Google has announced that they are extending their popular AdWords system to include text-based advertising techniques. As yet the system is still in Beta, allowing a limited number of advertisers to sign up for an account with access to personal support from staff members. This move represents another milestone along Google's ever-growing domination of the advertising marketspace. For more information, see Google's official announcement.
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Thursday, 19 July 2007
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
Blogger now uses a robots.txt file to exclude /search pages from the Google index
This morning, I checked the Google Webmaster Tools statistics for my blog, davids-pics.blogspot.com, when I noticed an odd message: "URLs restricted by robots.txt - 14". Blogger doesn't allow you to edit the robots.txt file, so I was confused as to how all these urls came to be restricted. I certainly didn't want Google missing out on some of my site's content.
A quick check to the "robots.txt analysis" page revealed the cause of this disturbance. It tuns out that Google (Blogger) has created a default robots.txt file on all blogspot blogs, with the following lines included:
This change has resulted in all of the label search pages in any blogspot blog being excluded from the Google index, as well as from the index of any other search engines that obey the robots.txt exclusion protocol.
I don't know why the blogger developers have decided to do this, but I certainly don't enjoy the consequences. A large portion of my traffic came from search engines to my blog's label search pages - I will now lose all of that traffic. Also, it makes sense that when people search for "flora nature photography gallery" they will want to go to the flora search page on my nature photography blog.
Regardless of my traffic loss, the robots.txt addition is here to stay. What are your thoughts about this recent change to blogspot.com blogs, and most importantly: Do you think that this exclusion will have good long-term effects on the blogosphere?
Related Sites:
Blogger
David's Nature Photo Gallery
robotstxt.org
A quick check to the "robots.txt analysis" page revealed the cause of this disturbance. It tuns out that Google (Blogger) has created a default robots.txt file on all blogspot blogs, with the following lines included:
User-agent: *Disallow: /search
This change has resulted in all of the label search pages in any blogspot blog being excluded from the Google index, as well as from the index of any other search engines that obey the robots.txt exclusion protocol.
I don't know why the blogger developers have decided to do this, but I certainly don't enjoy the consequences. A large portion of my traffic came from search engines to my blog's label search pages - I will now lose all of that traffic. Also, it makes sense that when people search for "flora nature photography gallery" they will want to go to the flora search page on my nature photography blog.
Regardless of my traffic loss, the robots.txt addition is here to stay. What are your thoughts about this recent change to blogspot.com blogs, and most importantly: Do you think that this exclusion will have good long-term effects on the blogosphere?
Related Sites:
Blogger
David's Nature Photo Gallery
robotstxt.org
Labels:
/search,
blogger,
google,
robots.txt
Thursday, 12 July 2007
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