Exclude-by-Keyword: Thoughts on Spam and Robots.txt
Note: This solution is for spam that cannot be filtered. There are already wonderful tools to help with comment / forum / wikispam such as LinkSleeve and Akismet. However, this proposed method would prevent the more nefarious methods such as HTML Injection, XSS, and Parasitic Hosting techniques. Truth be told, I rarely use the Robots.txt file. It’s functionalities can be largely replicated on a page-by-page basis via the robots META tag and, frankly, we spend a lot more time on getting page into the SERPs than excluding them. However, after running / creating several large communities with tons of user-generated content, I realized that the Robots.txt file could offer a lot more powerful tools for exclusion. Essentially, exclude-by-keyword. The truth is,...
Simplest Trick to Optimize Body Content
So, the general rules of thumb for body content are this… Keywords in important tags (h1, h2, h3, b or strong, em, maybe alt tags) Unique content as close to the top of the page as possible. The first issue is quite easy to handle, and has been spammed to death across the internet since the inception of search engines. However, moving unique content to the top of the code while maintaining an attractive, Google-guidelines-compliant page has proven more difficult. Let’s take a look. Headers, advertisements, navigation and more normally precede the really unique content on the page. But how much code and duplicate content does that create? In the case of FindArticles.com, we are looking at nearly 370 lines of code between the body tag and the unique...
Carbon Neutral Hosting
I know this is something that I and a lot of folks in the web community care about. There are still only a handful of hosting companies that have gone carbon neutral. It is something that we are working towards and, as large-scale buyers of web hosting, it is an easy way to make sure that your site is green… List of Carbon Neutral Hosts
Great Little CSS Fix
Anyone who designs websites using CSS inevitably runs into problems with cross-browser compatibility. Firefox and IE are notorious for rendering CSS markup differently. Take, for example, padding. If you have a <div> tag with a width and padding set, Firefox adds the padding to the width making the entire box larger while IE adds padding while keeping the box the width set in the CSS. While browsing the web today, I happened to come across a great fix that forces Firefox to work the same way as IE with padding: -moz-box-sizing:border-box; box-sizing:border-box;
Launch of LetThemCodeCake.com
Hi, I’m Ian and I’d like to introduce myself and my blog here at thegooglecache. I’m a programmer at Virante and my interests lie in usability, software engineering, online community, linux, open source software, and now CakePHP. I’d like to invite you to come read about all of these things, especially the latter, at Virante’s new blog letthemcodecake.com. LetThemCodeCake was an idea I had a few weeks ago while I was learning how to program inside of the CakePHP framework. We decided to use CakePHP because we wanted an efficient method for making large web applications. I wanted to place emphasis on code reuse and an MVC architecture. We decided that developing a coding standard, and our own MVC architecture would take too much time....
Website Launch Flowchart
With our roots in the entrepreneurial world, we frequently get involved with clients at the very beginning of both their business and website. To be as helpful as possible, we thought ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have something visual that shows everything we intend to do”. Off we went to our trusty search engines, searching for things like website design, website development and our new favorite ‘website launch’. While there were some fairly straightforward charts for website design, nothing really captured the essence of what we do – take people from nothing to fully functional websites that are capable of generating income. So we put together the website launch flowchart – what we refer to internally as our optimized design...
Recent Comments