Killing caches (was RE: Pay-Per-Click Question)

From: Michael Martinez <Michael_at_xenite.org>
Date: Wed 16 May 2001 12:43:09 -0500

C. ANTONIO ROMERO <romero_at_alumni.princeton.edu> WROTE:

>contains a lot of detail on how AOL's caching servers
>decide what to cache. It seems likely that many of the
>others will follow a similar policy.

TO WHICH JUSTIN W. HITT <Justin.Hitt_at_hittpansophism.com> REPLIED:

>Even though caches block some of my banners, undercount
>my advertising, and don't always keep my page views up
>to date, they are now my best friend! My site is
>ranked 28,710 with Alexa, but my logs say it only
>receives 25,000 unique visitors a month. I talked
>with some site owners (and looked at their web stats)
>and sites in the 30k to 20k ranking receive between
>150k - 500k unique visitors per month.

Static ads would not be hurt by a cache, but I suppose
no one sets those. However, it appears that Microsoft's
banner network, bCentral (formerly LinkExchange), uses
two clocks which are both out of sync with standard
time to disrupt the caching process.

Your mileage may vary.

The AOL proxy spiders are all over my domain these
days, possibly because I've been updating pages every
day, possibly because I use revisit-after meta tags on
most of my pages now.

For static content that doesn't change often, I specify
a revisit-after value of 30 days. For content which
could change on a moment's notice, I use 1 day or 7
days. I try not to fight the caches, however, as most
of my ads are either static (for internal cross-promotion)
or they are coming off our internal network and will
USUALLY be for internal cross-promotion. I do run a
few outside advertisements, usually in some sort of
special arrangement.


Michael Martinez
 Science Fiction and Fantasy info_at_xenite.org
  Visualizing Middle-earth, a book for all Tolkien fans
   http://www.xenite.org/



Received on Wed May 16 2001 - 12:43:09 CDT