Your own website against you – nice writeup

A nice writeup by incredible bill of webmasterworld about lawyers using your own site information against you.

“ITFALLS OF SAVING YOUR SITE FOR POSTERITY

Search engines automatically cache your pages and something called the Internet Archive, or Wayback Machine, also comes along and makes a permanent copy of your site for “posterity”. The problem starts when you realize you may have content on your web site that could result in legal issues. You may act quickly to resolve those issues yet the problems still remain without your knowledge because you didn’t act as quickly as all the robots crawling your site.

Unfortunately, legal beagles love that your site was saved for “posterity” when gearing up to file a lawsuit so although you’ve already done the right thing by cleaning potentially harmful things off your site, the tireless automatons crawling the internet have made sure there’s plenty of evidence and the next thing you know, you’re about to get hung out to dry.

If you think the lawyers aren’t technically savvy, think again:

http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202422968612

Not only can they find your content, they do it under cloak without your knowing about it!

You can forget your rights, just throw them out the window, because the history of your website is already busy squealing on you without your knowledge or permission.

HOW DO YOU PROTECT YOUR SITE FROM HISTORICAL SNOOPING?

Obviously the simplest way is to keep your nose clean so nobody has a reason to be snooping in the first place.

However, this is the internet and you have to OPT-OUT of things to protect your rights.

Here’s a few preventative ways to stop your website from being archived and being used as a snitch:

USE NOARCHIVE

Make sure you include the NOARCHIVE meta tag in each web page so that there is no cache in any of the major search engines.

USE ROBOTS.TXT

Block all of the archive site spiders, such as used by the Internet Archive, in your site’s robots.txt file with an entry as follows:

The [url=http://crawler.archive.org/]Heritrix software[/url] used by the Internet Archive is Open Source which means there are more archives out there and possibly using deviations of Heritrix that ignore robots.txt and cloak their access to your site.

HELP FOR HOSTED BLOGGER ISSUES

If you’re running a blog hosted on a 3rd party service like Blogger or WordPress, your options may be limited to just embedding NOARCHIVE which the Internet Archive ignores, meaning anyone running stock Heritrix code would also ignore by default.

The only way you can exclude your site, [url=http://www.archive.org/about/exclude.php]according to their site[/url], is to contact them directly. Obviously an insufficient amount of businesses and sites in general are aware of the perils posed by the Internet Archive or they would honor the NOARCHIVE tag for those sites with limited access and no robots.txt just to avoid a flood of emails.

OTHER POTENTIAL RISKS

Snap.com has taken screen shots of every web page, then Ask started taking limited screenshots as well as a some new completely graphical search engines like SearchMe. Some screen shots have minimal resolution too tiny to read but others, like Snap and SearchMe, are big enough you can read, and these too are called evidence in a lawsuit. Even the tiniest thumbnail can still show a licensed trademark being used without permission.

Some of the social bookmarking sites that allow large chunks of content to be copied such as Kaboodle, Jeteye, Eurekster, some using tools like Heritrix (see above), to make small archive copies of specific content.

SUMMARY

Obviously there’s no way you can completely stop anyone from making copies of your site but it may pay by being diligent in keeping many of these technologies off your site that provide any form of archives.

This is just another form of insurance that could, in the end, save your business, your house, your car, your family… “

Is TPR penalty lifted for some sites

Some webmaster world members are noticing that the Toolbar Pagerank penalty is lifted for their sites. Google started imposing Toolbar Pagerank Penalties for sites that sell / buy links around January this year now it seems to be lifted for some sites. Though its being reported in forums we never noticed anything like that across our client sites. Probably its because we don’t sell or buy links for our clients due to our policy.

forum discussion here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3729425.htm

Ways to check backlinks in Google,Yahoo,MSN and other search engines.

I have many question me how to check the backlinks or links coming into their site in various search engines. Well i already wrote an article based on that here. http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htm this article isey a bit old but works great still. Today the top 3 search engines are more friendly to webmasters and are willing to share a percentage of what they know about your backlinks.

1. Google: Traditionally Google used to show most of the backlinks to a site ( link: ) but way back in 2002 they broke that comment and started showing backlinks only with PR 4 and above. Then later in 2005 they broke that too and started showing very less sometimes less than 2% of backlinks a site really possesses. This is had been the case for more than 2 years. But in 20o6 started a massive webmaster communication programme. They opened up something called Google sitemaps ( now called Google webmaster central ) . Later they capitalized on that and due to massive support they got from webmasters and now the webmaster tools shows a lot of data very useful for webmasters. One of that is the backlinks to a site/page/from inner pages etc. To check the backlinks what Google shows you need to first verify your website to prove you are the owner. Now we can check backlinks if we login to Google webmaster tools here.

Once logged in and site verified:
We go to Dashboard >> Links and we can check backlinks what Google shows.

Remember even this is not accurate here google shows atleast 25% backlinks so you can count that what they are showing is somewhat correct.

