Open Your robots.txt File, QUICK!!!

April 13, 2007 on 7:33 pm | In SEO | No Comments

This hot off the press: Google, Yahoo and MSN, who agreed on a common site map format on November 16, 2006, now say you must tell them where you’ve put it…

The sitemap format was Google’s. For once the big guys put their egos aside and prostrated to the user in unison! Hail user!

They have announced that you have to put a pointer to your sitemap in your robots.txt file. This pointer is just a simple line that looks like this:

Sitemap: http://yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml

Simple as that. What isn’t simple is remembering to do it. May I suggest that you write a few words on your washbasin mirror using soap… and don’t worry about this method: it’s clean!

As the wolf would say to Red Riding Hood in an email, “All the better to spider you with, my dear!”

Technorati Tags: sitemaps, robots.txt, lucky balaraman, the magnum group, web design

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Why I Like Darren Rowse of Problogger

March 31, 2007 on 1:55 pm | In SEO | No Comments

I like Darren Rowse, the author of Problogger.

Problogger is a blog about how to make money blogging. Darren started it maybe around two and a half years ago and I’ve been reading it for more than a year.

The thing I admire Darren for is that he uses only honest, straightforward ways to get high rankings for his blog in the search engines (an activity called Search Engine Optimization or SEO). In general he believes in earning his inbound links through posting very interesting content.

When people read this content, they learn something, appreciate what he has written, quote it and often link to it for other people to get to it. These ‘honest links’ accumulate over time and make his web site appear higher in the search engine rankings.

This intrinsic honesty is exemplified by his recent post on how to get backlinks, where he clearly states that he will not buy, beg or exchange links. Gotta say I really agree with him there, because these practices tend to wreck the accuracy of search engines. PLEASE read the post.

He goes on to enlist the ways he gets inbound links. Examples are ‘How To…’ lists and scoops. All very clean, all very legit and VERY healthy.

One more thing: his honesty has not cost him popularity: 21,000 people read his feed on Feedburner.

We need more bloggers like you, Darren, may your tribe increase!

PS: I have never interacted with Darren in any way. He has no idea who I am. I am, however, going to point this post out to him, he’s going to feel good and HE DESERVES IT.

Technorati Tags: darren rowse, problogger, seo, lucky balaraman, the magnum group

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