Today I have been looking into getting my website crawled by search engine bots and went straight to Google as you do to start submitting. In the process I came across a Webmaster Help Center Article which gave some good advise so thought I’d share, here a little quote.

When your site is ready:

* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
* Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Technical guidelines

* Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

I saw the mention of Lynx (Text Browser) which I have used before as I am a total fan of the Back Track Project (An Security PenTest Live CD).

As I have a few sites I wanted to install Lynx on my super sweet Mac Book (Love both PC and Mac), typed it into Google and there it is on apples site.

Download Lynx for Mac

Once installed (all of 15 secs) I opened up Terminal typed lynx www.ezrahill.co.uk and it looked sweet. All as is so the bots should pick me up.

Quite a bit more to go over and quite a few more submissions to do to get listed in all of the big search engines. Here are a few links were you will wanna submit your site.

Add URL to Google
Submit to Yahoo
Open Directory Project

Fat woman scams a mother a daughter by “selling them” pictures of cell phones.

read more | digg story

Firefox 3 Beta 2 has been officially released over at Mozilla.

[Improved in Beta 2!] Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements.

read more | digg story

Do you use Lynx to test your sites?

Filed under: Transportation

If you thought a solar-powered ferry was far out, get a load of this. Reportedly, a 132-meter long vessel will be making its maiden voyage next month, but rather than chugging copious quantities of diesel while traversing the Atlantic, it'll be sipping down fuel and receiving a good bit of help from the computer guided kite attached to its bow. The $725,000 device will be tethered to a 15-meter high mast and will fly some 300 meters above the ship in order to catch enough wind to actually aid in its movement. It's suggested that the SkySails kite propulsion system will slash fuel consumption by "up to 20-percent or more," saving the operator some $1,600 per day and reducing carbon emissions all the while. 'Course, all the company has to do now is make sure the January trip is a success and it'll have a list of to-be owners a mile long.

[Via Slashdot]

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

---