One thing is
for sure, you don't want to spend hours, perhaps days,
months, or years on a website to have some stupid little
mistake get your site dropped or never even listed in
the search engines. There are a lot of rules that
search engines have created to block out what they call
spammers, so don't kid yourself by telling yourself
you are not an evil spammer. As the courts might say,
ignorance of the law is no excuse. So what kind
of horrific mistake could sneak upon you and possibly
ruin all your hard work?
When I first starting making web pages, I created basic
templates that I used for an entire site. Of course
it's great to have a uniformed look for your site, but
what if you had a screw up on a template you used over
and over again. What kind of screw up? How about hidden
text or a hidden link? You see the old WYSIWIG editors,
like the older versions of FrontPage sometimes leave
behind links within the html code even after you've
deleted the link. As far as hidden text, that can happen
by not paying attention to what you are doing.
If you make hundreds of pages eventually you might accidentally
color some of your text the same as your background.
You say it's not likely. I wouldn't think so either,
but it's happened to me several times. If you use the
mistake ridden template over and over again, you might
have a problem. It's generally understood that search
engines frown on hidden text and links. How many will
they overlook is anybody's guess. So if you haven't
checked your old web pages, it might be profitable to
check out your html code. Look for urls with no link
text in the code. You can usually find hidden text by
simply highlighting your webpage in your browser.
Solutions
If you find out you have the problem over hundreds
or thousands of pages, it might be worth investing in
Microsoft FrontPage 2003. It has a split screen that
helps in finding html errors, and best of all you can
do a site wide search and replace. The software will
find the code you search for, and all you have to do
is leave the replacement code box blank, thus removing
the offending hidden link.
The good news is that there are some other ways
to avoid this problem altogether. You can learn CSS
for template designs for instance. A trick I like to
use is Server Side Includes (SSI) for my links menu.
To make it work you have to have two things, a code
like this <!--#include virtual="/menu.htm" -->
with your links menu page inside the code, and your
server has to be set to take it. Most servers are automatically
set to use SSI includes in shtml pages, but most web
hosts allow you to pick .html or .htm pages to parse.
The only thing to keep in mind is it puts an extra task
for the server to perform on each and every page that
contains the extension you choose to parse. For example
one of my web hosts has in their control panel a apache
handler section. I simply go there put server-parsed
in the Handler box, .htm in the extension box, and click
add. That's it. Now if I need to add a link to my menu
I change one page the menu.htm page and I'm done.
Article
written by webmaster of Webmaster Tips.. |
