-
Robots.txt – Control The Robots That Crawl Your Sites
By writing a structured text file you can indicate to robots that certain parts of your server are off-limits to some or all robots. It is best explained with an example:
# robots.txt file for general use on web servers.
User-agent: webcrawler
Disallow:User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /logs
The first line, starting with ‘#’, specifies a comment.The first paragraph specifies that the robot called ‘webcrawler’ has nothing disallowed: it may go anywhere.
The second paragraph indicates that the robot called ‘googlebot’ has all relative URLs starting with ‘/’ disallowed. Because all relative URL’s on a server start with ‘/’, this means the entire site is closed off.
The third paragraph indicates that all other robots should not visit URLs starting with /cgi-bin or /log. Note the ‘*’ is a special token, meaning “any other User-agent”; you cannot use wildcard patterns or regular expressions in either User-agent or Disallow lines.
Two common errors:
Wildcards are not supported: instead of ‘Disallow: /tmp/*’ just say ‘Disallow: /tmp’.
You shouldn’t put more than one path on a Disallow line (this may change in a future version of the spec)
Ultimately, without the use of robots.txt files on your servers/domains, you are risking a variety of potential problems including, unauthorized access to your cgi directory, unauthorized viewing of your site stats, possible spamming of the search engines by accidental crawling of doorway pages.One distinct advantage however of having a robots.txt file on your server is that, quite simply, you will be able to tell when and where your site has been indexed or potentially indexed as, all robots will automatically call for the robots.txt file BEFORE any other page on your server so, as long as you keep an eye open for any calls of this file, you can see who is knocking at your site for indexing purposes.
Below is a robots.txt example that you can copy and paste into a text document to use on your own server:
<!–Start Copy Below This Line–>
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /logs<!–End Copy Above This Line–>
The above will allow all spiders to crawl all of your site except the subdirectory’s ‘cgi-bin’ and ‘logs’ which, may be altered to suit any subdirectory’s you do not wish the spiders to crawl on your server.
Article written by Lee
-
Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 6
Stage 6 already!
Only 2 more stages to go after this tutorial until you have a fully functional surfer trap!
Ok as promised in the last tutorial, we are going to implement the table pages you hopefully made in our last tutorial.
You now need to signup for ANOTHER counter code. Use the same counter as you did last time and, again, make sure the URL you send the traffic from the counter to is your main Multi-Site FPA surfer trap page.
Ok, you have the new counter code, what you should do with this is place it on every one of the niche table pages we made yesterday. Nowhere else except on these pages.
Once you have the counter code placed you now need to go back to our consoles, what we are going to do is make these HTML table pages into a secondary console from off the first pop up that we get when a surfer visits any of our FPA’s.
What you should do is enter the following coding in between the <head> and </head> tags of the niche pop-ups ensuring that you choose a DIFFERENT niche to the one of your original consoles:
<!—— BEGIN CONSOLE CODE ——->
<SCRIPT language=Javascript>
<!–
var exit=true;
function exitcnsl()
{
if (exit)
open(“http://www.yourdomain.com/tableconsolepage.html”, “tables”,”toolbar=0,location=0,status=0,menubar=0, scrollbars=0,resizable=0, width=800,height=600,top=0,left=0″);
}
//–>
</SCRIPT>
<!—— END CONSOLE CODE ——->You need to edit the figures for width= and height= to reflect the size of your table, ideally the frame of the console should be around 3 or 4 pixels either side of your tables.
Ok now once you have added the above to your existing pop-ups you now need to add the following to the newly created table consoles between the <head> and the </head> tags:
<SCRIPT language=javascript>
self.blur();
</script>What this will do is once the first console loads, it will immediately load a second console but, this second console should be ‘hidden’ behind the main window that is displayed. We have created a blur console.
We now have one last thing to do with this ‘blur console’ that we have just created.
Go to the HTML coding for the table ad console and add the same JavaScript to that page however, this time you DO NOT need to use the self.blur section of the instructions or, change the sizes of the console that pops.
Instead you need to add the following to the <body> tag:
onUnload=”exitcnsl()” so as an example your body tag may look like this:
<BODY BGCOLOR=#000000 onUnload=”exitcnsl()”>
Now you also need to alter the location for the console that will pop this time, you have a choice, you can send the console directly to the ARS POTD program or, you can send it BACK to your Multi-Site FPA page, at which point the surfer will be able to select another niche or leave your site.
Now remember, this surfer trap IS aggressive however, every time one of your counter codes load both from the FPA’s where we implemented them AND on the newly created table consoles we are gaining extra traffic.
