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A web site that is not online 27/7 can cause damage your
business reputation. Once a prospective customer finds site
down he/she normally looks elsewhere and does not return.
Site monitoring services or a customized bot are excellent ways to
watch for connectivity issues. Good hosts boast of a 99+
percent uptime.
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Monitoring SERPs
Your search engine result
positions (SERPs) are critical to your web site being found.
Poor SERPs result in poor web site performance and affect your
pocketbook. There are many tools available to help monitor
and track your search results. Some of my favorite tools are
provided by DigialPoint. Google lists the date your page was
cached. Yahoo and MSN do not. To find the cached date for
Yahoo go do search on HotBot.
To monitor
your keywords, pagerank, and back links go to
DigitalPoint's
page and create an account. Creating
an account, script etc takes a few minutes. Enter your keywords and
URLs and your are on your way.
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Monitoring Statistics
A good hosting package provides statistics for your site through
programs such as Urchin, Awstats, Webalizer etc.. The information
gained from your statistics can provide an excellent tool for fine
tuning your optimization and helping with site administration..
As you monitor you are going to find problems with
referrer spam and need to control web site access through htacces,
provided you are running on an Apache server.. You will find many
discussions of ways to deal with with referrer spam. Just do a
Google search for referrer span and look at some of the mod rewrite
techniques. See some helpful and not so helpful ideas on
site administration.
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Monitoring for Backlinks
All three major search engines have a link command. Don't be
confused when using them. You are comparing apples to oranges.
In an attempt to keep webmasters from manipulating
search results Google has made its link command useless. link:www.yourdomain.com
returns a sampling of the sites linked to your home page only. To
better monitor backlinks to your web use one of the
following Yahoo commands.
linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com (Finds ALL of the links
reported for every page on your entire site.)
linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com –site:www.yourdomain.com
(Finds ALL of the links reported for every page on your entire
site from external domains.)
linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com –site:www.yourdomain.com –site:www.sitewidelink.com
(Find ALL of the links reported for every page on your entire site excluding a sitewide links
from a particular domain.
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Monitoring for Piracy
Web piracy appears to be a
growing practice. Programs such as Copyscape allow you
to check for copyright infringement.
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Monitoring for Cloaking
Yesterday when checking for fresh dates I found
two of my SERPs had my name, my title, but another's webmaster's URL.
It is early in my investigation but it appears a black hat used a
redirect to take over my SERPs as his own thus getting him listed Google.
By making use of my SERPs he was driving traffic to his site and
making money by running adsense.
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Monitoring to make sure content is current
Of all of the areas mentioned
above monitoring for current content is one of the more labor
intensive task a webmaster needs to routinely perform. It is
very easy to forget to change a date, address, phone number or
date specific announcement. We all need to take the time to
read the content on our sites regularly.
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Some Google Monitoring Metrics
Allinanchor = The ranking based on the amount of times a KW shows up
in anchor text on a link. (Pretty much knew this already)
Allintitle = The ranking based on the amount of times a KW shows up in
the title of a particular domain?
Allintext = The ranking based on the amount of times a KW shows up in
text?
Allinurl = The ranking based on the amount of times a KW shows up in a
url?
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