Part IV: Making Money in Java

Maker Code 3/9 in Java Part IV: Making Money

You get what you pay for, you know When it comes to Web site submission services, that saying really hits home Very few of the free services submit your URL to anywhere near as many search sites as the paid ones do Although the paid services submit your info to many more search engines, you don t get much payback from listing in all the obscure ones Many Web site submission services fall into a gray area, offering limited free services but charging more for anything extra The paid services may or may not be worthwhile, depending on how well they know their stuff If you re going to part with your hard-earned bucks, you have the right to ask them a few questions first Make sure that the people you re dealing with understand the differences among the search engines If they can t tell you (for example) which ones accept HTML coding in their listings or how long a description is acceptable at a particular search site, you may not be getting much bang for your buck You may be better off doing it yourself ProBoost (wwwproboostcom), shown in Figure 13-5, is one classy example of folks who know what search engines are all about With ProBoost, you don t just fill out a form You can actually work with real, live people who are committed to your success ProBoost has free telephone support and a chat room, too

Not everybody wants all their pages indexed and offered to the general public at a search site; you may, for instance, want to share things with family or a small circle of friends, but not the entire world There are two methods you can use to keep a search engine s robot from indexing your site One may require the assistance of your network administrator or Internet service provider The other you can do yourself

For a long time, the only way to lock a search engine out was to use a file called robotstxt This file, located in the top-level domain directory (the same one your home page goes into), lists all banned search bots as well as directories that can t be searched The reason you may need some professional help here is that unless you run your own dedicated server, you may not have access to the top-level domain directory Putting robotstxt anywhere else doesn t do you any good If your Web site is housed on your ISP s server or on a virtual server, it s really in a subdirectory of a dedicated Web server What you need to do, in this case, is to let the people who run your HTTP server know which directories you don t want searched They ll take care of the rest which consists of simply listing those directories in a text file

The following example shows how to block all search bots from searching two sample directories: User-agent: * Disallow: /~mine/private/ Disallow: /~mine/personal/ Someone who wants to pry into your site can get a good start by looking at the contents of your robotstxt file After all, it contains a list of all the directories and files you don t want the world to see If you have anything confidential in those areas, robotstxt is a road map pointing straight to it

If you want to grab control yourself, or if you just want to avoid using robotstxt, you can turn to that good old friend, the META tag Remember that I said that tag is versatile Well, this is another useful application for it By assigning the name attribute a value of robots and adding one or more variables to the content attribute, you can specify your desires about the page it s in By default, a search robot will not only index your page (adding the words in it to the search site s database), but also follow all the links on the page If you want to disallow both of these behaviors, add the following HTML code in the HEAD element of your file: <META name= robots content= noindex,nofollow > You can accomplish the same thing by using a value of none: <META name= robots content= none > Technically, you could do the opposite that is, allow both options by using a value of all, but there s no point in doing that If you want both options working, just don t do anything To allow the indexing, but keep robots from following your links, use this line of code: <META name= robots content= nofollow > Remember that the robot s indexing and following of links are default behaviors, so you don t need to specify either one if you re allowing it Thus, the preceding code doesn t mention indexing at all You could, if you want to be pedantic about it, say the same thing like this: <META name= robots content= index,nofollow >