Tuesday, May 03, 2005

The Good the Bad and the Robots

Well good or bad my goal is to talk about the website creation process. Yesterday was an interesting day for a couple of reasons. First I learned about the creation of a robots.txt file, thanks mainly to the website scrubtheweb.com. It's a search but also is a promotional site. I used it for its free app that checks a page for robot webcrawler suitability. Helpful, because I didn't have a robots.txt file at all. But I created one and now curiously my site is no longer listed on google. Google used to have an actual description of my site, but then it was downgraded to just a link and now it's not even there when you search for lopico. So maybe I did my robots file wrong, but I don't think so.
I also began experimenting with sub domains yesterday, but I need to get another site hosted to really make it useful. I think that I'll probably use a sub domain for my advertising portion of my site. If you don't know what a sub domain is, it's a domain like my.yahoo.com, instead of www.yahoo.com.
The bad, well if you read my last post (which you probably didn't) you know how I feel about people compromising the integrity of google by these link exchange networks. I got an e-mail today from a site that is willing to link only to pages with at least a 5 rank on google and if you're lower than 5 you can pay for them to link to you. What a bunch of crap. This just completely undermines the Google system and should be banned. I struggle with my sites promotion, but I'd rather, get attention through hard work, not through link exchange.
Finally, I continue to do well in Tucson, AZ. Despite a recent post that all I ever get is restaurants, someone posted a Veterinary Clinic in Tucson: Central Animal Hospital. This was a particularly interesting addition because the adder put in the address phone number and web address. I guess maybe I'm not communicating the message clearly that all you need to add is the name of the business, probably because it's buried on an about page. I think I'll put a note about adding only the name on my homepage, but I'm not too sure.

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