The Venture Skills blog made it’s first post one year today, the post stamps are incorrect by the way I was fiddling with them when testing the posts but this is the opening lines…
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So sometimes you get asked unusual questions in my inbox this morning was a letter from a nice person called Neyma I won’t publish all of it just the bit relevant to this post.
but for now, I have a theoretical question that you may be inclined to
answer -Is it possible to rip the entire SU database? Can it be done in
one-click or would a bot have to be set? How hard would this be? what
sort of information could we get?
what about for some of the other Social sites?
For Neyma; not all, bot, not easy, stuff, yes
Now I’m sure my emailer has a perfect reasonable reason for theorising about wanting to rip the entire Stumbleupon database but I have a feeling Ebay would not be impressed. So I thought would discuss content scraping how its done and suggest some ways to prevent it.
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I was chatting to a friend the other day about his newly created site (it looked really sweet) and I was looking at the CSS (very neat) but misstyped the URL my whole world came down no literally not only was he using IIS to host the site 
he had no custom error pages.
A few days later I noticed he was starting to pay attention to this problem, interesting articles started to appear in his del.icio.us account, and I started to think about the humble 404 and other error messages.
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We rely on knowing who is coming to our site and how they got their our conversion goals are set by this and sometimes our authentication systems rely on them but what are these concepts and how can we abuse use them.
A user agent is the client application used with a particular network protocol; the phrase is most commonly used in reference to those which access the World Wide Web. Web user agents range from web browsers to search engine crawlers (”spiders”), as well as mobile phones, screen readers and braille browsers used by people with disabilities. When Internet users visit a web site, a text string is generally sent to identify the user agent to the server. This forms part of the HTTP request, prefixed with User-agent: or User-Agent: and typically includes information such as the application name, version, host operating system, and language. Bots, such as web crawlers, often also include a URL and/or e-mail address so that the webmaster can contact the operator of the bot.
A recent Google Webmaster blog post finally put the last nail into the coffin with regards to content substitution or to give it the demonic blackhat term Cloaking…
A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
Source:http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-uses-of-flash.html
So its ok for us to write text and then substitute that text with a flash or image file, now to be fair most SEO I think have been doing this with CSS image substitution for some time, but this is the first time that I have seen Google come out and say that its ok to use these techniques.
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So now more or less fully restored Hackday I thought I would introduce a few of the more interesting concepts that were being banded around the event some of which are relevant to search engines and online presence. However before getting to anything interesting I thought it was discussing some of the under pinning technologies.
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed," "web feed," or "channel," contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually. source: wikipedia
Georss is an extension to the standard rss which provides additional location awareness tags in their simplest form these are
<geo:lat></geo:lat> <geo:long></geo:long>
Yep that’s longitude and latitude so now an RSS node can be given a geographical location but why would you want to do this?
Yahoo amongst others have been busy adding georss to a range of products and services including maps and Flickr both are great examples of what can be done.
Do you have a question, perhaps you been trawling the forums, and your question has gone unanswered, maybe your not sure how to word your question or your afraid you would be laughed at?
We want to help and will be running a weekly column where we will try to get you the answer, and if we don’t know the answer we will try and find it for you. So what sorts of questions can or will we answer?
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I know its been done to death but I thought I would bring you my take on the big thing from Google this month Google Gears for those who have been living on mars (hows the weather?) Google Gears is a small application designed to help you use Google services offline the first service to get the gears treatment is Google Reader (an RSS reader in case you missed that while on mars to!)
It works! no it really does work I’m sitting in the middle of a forest on a grey day writing this blog post (The Boss is making us do away days!) while looking through the various feeds I have in my feed reader on my windows partition, interestingly their is some differences between Mac (who install gears via a firefox extension) and windows versions with the windows version being significantly bigger. While in Offline mode Google reader performs well but you do notice the lack of search facilities more, it seems a sham that with such a powerful data set at your finger tips their is no obvious way to mine the data. Read the rest of this entry »
How British is your site? Is it British enough to get into google.co.uk?
Regardless of where you come from you will no doubt have a regional Google be it China or Brazil but getting into these various search engines can at times be difficult unless you know what to look for.
We have discussed this subject before but now I want to give some sort of ranking to the various factors so here is our guide to Geo Targeting.
Through out this article we refer to regional rather then country tld (top level domain) and search engine, while most regional search engines are country specific a couple are not and with new domain names making up a series of countries such as .eu (urgh Europe 
) we are starting to have to think of Geo Targeting on many levels.
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I’m getting a little bit excited, less then 2 weeks to go till myself and David Castle open All about Asking a two day SEO residential course here in the UK in Nottingham.
We have announced details of couple of the workshops
I’m particularly looking forward to semantic markup and search engine optimisation, this is a subject that’s dear to my heart and I have been busy preparing several practical tutorials and bits for people, along with a set of scripts, css and html templates for people to take away. The second workshop which has been announced in detail is getting in the right search engine. This workshop is focusing on getting your site into the various search engines, regional, local mobile etc. Again its really a practical session with everything from XHTML geo targetting tracks to working with CHTML being discussed and played with.
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