If you have ANY questions at all please do not hesitate to post on the forums and myself or one of our administrators will assist you.
Article written by Lee
-
SMS Marketing To MMS Marketing – WAP Billing Solutions
MMS Billing (Multimedia Message Billing) is going to be one of the next huge leaps forward for the online industry’s, with more and more surfers firing up their cell phones to visit our sites and properties we need to start looking at the ways in which we can ultimately bill these types of customer and this is where MMS Billing comes into play.
MMS Billing – What Is It?
MMS Billing is a method of charging surfers using cell phones for access to your sites and services. Much like how the SMS Billing model works however, rather than solely billing for text or images, you can utilize MMS Billing on a wide range of rich media applications including movies, sound and, flash applications.MMS Billing – What Are The Costs?
The costs for MMS Billing can vary greatly depending on your MMS Billing provider however, as a rough guideline, you can expect to pay anywhere between $0.10 and $0.50 per purchase through the MMS Billing method.MMS Billing – An Overview.
MMS Billing is still in its infancy across the internet however, with more and more sites becoming WAP enabled and, more and more surfers turning their cell phones on to browse our websites this billing model will soon grow to what the current SMS Billing model is today.Article written by Lee
-
Protecting The Kids – Europe’s Role
As adult webmasters we have certain obligations we must fulfill daily whether these be, legal or moral.
One issue that is constantly cropping up in our industry is that of minors (Children) accessing adult websites and, more importantly, the ease of which they can do.
Recent figures released by one of Europe’s top internet analysis companies show that children in Europe and, specifically within the United Kingdom are more likely to visit a website and that, ‘showing that around one in five Internet kids (290,000) check out the sex sites’.
These figures are certainly alarming to say the least, bearing in mind they are specifically talking about the United Kingdom, that leaves a vast majority of Europe, as yet, un-analyzed.
We should all adapt to new methods in order to protect minors from accessing our site whether that includes placing your sites behind AVS systems which, in my opinion is one of the best ways and, most profitable of protecting minors or, utilizing ‘web safe’ software packages that are available to block access to adult sites completely we all need to adopt these practices.
The fact of the matter remains that, in this day and age, no matter what precautions we take in order to prevent access there will, undoubtedly, be a majority of children who can and will, get access to adult sites.
Does that mean we should compromise on the quality of our sites? No
Does that mean we need to think harder about how we develop our sites? YesIt takes very little effort to subscribe to the services to block access and, you can get a single line of code to place within your html from ICRA which will at least, deter underage surfers from accessing your sites.
In addition to the above mentioned service, you can also place a link on your warning page/s to the following services for parents to block access from children to our sites, SAFESURF, CYBERPATROL, NETNANNY and, SURFWATCH amongst others. Its not just about utilizing software and ratings on our sites though, we can go much further than that and, for instance, using nothing but softcore content on our sites will protect to some extent the materials available to children but, in addition you will also notice your conversion ratios will go up! I have and, I’m sure you have, heard it time and time again.. Make them ‘Pay for pink’ and, by using softcore images on your sites that’s exactly what you are doing.
I for one certainly hope that you take heed at this article, protecting our children is paramount if, we are to succeed in the business, it is getting harder and harder to control who accesses our site but, we can at least take a step in the right direction.
Article written by Lee
-
What’s A CHMOD?
CHMOD is another name for setting the permissions of files on your server.
All UNIX based web servers understand the concept of permissions. these are broken down into three distinct areas.
Permissions for the person who OWNS the file.
Permissions for the group (all users are members of one or more groups).
Permissions for everyone else.Permissions are listed one of two ways either using numbers such as 755 or, using letters such as rwx-xr-x however they both mean the same thing.
The first number or first group of three letters stands for the permissions of the owner (IE 7 or rwx).
The second number or second group of letters stands for the permissions of the group (IE 5 or xr).
The third number or third group of letters stands for the permissions of everyone else (IE 5 or x).The way the system works is as follows:
1 = x = you are able to execute (run) this program.
2 = w = you are able to write to this file.
4 = r = you are able to read the contents of this file.so if you add it up rwx = 7.
So, in the example given above (755 or rwx-xr-x) the owner is allowed to read and write the file AND execute it.
The group is allowed to execute and write to the file.
Everyone else can execute the file.We hope this gives you a little more insight to how CHMOD’ing or, setting the permissions on your server can affect how files act.
Article written by Lee
-
Thumbnail Preview TGPs And The Gay Market Place
One of the latest crazes to hit the gay adult market from a webmasters point of view is that of the thumbnail preview TGP and, more surprisingly than this is the fact that this new breed of gay adult TGP seems to attract more traffic than the standard format TGP ever did so, what is a thumbnail preview TGP and just how do you go about making one of your own? This is what we will investigate in this article.
