Deverill

I would assume the courts would approach it like stolen goods - if you go down to the shady part of town and buy a TV for $20 off the back of a truck then you'll probably go to jail. If you buy something at a pawn shop and it turns out that it was stolen they'll just take it away from you but there will be no charges against you. If you acidentally hit an unsecure network in your neighborhood they'll never catch you but if they did it would be a "be careful next time" and that's it. The funny thing about the law is they like for the prosecutors to prove intent. This is only opinion based on my limited knowledge of how some of the legalities work.

Exactly - bots just act like surfers to see where they can get. They don't have the ability to scan your public_html folder. Another thing to keep in mind is that some search engines do not pay much attention to pages with the word "links" in the filename so use "partners" "other-sites" or something like that. Finally, although linking a set of sites together will help some, especially if you have one that the engines are visiting and you want to send them to the other site, they do notice if it's just a small number of sites all linking to each other. It is vital to get links to your site from other, preferably related, sites and the more the better for the engines. Important: I said before that sumbitting to search engines is all but useless, and that is true, but that does not apply to directories such as DMOZ. The directories are usually human edited and you should submit to them if you want to be listed. The search engines have bots but the directories don't and thus will not know about you without someone submitting your site. Just wanted to make that clear.

I doubt it's a penalty. They are usually pretty relaxed on the rules and only go after the MAJOR abusers. Edit:That said, it's never a good idea to "break the rules" because they may some day decide to slam everyone. /end edit. With Google you can get a bounce while it is scanning sites and trying to apply new algorithms. It may be there one day, not the next and then back the next. I recommend you wait about 1-2 weeks and see where you stand before you do any significant (or even minor) changes to your site to try to "catch up" to them. It's never a good idea to chase the engines - just make the best site you can and let them come to you. Of course, links to your site are always awesome-good.

Can you point me to the law or the FCC rule that says this? Things that you believe are wrong are not always against the law. Well, if you want to get precise about it, what country's laws are we talking about? Here's something I found: Which sums up what I was thinking. Of course the little guy will never get prosecuted... but then again, ask the 80 yr old Granny that got slapped with an RIAA lawsuit because her granddaughter Kazaa'd some albums. Tim said to which I would reply - "If you don't want me in your house, lock the door and if you don't then it's perfectly legal for me to enter and help myself. Additionally, check out the laws about receiving police transmissions. In every state in the US there are laws that say to receive police transmissions in a car is illegal. Yes, it is the airwaves and it is "public domain" but if you have a scanner and get caught then you'll have the scanner taken and possibly charged with a crime. The only exception is emergency response folks (fire, police, ambulance, etc) and licensed amateur radio operators. So, this is another example that just because it's out there doesn't make it legal to intercept. As was said (sort of), just because something seems legal doesn't make it so. Bottom line - if you're not doing it then fine, don't worry about it. If you are then be prepared for the consequences if you get caught and someone wants your skin bad enough to pursue it in court.

A toilet is often referred to as a 'pot'. They like to go to the restroom in style.

This is an oversimplification, but now days the free submits don't usually do anything useful... even if you go to the engine itself. The only good and reliable way to get the search engines to notice you is to get links onto pages of sites that they are already visiting on a regular basis.

The use of airwaves is free, but to use those airwaves to freeload on someone else's resources (ISP costs, equipment costs, electricity, etc) is not. It is similar to finding out that your cordless phone works on your neighbor's base set so it must be free to make calls to whomever you want, right? After all, the airwaves you are using are free and it's not your fault the neighbor has a phone line hooked up to his receiver!

Sounds like a great friend that are so rare in our busy lives. Sorry for your loss.

Sounds like the next great internet hoax to me.

David's right, the meta tags don't count for much with the search engines and the Author tag is totally ignored. It's just there for information if you want to use it. Read our forum at the family forums for Web Site Promotion for more info about getting better placement in the search engines.

Tim's absolutely right. Google does take time to get listed and links from other sites is very much necessary to have a chance. Google is indeed not the only game in town. Remember too that there are other methods of advertising too such as business cards, etc. Good luck getting listed - if you still have nothing in a month or two feel free to ask for help or if you have any other questions in the meantime just ask!

Great job guys! Way to stick with it Robert! Thanks to owatagal too! Now I have a new tool in my box as well. Thanks!

I may have done it wrong but last time I tried to do that the mysite redirected to www.mysite which is the same place so it tried to redirect and got very confused and spewed an error at me. Since both are the same directory and files I don't think it can happen. The other sites probably don't have a www symlink so they can do that. Hang tight and someone who can confirm or deny that which I said will be along and hopefully they will know a solution.

I've done 3 from 1.0 to 1.0.1 without uninstalls and they're all working fine, for what it's worth.

Congratulations to Bill and the rest of us at TCH! Robert's gonna do great. Way to go Robert!

I'm about 80% sure that it has no effect whatsoeve. In fact, a site pointing to mainsite.com and another pointing to parkedsite.com is less powerful than two sites pointing to mainsite.com. Google has made a MAJOR update to their algorithms recently. I had a site that for a certain keyword phrase moved from 141 to 3 and from 128 to 2 on another phrase. I'd say it is way more likely the new programming at Google that's responsible for all you describe.

Welcome to our gang, David! Looking forward to the interaction!

From what I've seen, almost anything within the first 72 hours can be written off as DNS propagation weirdness. If the nameserver has been set to TCH then it seems like they just haven't gotten the whole update in place. Wait if you can but if you just can't stand it any longer you can always enter a helpdesk ticket - but I doubt they can do much until the propagation is complete. Unfortunately that DNS "thing" is something bigger than any of us and requires a lot of people to cooperate.

Hi Scott, You could also force Spam Assassin to the trash at a fairly high value (7 or so?) which would get rid of the junk mail. If spam is a big contributor they'll probably like it (after the withdrawals from greeting cards and jokes online) and it should cut back on the usage as well.

Sorry to be thick, guys, but I have 2 questions. 1. Is this new SBC thing as simple as a port 25 block? 2. How can port 25 blocking help? It seems almost everyone uses 26 as an alternate so won't the spammers just go 25-26-27?

Sorry, don't have time to follow every link. From what you are saying I have to wonder if it really is Google or if it is just someone's bot calling itself Googlebot. I can't imagine Google ignoring robots files - they have a lot riding on their reputation. It also surprises me that banning a single IP could keep googlebot out - I would think they use several bots for the millions of pages they crawl. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this turns out.

What you want is called robots.txt and is a file you put out in your directory that tells the bots to leave you alone - There is a tutorial about it that will explain what to put in there. Remember, if you tell googlebot to stay away then you won't get good (or any) listing on Google for your site.

If he is using POP3 to get his Earthlink emails into Outlook Express on her computer then he has just basically given her access to any of his downloaded emails. When he reads the email it is downloaded into OE which is simply a file on her computer. At that point security basically goes out the window. Even if he was using a web browser to read the email there are caches to be concerned with. Neither earthlink or AOL screwed up and nothing mystical happened... it's just that if you use my computer I can figure out what you did in most cases.

With 19.5 million "web hosting" out there, you don't expect to be #1 do you? We could be like the #1 guys on Google for "Web hosting" and put a nasty link at the top of everyone's website - but we don't roll like that.

Awww, that's not nice! Go to google and enter "web hosting with a choice" and see if you still feel that way