Google PR For Entertainment Purposes Only

Hi Classics,

Thanks for the reply.

Oddly enough, Google actually did find my site early this morning — how ironic. But you’re right, it only found the first page. Jeeves, Inktomi Slurp (is this Yahoo?), and “Alexa (IA Archiver)” also found only the first page. MSNBot was able to find 31 different pages.

What could be stopping the majority of these bots from following my links? I’m not doing anything “tricky” with the code — it’s just plain old HTML (actually it’s XHTML 1.0 Transitional). I’m using CSS to style the pages; other than that it’s plain code (no Flash, no Javascript, etc). I validated all of the pages with an XHTML validator; each page checks out error-free.

You probably need more links.

Do you mean I need more outside links pointing to my site, or do I need more links on the front page of my site leading to the interior pages?

Google updates its index usually more than once a day. Yahoo updates every six weeks or so. Google crawls at least 10 times as much as Yahoo, probably over twenty times as much.

Interesting; I didn’t know that. If that’s the case, then I guess I have some work to do!

(I’d also check your html, your graphics aren’t loading, for example.)

Hmmm. Everything works fine on my end. Is it still doing that? What specific areas aren’t showing up? I’m very interested in this — everything works fine for me, on two different computers. If there’s a problem with my images, I certainly want to look into it. None of the images are hot-linked; everything is hosted on my own domain. Maybe it was a brief problem with my hosting company, Carpathia (Prohosters).

Thanks in advance for your help. ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

Hi Steve,

No, the images by themselves don’t have the affiliate code attached. That’s why I was concerned about bandwidth leeching. The affiliate code is something that is added to the anchor tags when you make the image into a link on the webpage. i.e., the affiliate code is only associated with the image when you put it between the and anchor tags.

HAH! :laugh: Well, you could, but I think everyone here is respectful of this sort of thing. Hopefully it won’t become a problem for me. I mean, really, you could use anyone’s banners if you wanted to, because presumably everyone else has hot-linking disabled as well.

I suppose if it becomes a serious problem, if someone starts leeching major amounts of bandwidth, then I’ll have to look into a way to put an end to it. Two options I can think of right now would be to (1) Disable hot-linking again, or (2) Find a way to block certain IP addresses from accessing the images.

There should be a button below each person’s post that says “Quote.” If you click that, then it should automatically put the person’s entire post inside the quote tags. If you do it manually, then to begin a quote, type [qu*te] before the passage being quoted (change the * to the letter O), and type [/qu*te] at the end of the passage. To specify which person you’re quoting, for the opening quote, type [qu*te=Engineer] to refer to me, or [qu*te=Professor] to refer to the Professor, etc. The end tag of [/qu*te] remains the same either way.

yw. :colgate:

Hi,
quote:I feel like I’m susceptible to bandwidth leeching.unquote:

just curious, but if someone was hotlinking images, which I assume most would be banners; wouldn’t they also carry Engineer’s affiliate code in with them?

If that’s the case; get your hotlinks here!

ps.

Engineer, how or I should maybe say where are the quotes in this new fangled system?

tiafyr

One more followup:

Here’s a list of software that usually does HTTP_REFERER blocking. and would therefore cause images to not appear if hot-linking is disabled.

Norton Internet Security
Zone Alarm
Most ad-blocking software
Perhaps even the Windows XP SP2 firewall does this.

Norton is the most common culprit.

I see them now.

I just have a firewall and pop up blockers. I doubt they would have prevented me from seeing anything, but who knows. I also don’t see how that would be relevant since the graphics were 403 forbidden, not unviewable.

But anyway it is fixed so I guess it doesn’t matter.

Preventing hot-linking generally works by examining the referrer field on the incoming web requests, and if the request is coming from an external domain, the request is prohibited.

If a visitor is using a browser that doesn’t send a referrer field to the server, they won’t be able to see your images, even if they’re browsing your site. Since some browsers allow the user to turn off the referrer capability, I generally don’t think the prevention of hot linking is worth the trouble it causes.

I expect if Classics encountered this issue, he may have that turned off in his browser? Classics?

Update —

I contacted Prohosters via their online chat option, and they helped me out. The problem, according to them, was that I had hot-linking disabled, which is (apparently) why people can’t go directly to an image like through the links Classics posted above. If you click on those links now, they should work (they do for me, at least).

Now I’m curious about when you (Classics) viewed the actual site itself, without going directly to the images. Did that also give you problems? Because if it did, if the graphics didn’t load on the main page, then I don’t see how enabling hot-linking would solve the problem. Even if hot-linking is disabled, I think the images should appear on the pages anyway (they have for me and for others who have viewed the site). Now, with the hot-linking option enabled, I feel like I’m susceptible to bandwidth leeching.

Classics, can you please check my site once more and let me know if the images are appearing correctly for you now? Thanks again for your help.

Thank you, Classics. I see what you’re talking about now regarding the images being Forbidden. I have no idea how to fix that problem right now, but I’m working on it. I’m using PHP includes throughout the site; maybe that’s the problem. Has anyone else encountered this problem of having Forbidden images? If so, how did you solve the problem?

As for the white space at the top of my source code — I will be removing that today or tomorrow, on all of my pages. I don’t know if the white space would negatively affect the spidering process, but I agree, it isn’t very convenient to scroll down so much to see the code.

Thanks again.

More links means more exterior links to your site (more ways for the bots to get to your site).

The graphics don’t load because they are Forbidden, for example
http://www.onlinepokercraze.com/images/ads/pacificpoker_125x125_1.gif
and
http://www.onlinepokercraze.com/images/ads/partypoker_120x600_1.gif

View Source you have to scroll and scroll to actually get to your code. I’m not a tech guy but those two things surely are not good.