Yahoo: Yahoo is the only search engine who never hesitated to share their backlink data. In yahoo we can just use link:http:// to check for a single page or linkdomain: to check for an entire site. There are lot of ways you can check backlinks in yahoo especially filtering out sites. Please check those stuff here.

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htm

MSN: MSN was showing backlink in link: command before a year but they broke the command and stopped showing all backlinks. Now they opened up communication and started http://webmaster.live.com/ where you can verify your site like Google and check backlinks.

Its good to see search engines share more with webmasters in recent days i hope we see more from them in future.

vijay

Olympics and SEO – We will get you top 10 multiple rankings.

More information on 404 errors

Google webmaster central blog had been posting some interesting stuff on 404s for a while this time they had a posting on 404 errors on how they treat 410 errors. According to the official Google webmaster blog 410 errors are treated the same way as a 404 error. More from the webmaster blog:

How do you treat the response code 410 “Gone”?
Just like a 404.

Do you index content or follow links from a page with a 404 response code?
We aim to understand as much as possible about your site and its content. So while we wouldn’t want to show a hard 404 to users in search results, we may utilize a 404’s content or links if it’s detected as a signal to help us better understand your site. Keep in mind that if you want links crawled or content indexed, it’s far more beneficial to include them in a non-404 page.

What about 404s with a 10-second meta refresh?

Yahoo! currently utilizes this method on their 404s. They respond with a 404, but the 404 content also shows We feel this technique is fine because it reduces confusion by giving users 10 seconds to make a new selection, only offering the homepage after 10 seconds without the user’s input.

Should I 301-redirect misspelled 404s to the correct URL?

Redirecting/301-ing 404s is a good idea when it’s helpful to users (i.e. not confusing like soft 404s). For instance, if you notice that the Crawl Errors of Webmaster Tools shows a 404 for a misspelled version of your URL, feel free to 301 the misspelled version of the URL to the correct version. For example, if we saw this 404 in Crawl Errors:http://www.google.com/webmsters <-- typo for "webmasters" we may first correct the typo if it exists on our own site, then 301 the URL to the correct version (as the broken link may occur elsewhere on the web):http://www.google.com/webmastersHave you guys seen any good 404s?Yes, we have! (Confession: no one asked us this question, but few things are as fun to discuss as response codes. :) We’ve put together a list of some of our favorite 404 pages. If you have more 404-related questions, let us know, and thanks for joining us for 404 week!

Search engines allowing promotion of sex selection in India

Google , Yahoo and MSN have been accused of allowing sex selection ads in their sponsored results. Dr. Sabu Mathew George filed a writ petition highlighting the violation of Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act by the websites. Particularly Yahoo, Google and MSN were accused of allowing ads to run despite of repeated warning notice sent to them.

As per the article

“The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued notice to the Centre, Google India, Yahoo India and Microsoft Corporation on a petition seeking a ban on popular online search engines promoting sex selection techniques.
A three-Judge Bench of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan and Justices P. Sathasivam and J.M. Panchal issued notice on a writ petition filed by Dr. Sabu Mathew George highlighting the violation of Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act by the websites.
Counsel Sanjay Parikh submitted that despite bringing the websites to the notice of the departments concerned, no steps were taken to block them. He said the petition was filed for full and effective implementation of the Act.
He sought a direction to the Centre to block all websites, including those of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, that violated the Act.
Dr. George wanted a direction to the Centre to take punitive and deterrent action against these three companies. “

source: hindu.com/2008/08/14/stories/2008081459841300.htm

Yahoo Answers a threat to content publishers –

A webmaster world member complains about the domination of Yahoo answers. Yahoo answers a platform where users can ask questions and other experts in same field can answer the question. The person who asks the question has the option to decide which one is the relevant answer based on votes or by experience of the posting expert.

Today Yahoo answers is the NO.1 site for getting solutions from experts. We have forums for all topics but Yahoo answers have provided a clean solution to problems.

Sandy of webmasterworld asks

“Since last few months we had been observing this.. hopefully others can clarify more. We used to get decent results from yahoo search engine to some topics on our site but lately yahoo answers is ranking on top results for same phrases and keywords today.
No way to get on top ahead of yahoo answers now for those phrases “

Well as with any search engine the quality of the domain and the internal linking plays a important role in search engine rankings. Yahoo answers have an excellent internal linking and they are bound to dominate the results if the contents are unique. I feel that is what he is saying. There is nothing much he can do to fight against yahoo answers. One way he can try is to improve the content quality of his site and get more stronger links. Yahoo answers loose value over a period of time and i am sure his site will be on top once the power of the Yahoo answers topic fades off.