Thumbnail Preview TGP Basics.
A thumbnail preview TGP is just as the name suggests, a standard TGP with one main difference, the TGP itself doesn’t list gallery descriptions rather a small preview image of the content placed on each of the galleries submitted. This thumbnail preview is usually size between 100×100 pixels and 60×60 pixels in dimension however, the thumbnail preview size can be determined by the webmaster owning the TGP.
How Do I Start My Own Thumbnail Preview TGP?
In order to start your own thumbnail preview TGP you will need a couple of things, first and foremost, a domain name to run it on, the current trend in the gay marketplace is to name your TGP something short, memorable and, well, brand able so, the domain name you choose for your TGP should take all of these aspects into consideration. The next thing you will need in order to run your own gay thumbnail preview TGP will be the script which you use to manage the TGP itself, for this purpose I would highly recommend Autogallery MySQL from http://www.jmbsoft.com it is affordable and, easy to maintain which is a must if you are wanting to run a sizable TGP. One other thing that you may also like to consider investing in for your thumbnail preview TGP is a design, in fact, most of the ‘good’ thumbnail preview TGPs whether they are focused in the straight or gay market, have a clean, almost pay site quality design aspect to them. Of course, you do not need to keep up with the joneses however, if it works for other people, then why not see if it will work for you also?
Thumbnail TGP Structure.
So you now have a domain and have purchased the script and / or design that you want to use on your thumbnail preview TGP what next? Well first things are first, you should take a look at some of the other sites that currently exist and see how they do things, find out what things you feel they are doing wrong and, capitalize on that.
You should also make some decisions now as to the look and feel you want your thumbnail preview TGP to have, how many galleries are you going to list on the front page each day? Will you be utilizing the archives feature of your TGP script? What limitations do you want to put on submissions from other webmasters? These are all aspects of running a TGP that you need to think of prior to opening your site up for general submissions.
In general however, you will find that most thumbnail preview TGP sites will have roughly 100 thumbnail images on their front page of the site with any additional galleries being listed in their archives section again, you should decide on how you want to maintain your own site.
Getting Traffic To Your Thumbnail Preview TGP.
Now you have hopefully set your thumbnail preview TGP live you need to do one final step in making the TGP itself a huge success, get the traffic flowing, one of the best ways to do this, as with any other type of site is to ask your friends and associates to trade traffic with your site however, should this not be an option then you should use more conventional methods such as submitting galleries to other TGP sites ensuring that you use a recip to your TGP on each gallery as well as utilizing other forms of traffic such as cheap brokered traffic, top lists, web rings and, even counters, within a month or so you will soon start to see a steady flow of new webmaster gallery submissions and, with each new submission comes more traffic and ultimately, more income from your site.
Article written by Lee
-
International Billing Alternatives – Premium Phone Billing
In the last article i wrote in respect of international billing options we took a closer look at the SMS Billing method and its pitfalls and benefits when charging our surfers for access to our sites. In this article we will take a look at another option we can offer our international surfer base – Phone Billing.
Phone Billing – What Is It?
Phone billing, as the name would suggest is a method of applying a ‘charge’ to a surfers normal land-line telephone. This charge is often around the cost of $35 (US).Once the surfer has called the premium rate number displayed on your websites join page, they are given a code to enter into a form, again, this form could be on your join page or on a separate site.
Phone Billing – What Are The Costs.
To be perfectly honest with you this is all dependant on to many variable factors to give you a good solid answer. However, as mentioned above the standard cost would seem to be in the region of $35 (US) but, this can often vary depending on factors such as the country in which the surfer is calling the premium rate line from, How much the surfers telephone company charges for a call, How much the paysite charges for access, How much the premium rate phone line provider charges, etc etc.Generally speaking however, the cost to the surfer is almost always made into profit in your pocket, if a call costs $35(US) you will almost certainly make $35(US) from that surfer minus a small percentage (depending on the provider) again however, this figure may vary slightly.
Phone Billing – Overview.
As with SMS Billing, Premium Rate Phone Billing offers a good alternative for your international surfers to access a paysite however, this doesn’t come without its drawbacks. Unless your members area is updated regularly and is of high quality you are going to make $35(US) approximately of each surfer unless, that is, they decide to call the premium rate number again for access to your site for another month.That said, if you do not want to offer your foreign surfers the option of having credit card or debit card access to your sites Premium Phone Billing would almost certainly be my second choice to make money from them at the present time.
