John K Mitchell's Misc Blog

This article on the Google Answers site about only allowing the Google crawler to index the site contains a nice example (from webmasterworld.com) of a spider trap to block badly behaved spiders and site copiers from pulling your sire down too quickly.

It looks as if the spider trap will only work on Linux type systems so if you have a Windows server you will need to find some other method of protecting your bandwidth.

Apparently Google are starting a pilot program to alert sites that they feel have strayed outside their guidelines. Matt Cutts blog goes into some details about this program and even gives an example email that they might send you.

At last Google seems to be looking at the impact that they have on webmasters and businesses when a site is removed from the index after having been included for many years.

These online property conveyancing solicitors offer a conveyancing service to over 20,000 clients per year with specialist staff dedicated to the service.

They claim that they are even available over the week-end and during the evenings, this would be useful for those of us that have to work for a living and can not make telephone calls during the working day.

I guess that, as specialists, they are involved in the E-conveyancing program from the UK Land Registry. It looks as if this program will speed up the complete process of conveyancing and allow for e-lodgement of Land Registry updates. I wonder if this will reduce the cost though?

This company produce a great range of full colour business cards that allow you to create new business cards and proof them online. They will even deliver direct to the end user, which is great if you have more than one location.
They also offer a call-off system that allows you to bulk order then call-off the cards as you need them.

This forum about UK & Ireland Search Engines: on webmaster world is one of the few I've found that is specifically about the UK Search engines. It's not very busy but is fiarly well focused.

Adsense Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like Adsense to emphasise or reduce the importance of when matching ads to your site's content. By providing them with your suggestions, you can try to improve your ad targeting.

The section targetting works by using HTML comment tags and with the relevent content between the tags.

Google emphasise that the content should be a significant amount and that it may take up to 2 weeks for the tags to take effect.

This article about spyware changing Google results is interesting and also potentially very worrying. I wonder how many people would have this installed on their machines? It just reinforces the rule that you should be careful in the sites you visit and the emails that you open, even if the email is from someone you know.

UK internet statistics and market report. The only problem is that the search engine usage is a little old being from September 2003.