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Excerpt: Some people may know about this already, but it's worth discussing since it has been pertinent to me a few times:In theory, according to my interpretation of the robots.txt specification, if a Disallow: under User-agent: "*" exists, as well a Disallow: under a specific robot's User-agent:, and that robot accesses the web site, both rules should be applied, and both should be excluded.  However, Google does not interpret it this way, and only applies the rules for the speci…

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Excerpt: Someone commented on my last post that there is a way to achieve some of what I stated as a goal in the previous post without cloaking.  He said:"Only create the session IDs in the URL when either one already exists, or when the user does something to prompt it (and make sure robots don't do this). For example, if you're making an ecommerce site, don't make the session for the shopping cart when the user enters the site; create it when they add their first item to their bas…

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Excerpt: This post is an answer to those who have criticized my unabashed advocation of cloaking as an ethical practice.  I maintain that cloaking, in quite a few cases, is necessary, and far from unethical or black hat.  Here is just one example of the many I will cite over the coming weeks:Cloaking to Avoid a Spider Trap:A long, long time ago people used to be very fearful of cookies.  I'm not sure what it was.  Maybe Al Gore, the inventor of the internet, or some other influent…

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Excerpt: So there was just a PageRank update, and everyone is excited as usual; but perhaps a bit less this time.  I know PageRank is "dead" as a metric of site importance and ranking.  I don't deny this at all.  I'm glad most people shook the PageRank obsession.  Barry agrees with me in this post.  I remember when PageRank was hyped to the point that people were spoofing PageRank using redirects to artificially inflate the value of domains.  SEO Black Hat …

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Excerpt: Incidentally, some scraper, here, was stealing my content and posting it, verbatim, on his site.  I never authorized this.  He was even linking back and thusly sending pings to me — I got alerted to each "citation."  Not so bright.  He also struck the content at ha.ckers.org, a site about software security with some SEO stuff as well.   That was even less bright.  I was eventually going to report the site (see below), but RSnake at ha.ckers.org had a…

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Excerpt: I find it very annoying when I click on a link that references an internal part of a document, and I fail to see what I was trying to get by clicking it.  It happens the most when a webmaster puts an anchor name near the bottom of the document.  A browser "tries" to scroll such that the referenced content is located at the top of the page, but this is not possible when there is no more page to scroll.  Even if it does manage to do so, it is still helpful to highlight it …

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Excerpt: People have too much faith in Google – even when doing so implies a violation of the principles of computer science.  Many Google-oglers have contended that Google can find applications of JavaScript redirect cloaking with ease.  I'm not a PhD in Computer Science, but I doubt there is any easy way to find this stuff generally.  Yes, even for Google.  Clever spammers will be doing this sort of thing for awhile.  Google will nail the lousy spammers that cut and …

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Excerpt: Since BigDaddy, many have been screaming about the decreasing quality of Google's index.  Now let's get a few things straight.  Some SEOs (ahem, spammers) may be the last demographic that you want to ask about index quality; but even the whitest of white hats are noticing.  One of earliest cited problems is that Google is kicking many pages out of the main index and into the supplemental index.  Many web masters complained, and Google listened — at least temporarily….