SEG

How to start a multilingual site: Help from Google to make a google friendly multilingual site

This blog is all about of how to start a multilingual site & various pros in having a multilingual site. Multilingual site is a site where a person can have a site in different languages. But the first thing you’ll want to consider is if it makes sense for you to acquire country-specific top-level domains (TLD) for all the countries you plan to serve. This option is beneficial if you want to target the countries that each TLD is allied with, a method known as geo targeting. Geo targeting is different from language targeting. Geo targeting refers to the sites whose main target is in a particular region/location in the world & it allows you to lay down different geographic targets for different subdirectories or sub domains (e.g., /de/ for Germany). Where as language targeting is one which targets to reach all speakers of a particular language around the world & where you probably don’t want to limit yourself to a specific geographic location. In this case you don’t want to use the geographic target tool. Since its difficult to maintain & update multiple domains, its better to buy one non-country-specific domain, which hosts all the different versions of your website. In this case, there are two options which are recommended:
First option is to place the content of every language in a different sub domain. For our example, you would have en.example.com, de.example.com, and es.example.com.
Second option is to place the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating & maintaining your site. For our example, you would have example.com/en/, example.com/de/, and example.com/es/.
There may arise a doubt for some that when same content is posted in different languages then will it result to a duplicate one?? Definitely not, but you should make sure that your site is well organized. And always avoid mixing languages on each page as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users. It’s always good to have navigation & content in same language on each page. You can also know how many of your pages are recognized in a certain language by performing a language specific site search. Multilingual site is a benefit to the owner of the site & to the visitors of the site as they get information in their language. For example: when a person wants to know fashion designing institutions in London then he may type that query in search along with the language he needs the page to be displayed in. He feels so comfortable when he gets the information in the language he knows & understand.

Official post http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html

LIVE SEARCH WEBMASTER CENTER GAINS CRAWL ERROR & BACKLINK REPORTS:

Webmaster center has launched a new data on august 6th called crawl error & back link reports. The below information tells how the site owners can use the launched data.

Last fall when webmaster center launched the Live Search Webmaster Center in beta, the goal was to establish a long term relationship with webmasters and help them achieve their goals by addressing the most common questions we hear, and help them understand how Live Search sees their site. In an effort to improve upon those goals, today they’ve have launched a significant update to our Webmaster Center and brought the Center out of Beta! This update includes several new features that provide webmasters more information about how Live Search is crawling and indexing their sites, as well as a few features to make the data more actionable.

Crawl issues & reports:

The “Crawl Issues” which is a new feature allows webmasters to find four types of issues as follows:

File Not Found (404)
Blocked by REP
Long Dynamic URLs
Unsupported Content-Types
For each issue webmaster center returns the URL & the data encountered.
-File Not Found: It lists all the pages that MSNbot tried to crawl and received an HTTP response code of 404. Generally, URLs listed here are from typos in links from other sites. You often can’t fix the link, but you can 301 transmit the typo to the correct page (for both a better user experience and reclaimed backlinks).
-Blocked By REP: It lists all pages that MSNbot tried to crawl but didn’t because they were blocked by the site’s robots.txt file or robots Meta tag. You should review this list and make sure you aren’t accidentally blocking access to pages you want indexed.
-Long Dynamic URLs: It lists all pages that have been flagged as having “exceptionally long query strings.” Microsoft says these URLs could lead MSNbot into an infinite loop as it tries to crawl all variations of potential parameter combinations and recommends webmasters find ways to shorten these dynamic URLs.
Unsupported Content Types: It lists all pages that are classified with content types that Live Search doesn’t index.

The crawl issue reports & download functionality features join the existing set which includes:
-indexing details
-penalty information
-robots.txt validator
-out bounding linking data
-sitemap submission
Backlinks data:
In the beta of the Live Search Webmaster Center they offered a limited look into back link data. They’ve significantly enhanced this tool, giving webmasters access to more data about their referring links. The new backlinks feature shows the total count of backlinks to a site. You can view a list of the top URLs in the tool or can download up to 1,000.
Making data more actionable:
Webmasters are analytical and rarely work alone. They often need to be able to grab as much data as they can, and take it offline into Excel or some type of database for analysis and collaboration with a client, marketing or engineering partner. To enable that, they’ve built a few new features into all our reports, both the new ones and the old ones.
-Advanced filtering: This way one can quickly scope the results to zoom into the data they need, without having to sift through all the results.
-Downloading data: For times when webmasters want to view a lot of results, they also provide a download option that can give access to the first 1,000 results in a CSV file that can be easily opened with Microsoft Excel or imported into a custom reporting tool. This can help a webmaster analyze the results and share them with colleagues.
-More than just a set of tools: When they launched webmaster center, few resources were launched to help the site owners to engage with them.

SEO widget – SEO statistics widget launched.

We recently developed a cute tool which will display your,

Alexa rank, Google data yahoo data, Pagerank and other search engine data on your website. Please check out your New widget here. http://www.searchenginegenie.com/widget/seo_statistics_widget.php

This widget is a must have for your website it shows who is online on your website. This is an additional feature apart from the other features.