Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Optimization’

What is Robots.txt?

Friday, September 24th, 2010

When you host a website, search engine spiders (otherwise known as bots) will take a tour of the portal for indexing purposes. Search engines will index websites and update the indexed data regularly. In fact, the search engines employ the very same data to display search results. Normally, these bots will index all the web pages originating from a website. Can we control these bots? Robot TXTI mean, if you wish not to index certain particular pages of your website, can you do it? Yes, you can execute it with the help of robots.txt file. What is the need for a robots.txt file? Is it mandatory to include this for your website? How will it affect the search engine visibility of your website? I will answer these in the succeeding sections.

There was a time when search engines used to penalize webmasters for promoting duplicate content (within the same website). While some administrators did it knowingly (with the very intention of increasing the page ranking), the others had to post duplicate content because they had to. For the sake of illustration, consider that you wish to make a web page printable. You will have to develop two web pages with the same content – but only one among them will be printable!

In the earlier example, with the help of the robots.txt file you can instruct the search engine bots to skip indexing the printable page. Bear in mind that this is just another instance with the help of which you can understand the true importance of the robots.txt file. Plenty of websites contain confidential data, and it is a smart practice to keep them away from search engine bots. Once indexed, it is tough to flush them off. Webmasters often employ the same robots.txt file to choose the web pages that the search engine must index.

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Does my web Hosting Affect my Search Engine Rankings?

Monday, July 6th, 2009

There are a number of different things that go into finding the perfect host. Between the many factors to take into account, few people ask themselves the question, “Does my web hosting affect my search engine rankings?” To answer this question, it is pertinent to say that the actual hosting company will not affect your search engine rankings, as long as they haven’t been blacklisted. But it can, however, indirectly have a negative effect on your SEO. If you see that a hosting company is promising you search engine rankings, steer clear. This is just not within their capabilities.

So how does your web hosting selection affect your SEO? It really doesn’t come down to the web hosting company as much as the hosting plan you choose. Any host that provides shared servers for customers has the ability to negatively affect your SEO. This cheap and normally capable type of hosting is a regular choice for up and coming webmasters. The main problems arise when certain users of the same server start to do things that are frowned upon by the big search engines.

Individuals that spam email, recklessly accumulate links, promote certain material such as adult related, and a variety of other actions can black list an entire server or IP. Cheaper plans seem to attract these types of activities, so be weary of overly cheap plans. Check and make sure that your web host does not accept any adult type websites, or any of the actions stated above. Then research if the web host has had past problems with these issues. The better the web host’s security, the greater the chance tSEO Positionhat your web host will not negatively affect your ranking.

A problem that can arise from choosing the wrong host is that the company’s server IP address can possibly become on the spam list and become part of a black hat technique. With such behavior, Google will penalize you, so why bother taking the risk when you can do things right the first time? To achieve greater security, it is pertinent to upgrade to a better hosting plan. Virtual private servers are the first step up, and really lower the amount of users sharing the responsibility of playing it straight. This instantly minimizes the chances of being affected by the other users, simply because they have more invested and are less in number.

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