Article written by Lee
-
Marketing to European Surfers
Marketing to European Surfers.
Today we’ll try to answer couple of questions regarding dialers and how to market them to European traffic.
How to get traffic to your European market targeted site?
Pretty much the same way as for all the other sites, lets German market for example (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) use SE’s, German link-lists, TGPs,… feed site with your own traffic, and don’t forget to use exit-consoles.
Is your site translated into specific language?
Yes, of course you won’t get far using English template on German/Spanish.. sites… You can always contact Adult Site Translation if you need help with translations.
What sponsor should you use?
That is pretty hard to say. Practically since almost every European based sponsor offers dialers so it doesn’t really matter which one you choose. It’s the same with per sign-up sponsors: It depends how good you are in sending traffic to them. And as always try couple of them and see which one works best for you. Most of the sponsors will offer to your surfers to pay by CC, bank account and dialers.
Me personally, I don’t really advertise dialers. I go for sign-ups because most if not all European sponsors are recurring and it brings more money in the long run. But if a surfer wants to pay the (admittedly) high phone bills – that’s fine with me In fact, sometimes I get more money from a 0190-number (dialer number in Germany starts with 0190) than I’d get if the surfer would sign-up with his CC and would cancel his membership after the first payment.
Why are dialers so successful in the German/European market?
Well, I can think of 3 reasons for this:1.) 0190-numbers are very common in Germany. Many support-hotlines use them, you can download logos for your cell phone via 0190, you can get health-tips via 0190, fax-numbers, etc… Germans see those numbers everywhere and get used to them. Of course they know that they are expensive but I think they tend to forget this because they are so common.2.) Much of my income from dialers is from Swiss and Austrian people. Especially surfers from Switzerland LOVE dialers (Some of them spend hours/nights with dialers and in the end if i get 50% of that for me is not bad, isn’t it?
I think they love dialers because they hesitate to give out the information on their CC (if they have any) and they can’t/don’t like to transfer their money via bank transfers. So dialers are actually their only way to get into the members-area.3.) Credit cards are not very common in Germany. I would guess only some 30% have one and many who have one don’t believe that CC transactions on the internet are secure. So most of the surfers have only 2 options left: Paying by bank account or using a dialer. The bank account has 2 disadvantages in the eyes of the surfers: 1st “The sponsor knows my name, my account number, where I live and that I’m a greasy little wanker who pays for porn. -Maybe this sponsor is going to tell my neighbors about it-” 2nd “How can I explain this to my wife?” On the other hand the dialer has advantages: 1st It is anonymous. Nobody knows who and where the surfer is. 2nd The dialer is faster than typing all the necessary information needed for a bank transaction. A few seconds for a 35kb download and the surfer is ready to go. 3rd You can always find a reason why there’s this 0190-number on the phone-bill. “Well darling, you know, I had problems with my new graphic card and I had to contact the customer-support. Those damn bastards are on a 0190-number what what can I do?”
Well, that’s about it on dialers. One warning at the end: If you like to give them a try beware of those that do auto-downloads and auto-installations. Surfers don’t like them. Use dialers where the surfers needs to click somewhere to download and install them.Article written by Lee
-
Fighting Back Against Computer Viruses
Only 10 years ago, the only way that a virus could have infected your computer was through you physically putting a floppy disk into your hard drive and running the program file that initiated the virus however, today’s viruses have become more complex in how they operate and, can spread like wild fire if they are not recognized as a virus doing damage not only to your computer but that of your associates and peers.
So how do we minimize the risk of virus infection on our computers which, lets face it, for the Adult Webmaster are our livelihood and, need to be protected at all cost. This is what we will take a brief look at in this article, how to minimize the risk of getting a computer virus and, heaven forbid, how to deal with a virus if you actually have one on your machine already.
Computer Viruses – A Little History.
1981 – The first widely accepted computer virus is recognized. The ‘Elk Cloner’ virus was spread through floppy disks and, whilst by today’s standards, it was not a high risk virus it, non the less was still a virus, in fact, all this first virus did was to display a message on your computer screen.1991 – The ‘Tequila’ virus was the first recognized ‘polymorphic virus’ meaning, it was the first virus which actually altered its state once on your machine in order to remain undetected.
2001 – 2001 saw the spawn of several highly potent ‘worm’ orientated viruses from the ‘Gnuman’ virus, the ‘LogoLogic Worm’ and the famed (is that the right word?) ‘Nimda worm’. These ‘worms’ were the first of their kind to actually spread themselves across the World Wide Web through infecting users email clients (specifically Outlook Express) and sending itself to every email address the infected machine had in the address book.
