instance). To keep your site at tip top performance, to keep your logs clean, your applications, scripts and private data safe, always use a robots.txt file and make sure you read your logs to monitor all robotic activity.
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Andrei co-owns Bsleek - a company that specializes in web design, hosting, promotional items, printing, tradeshow displays, logos, CD presentations, SEO and more. Andrei has amassed an extensive technical knowledge and experience through his career as the CIO for a major travel management company and through his past careers in military research, data acquisition and airspace engineering. He also consults for Trinity Investigations, a New York based PI firm.
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Bsleek - Redefining cheap web hosting
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Article Marketing: the BETTER Offpage SEO Solution
By Dina Giolitto
Been reading up on SEO? If so, you know that there are one of two major strategies for bumping up your website on the search engines. One is onpage optimization, which involves plumping up your website's headlines, subheads, alt image tags and content with popular keywords. The other is offpage optimization, which, although not talked about nearly as much, will drastically improve your rank if done the right way.
Offpage SEO works like this:
To improve your SEO rank and increase traffic to your site, you need to get more popular websites to link to you. This is called inbound linking.
Websites are ranked 1 to 10 for Page Rank; one being the least popular and 10 being the most popular. If you're just starting out, you're probably a 1 or a 2, but you want to be at least a 6 and who knows... maybe one day a "perfect 10!"
Just like real-life office hobnobbers, your little website is going to have to do some shmoozing with those big league websites to get noticed. How can you give your site some help? Just as you feared: you must first research whose site is ranking higher than you are for your selected keywords. Then you must email them and ask if they'll place your website link on their site.
Now when you ask people with highly visible websites if they can add your URL to their list, what do you think they typically say? "Sure, for a small fee..." (But more likely a not-so-small fee). So now we're talking about money, and nobody wants to lay out cash, especially if they're just starting out.
For this reason, you may be interested to learn: there's a new wave in offpage optimization that does not involve researching other people's websites OR emailing people OR negotiating link placement fees.
It's Article Marketing.
Simply stated, Article Marketing is distributing keyword-rich articles that include your name, professional author bio and URL link to other websites that display the articles as content. Then, publishers come by and pick up that content to place on THEIR websites.
Now, let that sink in for a moment and then remember the goal of offpage optimization: to get better ranking sites to link back to your URL. Article marketing covers this easily. How so?
As an article marketer, you can distribute hundreds of keyword-loaded articles to top ranking article content sites like EzineArticles.com. EACH TIME you post an article on a site like this, your article gets indexed in their content BY KEYWORD and your URL is listed along with it. That's with EVERY article you write.
It's also worth noting, that when you choose to showcase your work on a highly reputable, top ranking site like EzineArticles.com, you get the added advantage of their expertly designed and fully search engine optimized website template to help push you higher on the search engines.
A third point: EzineArticles.com is the number one choice for real live internet marketers to post their articles, pick up other authors' articles to use in their emailed ezines, and generally affilate with for all things article marketing. So if you wanted to start getting your name out there and known by all the right people, posting your expert articles on EzineArticles.com might be a pretty good way to do it.
Still not convinced that article marketing with a top ranking site is an incredible offpage optimization tool for your site? Submit four articles and then do a Google search on your name. Tell me what comes up. Then... when you're ready to take full advantage of this incredible opportunity: create a full-scale article marketing campaign that includes keywords and highly targeted copy... submit to the highest ranking article distribution sites... and watch your website rocket up the ranks!
Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.
Liked this article? Have more of the same emailed to your inbox each month. Sign up for the Copywriting and Marketing Ezine from Dina at Wordfeeder.com and learn to write search engine friendly web copy and market your web based business for free.
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