This morning, a slightly misplaced click, opened up a page full of code which caught my attention. Who knew that the page source for the Developer Toolset within Google Chrome would start with:
Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.
?
See for yourself. Load up a fresh Chrome window, click the page icon, and scroll down to Developer > Developer Tools:
Right click anywhere in that window, and select View Source:
Tada:
A bit of light humour in the lead up to April 1st. Malcolm Coles has launched CRAP to avoid some of those usual web-based issues we see on the dreaded April-fools’ Day.
As he puts it, those in the UK and Europe start seeing April-fools based jokes and posts, technically, a day earlier than we should, where as those in the US, once they feel safe after the midday cut off, are duped once more in the evening as those of us closer to Greenwich start pranking about!
CRAP – The Campaign for a Recognised April-fools Period calls for an internationally recognised, 24 hour period, spanning March 31st and April 1st.
Android’s WordPress App may be light on the features, dull and not overly exciting, but it does the job. Quite how well it does the job will only be truly apparent after I hit the publish button at the end of this post!
Straight away, we notice the lack of 1 touch buttons to insert H2 tags, most of the nice plugin functionality for SEO stuff and no functionality to upload media from the phone into the post. Makes live blogging a bit of a chore! Still, it’s getting there!
Robots, crawlers, spiders or agents are programs which are used to traverse the wobbly world wide web automatically, taking note on which content is where. Search engines use these programs to index content for their indices, spammers use them to scrape content for their own sites, or even to crawl the web for email addresses to spam you even more. Understanding of how search robots work is an intrinsic part of SEO!
Robots.txt is a file which, when placed in the root of a publicly available webserver, tells search engine robots and agents which content they can and cannot/should and shouldn’t access. It can be used to block access to members’ only directories for example, or pages which nobody should really be finding through search engines, or, as I was trying to do earlier today, block search engines from indexing pages which are a part of your affiliate system or associated with an affiliate ID.
Many e-businesses run affiliate systems, which can be described as an semi-automated process by which the e-business takes referrals from partner websites, and remunerates them for any transactions that result from the referral. Having worked in the online gaming industry for over 10 years now, I’m quite familiar with many of them, as they an intricate part of just about every online gambling business model.
Most affiliate systems use standard html links which contain affiliate ID parameters in order to track referrals from their partner or affiliated sites. Anyone who clicks the link which contains the affiliate parameters will be associated with that affiliate’s account. If they go on to purchase something from the site, the affiliate will take their share of that revenue.
This is leading somewhere, I promise!
Many companies, when taking on an SEO consultant, agency or in-house employee, go straight for the proverbial jugular. They want to target the big, juicy keywords which will drive mountains of good, converting, valuable traffic. Because of this, they usually overlook the basics, ensuring you’re dominating the search results for your brand names. Imagine, if you will, the panic in the office this morning, when after no more than a few hours, I spot a discrepancy in our brand term search results: an affiliate tracked URL is ranking in second spot, taking a nice bounty per referral as well as a share of any future revenue from any clients that came through that link!
Whoever was in here before me, had not taken the time to ensure that search engines, and especially Google (ye olde search dominator) were not allowed to index URLs tagged with affiliate IDs. Due to the high volume of traffic this affiliate was sending through his affiliate ID, that URL got indexed for our brand name, and is still ranking in second place. I immediately submitted a removal request, and asked for a change to the robots.txt to ensure that affiliate parameters were blocked from this point forward… the reply: “what robots.txt?”
Given the fact the content/web developer people here hadn’t implemented one, and the urgency required to get this resolved, I quickly typed up a robots.txt file for them to upload… ran it through the nicely-provided-by-Google testing utility:
Allowed by line 5: Disallow:
But what about line 6 you stupid test tool? The one that says:
Disallow: /?affid=*
No amount of fiddling would get it to work! I tried and tried and tried. And then I tested a second URL, one I typed up myself, and not copied and pasted:
Blocked by line 6: Disallow: /?affid=*
And that is when it struck me… affid and affId are two completely, and utterly different things according to robots.txt… why? Because ROBOTS.TXT IS BLOODY CASE SENSITIVE!
“Cheap Oyster travelcards?” No, just one travelcard.
My current place of employment were nice enough to give me a company loan cheque to buy an annual Oyster travelcard, and then took a slice of the loan out of my salary every month, to pay it back, interest free. However, back in August, when I bought my annual Zones 1 and 2 travelcard, I was unaware that by the 5th of February, I would be relocating back to Gibraltar and the south of Spain, so now I have a good few hundred quid’s worth of soon to be useless Oyster travelcard in my wallet.
The remaining balance of the loan was £604, which, given there are 30 weeks left until it expires, works out at £20.13 for a weekly travelcard “equivalent”, compared to the standard £25.80. Would be happy to let it go for less than the balance as I’m just trying to recoup some of the money to put towards relocating.
Get in touch if you’d like it.