Virus Infections – Prevention Better Than Cure.
So we now have a little background on the main viruses over the last 20 years we will take a look at the ways in which we can prevent viral infections on our computers after all, as the subtitle for this paragraph says, a prevention is far better than having to find a cure.Here are a few simple ways you can help to prevent the spread and infection of computer viruses.
1) Install a good anti-virus software package on ALL of your computers, Norton and, Mcafee, both have some good products to aid you in preventing viral infections of your PC. Also, you should ensure the software package you do install has updated virus definitions, a new virus is created almost every week so you need to ensure your software keeps up-to-date on the latest infections.
2) Scan any and all email attachments you receive, irrespective of whether you know the sender or not, anything that you get sent in an email should be scanned, as mentioned above, there are complex viruses that can ‘send’ themselves from other peoples email address book, what happens if you are on the address book of an infected users computer? Can you afford not to be online?
3) Ensure that, once you have an Anti virus program installed on your machine that you have it setup to start each and every time that your computer boots, the first thing that should be loading on your machine is an anti-virus program, you only have one chance to prevent infection.
4) Avoid downloading .exe and .com files to your desktop unless, you know the person you are downloading the files from and, even then, before you launch or open the files ensure you scan them independently.
Virus Prevention – Overview.
Hopefully this article will have given you some insight into how you can protect both your computer and the computers of your associates and peers from computer viruses and, hopefully, by following the guidelines within this article your time spent online will be productive and virus free. One thing you should remember however is that no matter how hard we all try to remain virus free, someone will create a new program that ultimately, could infect our machines no matter how hard we try.Article written by Lee
-
Favicon.ico – What Does It Do?
Favicon.ico is the name of the graphic Internet Explorer 5+ uses in the address bar and when someone views their favorite bookmarks. There should be one beside the address of this page now if you are using IE5+. If you want to see favicon.ico in action among your favorites bookmark our site now by right clicking and selecting ‘Add to favorites’.
Internet Explorer looks for this file in the same directory as the HTML page currently being displayed, if it cant find favicon.ico it will then display the default Internet Explorer icon in the address bar. As for viewing of favorites, IE will check its temporary folder to see if favicon.ico is there again, if it is not located it will display the default white background with a blue ‘e’ icon.
For a webmaster there are three main advantages to using the favicon.ico ‘trick’.
The first, is that it helps to brand your site with a nice little icon that is easy to recognize.
The second, is that it makes your website more professional.
The third, is that your entry will stand out in surfers bookmarks over the others. This is especially good as, if you can get a surfer back to your site then you have another chance at making a sale.
Many internet users have a multitude of site bookmarks so, you need to use favicon.ico to give you an edge. I highly recommend using it and, now I’m going to tell you how.
First, you will need to create an icon file which is exactly 16 x 16 pixels. If the icon is larger or smaller IE5+ will just ignore it. As for the colors in it, 16 is standard. You can use more colors if you want but, the more colors you use, the larger the .ico file becomes and, the longer it takes to load.
You now know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create this file you can take one of two routes.
The first is to convert and existing 16 x 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16-32 colors into an .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.
You know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create favicon.ico . The easiest way of creating a favicon.ico file is to convert an existing 16 X 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16 – 32 colors into a .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.
Once you have created your favicon.ico file all you need to do is to upload it to any directory on your server that contains html pages. This way, when IE5+ searches for favicon.ico it will be bale to find it regardless of which page you are on.
That’s nearly all the areas of favicon.ico covers apart from, what if you want different icons for different parts of your website? Can this be done? The answer is yes it can. All you have to do is place the following HTML code between the <head> and </head> tags of your web page.
<LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”differenticon.ico”> (SHORTCUT ICON should be kept in uppercase).
Now when someone adds a web page with that code to their favorites, IE5+ will not look for favicon.ico but will look for differenticon.ico and if it’s there it will display it, if not the default icon will be displayed.
Using favicon.ico or the SHORTCUT ICON code is nice way to add a unique touch to your site, and of course will result in more repeat visitors than if you were not using it – which is always good for any webmaster.
Article Written By Le
Premium Sponsors
Categories
- 2257
- Billing Solutions
- Blogging
- Branding
- Content
- Domain Names
- Employment
- Forms & Contracts
- General
- Hosting
- Link Lists
- Opt-in Mail
- Paid Traffic
- Pic Posts
- Promotion
- Scripts
- Search Engine Optimization
- Sponsors
- TGP
- Traffic
- Tutorials
- Viral Marketing
- WebDesign
- Writing