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New SEO methoud really work?

Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 7:58 am
by DaveTheAve
Alright, I didn't know were exactly to place this post; I didn't think it would hurt to place it here.

Doing some research on trying to make my re-write of my website contain more SEO I have stumbled across a methoud I never heard of a Robot Exclusion Profile. I found an example of a site that uses the new profiling and ran it through W3C and it clams it valid XHTML 1.0 and once I change one simple thing, could be XHTML 1.1 valid; both cases were ran in strict mode.

What do you think about it? My question, beside does it really work, is how do robots know what the profiles mean? Are they preset or do you make up your own? If they are present how do you find them? Is there a global standard or do you need to profile for all search engines?

I don't know but it sounds like it's something I'd look into.

Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 8:34 am
by matthijs
What exactly do you mean by
on trying to make my re-write of my website contain more SEO
I think that you would have to look at other things if you want to optimise your pages for SE, if that's what you mean.

I swiftly read through the page you linked to, but question it's use. What search engines have been doing, and will keep trying to do, is to know exactly what a visitor of a page gets to see and what users are looking for. Websites which use techniques to show people other content then a search engine are penalized by the search engines. At least, that's what's supposed to happen. So, anything that seperates what SE and visitors see is not in line with the policy of SE.

But even if it is legal, such a technique will be misused quickly. For example the example on the page:

Code: Select all

<p>This page is not about <span class=”robots-noindex”>pornography</span>.</p>
So if this microformat would work, I could show all kinds of nasty content to my visitors, without the search engines indexing it?

I've never heard about this microformat before, so I don't even know if it is implied anywhere and if search engines do anything with it.

If you want good rankings in the search engines there's only one thing you should do: make lots and lots of very very interesting content (plain text/html) and make sure many people know about it so they start linking to you.

Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 7:38 pm
by DaveTheAve
To tell ya the truth the only thing that I'm currently looking for is a way to stop a crawler from indexing CERTAIN links. For example, download URLs and my spambot-honeypot; everything else SHOULD be indexed.

Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 8:51 pm
by John Cartwright
DaveTheAve wrote:To tell ya the truth the only thing that I'm currently looking for is a way to stop a crawler from indexing CERTAIN links. For example, download URLs and my spambot-honeypot; everything else SHOULD be indexed.
This is actually frowned upon. Search engines will often penalize you for using this blackhat tactic. I believe the term is "cloaking".. give it a google

Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 12:19 am
by timvw
Jcart wrote:
DaveTheAve wrote:To tell ya the truth the only thing that I'm currently looking for is a way to stop a crawler from indexing CERTAIN links. For example, download URLs and my spambot-honeypot; everything else SHOULD be indexed.
This is actually frowned upon. Search engines will often penalize you for using this blackhat tactic. I believe the term is "cloaking".. give it a google
Power to the webmasters (and their public)... I've stopped caring about search-engines...

Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 12:22 am
by feyd
timvw wrote:Power to the webmasters (and their public)... I've stopped caring about search-engines...
I [s]stopped[/s] never started caring about search engine optimization.

;)

Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 12:24 am
by nickvd
DaveTheAve wrote:To tell ya the truth the only thing that I'm currently looking for is a way to stop a crawler from indexing CERTAIN links. For example, download URLs and my spambot-honeypot; everything else SHOULD be indexed.
I would recommend searching for information regarding "robots.txt"

Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 1:08 am
by matthijs
And I would definitely take some time to research the information Google has put up for webmasters http://www.google.com/webmasters/

There's loads of information and useful tools. If you have a Google account you can check how your site is doing (in Google), which pages are being indexed, and when, what potential problems there are, etc etc. Combine that with Google analytics for your site and you'll have a good overview of how your site is doing.

Or you could just put up a clean, well-coded site with loads of interesting content and only worry about adding more content ;)

Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2006 3:09 am
by Kieran Huggins
matthijs wrote:Or you could just put up a clean, well-coded site with loads of interesting content and only worry about adding more content ;)
Say, I think you're on to something!

My clients NEVER understand this principle... and it's difficult to tell them nicely that a generic name and no valuable content just isn't notable... period.

Cheers,
Kieran