Re: Tracking and Looksmart

From: Alexis D. Gutzman <alexisg_at_marketingsherpa.com>
Date: Tue 23 Jul 2002 20:41:11 -0500

Rather than trying to fool the search engines, why not do what they
recommend, and put a site map link on the home page, which the spider will
find and crawl. This will put all or most of your content within two clicks
of the home page, and make all of it readily accessible to the search
engine. As long as you make human navigation clear, most visitors won't
click on the site map. Putting the site map link below the fold will also
help, since a site we recently profiled found that ~90% of visitors never
even scrolled! If you need to be absolutely sure that only spiders make it
to the protected pages without getting the form, you can use server-side
detection to identify the footprint of the spider (there aren't that many
that really matter) and let the server show these agents the content behind
the barrier without seeing the form. Try the site map first, though and see
whether any humans go to the site map and find the content without going
through the form.

Make sure that if you don't want the content available without the visitor
seeing a form that you (a) set your meta tag to <META NAME="ROBOTS"
CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> so that the SEs don't keep a copy of the page for
viewing directly from the SE (as cached content), (b) intercept traffic that
clicks on any deep links into your site to show them the barrier page
instead of the protected content.

Regards,
Alexis
---
Alexis D. Gutzman
Managing Editor, _MarketingSherpa's Buyer's Guide to Search Engine
Optimization Firms_
Managing Editor, Reports
MarketingSherpa
http://www.sherpaweekly.com <== Free "Top 10 eMarketing Mistakes" Report





Received on Tue Jul 23 2002 - 20:41:11 CDT