Do bots have manners? Yes and No. There are good bots and bad bots. It is the bad bots that may be an issue, if they don't mind their manners. The bad bots can enter your site and steal your bandwidth, traffic, email addresses, content, and possibly hijack a web page. But how do you address these issues?
With my article "Behind the Scenes with Bots Manners" you can get the details on how to save yourself a lot of frustration when you're trying to figure out what is happening to your traffic. It's may be a gradual trickle, then as your website becomes known, you 'll eventually get a major slowdown. Or, you may have the people that maintain your server give you a heads-up that your traffic is being stolen.
Please note: In some cases a bad bot is a subjective view. If you have limited bandwidth you do have to determine which bots can stay and which must go. Of course, the content scrapers, email harvesters and web page hijackers, are rather obvious bad bots that can steal your money. Learn from my article how you can help your server control the bots.
Behind the Scenes with Bots Manners
Do bots have manners? You may be saying to yourself, "I really don't care if bots have manners". But you should. Why? If they behave badly, you are the recipient of lost bandwidth, traffic, or content and email. But there are some ways in which you can keep search engine bots honest. How, you ask? It is the .htaccess file, the robots.txt file and the meta tag that can save your traffic, content and email from being stolen or abused. The first two, are simple text files, and the last, a line of code that direct all or specific bots that enter the web page, to follow your set rules. READ MORE...
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Showing posts with label bad bots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad bots. Show all posts
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Saturday, July 7, 2007
More on SEO and Bots
SEO and the bots? What do you mean. SEO and SEM encourage the bots to visit your site. Which you do want. But you also need to realize that with the good comes the bad. The good bots behaves nicely on your site. But the bad bots, can scrape your site, harvest your emails, steal your traffic and hog your bandwidth. So how can you make, or try to make the bots behave nicely on your site? Through behind the scene programs that instruct the bots on how to behave.
My article "SEO and the Good and Bad Search Engines" gives you an intro of setting your site up to protect yourself from the bad bots and to encourage the good bots to enter. But remember, a bad bot can be defined differently by a webmaster. But if you find your traffic suddenly disappearing and it's not due to any changes in how Google, Yahoo or MSN are spidering your site, then just maybe, you may have some bad bots stealing your hard work.
SEO and the Good and Bad Search Engines
By Vickie Scanlon
SEO is always a work-in-progress-and one that should be learned. Most people know about putting keywords in their content, and making their meta tags available and relevant to the content. But is there anything else to consider. Of course! You need to make your site search engine friendly, as well as, safe against the bad search engines.
SEO and Robots.txt and .htaccess
When the search engines crawl your site, they will check into your robots.txt file -- seeing if they have permission to enter your site, as well as, seeing what pages they should not index.
In addition, the robots.txt file will help you to tell certain friendly search engines not to enter specific pages that you do not want indexed. Then there are other search engines that do not follow the rules, hog precious bandwidth, and possibly steal your traffic. Yes there are friendly (good) robots and bad robots. So what do you do with the bad robots that don't obey the robots.txt file?
You should set up a .htaccess file to instruct the bad search engines to stay away. Some bad bots have no manners, and will take all your website has to offer, be it, your emails, images, content and traffic.
So, how do you get the bad robots to stop? You can utilize the .htaccess file to block the bad search engines from entering your site.
Sounds easy, but remember, the bad search engines will use different names to crawl your site, so you have to be ever vigilant - if you don't want to lose traffic. If you're not familiar with the .htaccess file or how to set it up -- go to Clockwatcher's for a nice tutorial on the subject.
SEO and Your Site Map
A site map is really important if you have a large site. Why? If a search engine has
a difficult time crawling your site, they will look to your site map for help. It's nice that they have another alternative to getting your site completely indexed.
SEO and Alt Tags
Make sure that you label your images. By using the alt tag within your html code for your images, you can tell the search engine what the image is about. Although you may know about the alt tag, sometimes, I included, have a tendency to forget to utilize it. Not only does the alt tag help the search engines to identify what is on your web page and what the image is about, but it also helps those that are blind.
To conclude, although keywords and content are extremely important, so are the mechanics of keeping your site search engine friendly and protected. Small sites may feel they do not need to protect their content. But if you have any ranking at all, the search engines will seek you out, good and the bad. And it is the bad search engines that can steal your content your traffic, and your bandwidth. So, don't ignore or fear the robots.txt and .htaccess process, your website can take a hit that can cost you money.
Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: My Affiliate Place for free tools, articles,ebooks, how to info, affiliate opportunities, travel and tech accessories, security software and computers for your home office or online business.
Read more...
My article "SEO and the Good and Bad Search Engines" gives you an intro of setting your site up to protect yourself from the bad bots and to encourage the good bots to enter. But remember, a bad bot can be defined differently by a webmaster. But if you find your traffic suddenly disappearing and it's not due to any changes in how Google, Yahoo or MSN are spidering your site, then just maybe, you may have some bad bots stealing your hard work.
SEO and the Good and Bad Search Engines
By Vickie Scanlon
SEO is always a work-in-progress-and one that should be learned. Most people know about putting keywords in their content, and making their meta tags available and relevant to the content. But is there anything else to consider. Of course! You need to make your site search engine friendly, as well as, safe against the bad search engines.
SEO and Robots.txt and .htaccess
When the search engines crawl your site, they will check into your robots.txt file -- seeing if they have permission to enter your site, as well as, seeing what pages they should not index.
In addition, the robots.txt file will help you to tell certain friendly search engines not to enter specific pages that you do not want indexed. Then there are other search engines that do not follow the rules, hog precious bandwidth, and possibly steal your traffic. Yes there are friendly (good) robots and bad robots. So what do you do with the bad robots that don't obey the robots.txt file?
You should set up a .htaccess file to instruct the bad search engines to stay away. Some bad bots have no manners, and will take all your website has to offer, be it, your emails, images, content and traffic.
So, how do you get the bad robots to stop? You can utilize the .htaccess file to block the bad search engines from entering your site.
Sounds easy, but remember, the bad search engines will use different names to crawl your site, so you have to be ever vigilant - if you don't want to lose traffic. If you're not familiar with the .htaccess file or how to set it up -- go to Clockwatcher's for a nice tutorial on the subject.
SEO and Your Site Map
A site map is really important if you have a large site. Why? If a search engine has
a difficult time crawling your site, they will look to your site map for help. It's nice that they have another alternative to getting your site completely indexed.
SEO and Alt Tags
Make sure that you label your images. By using the alt tag within your html code for your images, you can tell the search engine what the image is about. Although you may know about the alt tag, sometimes, I included, have a tendency to forget to utilize it. Not only does the alt tag help the search engines to identify what is on your web page and what the image is about, but it also helps those that are blind.
To conclude, although keywords and content are extremely important, so are the mechanics of keeping your site search engine friendly and protected. Small sites may feel they do not need to protect their content. But if you have any ranking at all, the search engines will seek you out, good and the bad. And it is the bad search engines that can steal your content your traffic, and your bandwidth. So, don't ignore or fear the robots.txt and .htaccess process, your website can take a hit that can cost you money.
Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: My Affiliate Place for free tools, articles,ebooks, how to info, affiliate opportunities, travel and tech accessories, security software and computers for your home office or online business.
Read more...
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