Why “Follow, Index” and “Revisit-After” Robot Tags Are Useless

Sometimes we see on source code’s head section a lot of Meta tags like:

* <META name="revisit-after" content="15 days">
* <META robots="follow,index">

Both are useless (or obsolete to say the least).

* <META name="revisit-after" content="15 days">
Search engines don’t use this as a basis for them returning to your website. They’re more sophisticated than this tag, even if you update your site exactly every 15 days. If your site does not have anything new in recent memory, search engines will optimize its resources and could skip your site in favor of more often updated sites. The reason is that search engines don’t find anything new content to index. In order to impose a similar directive to search engines, you can implement XML sitemaps, including .

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Stone Age Marketing

A friend once asked whether submission to search engines is still a viable business, I said it should no longer be. But as he showed me a page about a Hong Kong web design company promoting a service called “Web Promotion” I come to realize that you can still make money by telling webmasters in Hong Kong you charge less than a thousand dollars for submitting their website to hundreds of search engines online.

I am referring to WebStudio, a web design company in Hong Kong that offers “Search Engine Submittal” service. As its page explains, it will do the dirty work of submitting your website to “thousands of search engines” for just HK$800.

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Common Pay Per Click Myths

You will see immediate results
Because paid search is almost always compared to its cousin organic search, the distinction cannot be ignored: paid search delivers immediate results much faster than organic search does. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. You can’t get immediate results just because you have done keyword research, developing ad copies, making bids and activating your campaign.

In reality, paid search campaigns are somewhat similar to organic search such that it takes time too. We need to carry out adjustments in bids, keyword refining and adjustments to ad copies and landing pages based on results of our initial campaign setup and not just by sheer intuition. We can then identify which keywords or ad groups yielded better conversion and so we make an effort to get as much traffic to them as possible.

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Weird & Strange Google Search Results

How many times do you use search engines every time you go online? And during such occurrences, how many times do you notice that search results you find look strange, funny, if not outright weird?
Here are some of those you might have come across already.

1. search engine
When you talk about search engine, what comes to my mind first? (Hint, hint: it’s now even a verb at Oxford English Dictionary.) I know Altavista is also a search engine, but why is it ahead of Google, Live Search or Yahoo!?

Weird & Strange Google Search Results: search engine

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Does Google Toolbar Help Index Content?

The answer to the question above is NO.

Another myth was debunked as Matt Cutts as he explains that installing Google Toolbar doesn’t index pages by virtue of the presence of Google Toolbar.

In an article quoted from Information Week:

But thanks to Google (NSDQ: GOOG), there’s no need to guess the URL. It can be found using the inurl: search query operator with mms2legacy as the argument.

The reason for this, explained Ken Simpson, CEO of anti-spam company MailChannels, is that one’s Google Toolbar may be configured to pass URLs that one visits to Google for indexing. “If you run Google Toolbar, it knows pages you visit,” he said.

As Google explains in its Google Toolbar privacy policy, “Certain optional Toolbar features operate by sending Google the addresses or other information about sites when you visit them. Web History, PageRank, and Safe Browsing in Enhanced Mode all work this way.”

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