The role of the robots.txt file to improve site ranking!Written by Michael Kralj
Not many web master take time to use a robots.txt file for their website. For search engine spiders that use robots.txt to see what directories to search through, robots.txt file can be very helpful in keeping spiders indexing your actual pages and not other information, such as looking through your stats!The robots.txt file is useful in keeping your spiders from accessing parts folders and files in your hosting directory that are totally unrelated to your actual web site content. You can choose to have spiders kept out of areas that contain programming that search engines cannot parse properly, and to keep them out of web stats portion of your site. Many search engines cannot view dynamically generated content properly, mainly created by programming languages, such as PHP or ASP. If you have an online store programmed in your hosting account, and it is in a seperate directory, you would be wise to block out spiders from this directory so it only finds relevant information. The robots.txt file should be placed in directory where your main files for your hosting are located. So you would be advised to create a blank text file, and save it as robots.txt, and then upload it to your web hosting to same directory your index.htm file is located.
| | Link Building in Light of Vision-based Page SegmentationWritten by Andy Hagans
The days of basing a successful link building strategy on link quantity and anchor text alone may be numbered. The link popularity theories behind PageRank and Hilltop remain important, but major search engines are continually adding new elements to their link algorithms to improve search relevance. One of these new elements is concept of visual page segmentation which was recently proposed in a paper entitled �Block-level Link Analysis,� by Deng Cai, Xaiofei He, Ji-Rong Wen and Wei-Ying, available online at http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=690.How VIPS Works The paper introduces VIsion-based Page Segmentation (VIPS), which begins with premise that current link popularity algorithms are faulty in that they consider each page on World Wide Web as a single node. Different �blocks� on a page however often have different semantics; for instance, a block on left side of page might contain a general navigational menu or text link advertisements, whereas block on right side of page might contain an informational article or links to other Web sites about a certain topic. When VIPS is applied, these blocks can be separated by a computer with a vision-based program. Each block can then be considered as fundamental unit of analysis, rather than entire page. When a link is scored in terms of its block, link�s contextual relevance can be interpreted more intelligently by search engines. What VIPS Means for Search Engine Optimization In near future major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! Web Search and MSN Search will likely integrate some form of visual page segmentation into their search algorithms. A successful search engine optimization strategy should incorporate knowledge of block-level analysis to ensure that effects of a link building campaign will be maximized. But how exactly does a concept like VIPS affect search engine optimization? Two consequences in particular should make every SEO take pause. Devaluation of Links from Certain Blocks VIPS will allow search engines to differentiate between links from content block and links from other blocks such as text advertisement blocks or footer blocks. As such, algorithms could easily weight links from each block differently.
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