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Do manual web crawling and look up site maps
When should you not use shortened urls?
Get traffic stats of any website with Chrome and Firefox

Do manual web crawling and look up site maps

Posted: 21 Jan 2010 06:37 AM PST

Any one using a search engine is aware of crawlers that move across the internet finding us relevant links trying to go along with the relevancy of search key word that you enter. One of the main ideas of Search crawlers is to look up relevancy from one site to another and using Page Ranks its easier for it to find relevant information. A web crawler decides that the higher the page rank the more relevant is the information.

Google has tried allowing use to crawl the web for results manually byintroducing Wonder Wheel and Google Swirl for image search. These tools are high on eye candy but I think need to improve on relevancy of results. When I first used walk2web I was impressed with it’s presentation style but did not really use it much for getting to know how useful it can be.

web_crawling_walk2web

About Walk2Web

Walk2Web allows you to enter a URL of a website you want to navigate or look deeper into and has a cool interface to show important links.
It usually shows to the right hand corner links with some basic information. You can click on the link and takes your to the blog article directly.
I gives you something of a site map of the URL you are digging deeper into. With internal links and other links you can get start exploring from one link to another which basically resembles manual crawling. While you click individual link it also produces a screen-shot to the right hand side.
This tool can be quite useful to get a visual simulation of how your website will be looked up or deconstructed by a search engine.
Apart from this I think its a must use for blog owners. As often blogs keep growing and your website might not well organized. How well organized or unorganized your blog site is can be easily found out by checking out how you can make your way around on the website.

Take the example of Devils Workshop. If you enter the keywords ‘Join Devils Workshop‘ in Google you will get a link to our page which has details on joining us. This is great but if you join DW you also end up automatically joining rtBlogs network. One of our blogs is Facebooknol which is dedicated to Facebook related to posts.

If you enter on Google ‘Join Facebooknol‘ you will not get a link to Facebooknol for joining up. I was unaware of this until I used Walk2Web which did not show ‘how to join’ links with all our blogs except Dw when crawling through their internal links.

Guess it helped us a bit to figure our and start working on a plan to clean up our blogs better. Hope you too find it useful. Do let me know through your comments.

Link: Walk2Web

This Post Do manual web crawling and look up site maps is Published on Devils Workshop .

When should you not use shortened urls?

Posted: 21 Jan 2010 02:41 AM PST

URL shortener services are dime a dozen out there on the internet and with the popularity and rise of Twitter I do not think that its about to change any time soon.

At DW we have covered many posts on short URLs from Bit.Ly to Goo.gl. There is a growing trend of some people using short URLs at places other than Twitter and that seems to be a disturbing trend. So I thought I would list down instances where I personally feel a shortened URL is inappropriate.

url_shorteners

Facebook:

Shortened URL on Twitter is fine as sharing a link to a blog can be almost impossible within the limit of 140 chars. But that rule doesn’t apply to Facebook and there is no reason to share short URL links on Facebook. Even if you do share a short url make sure you have comments along them so that the person who might click on the short URL will know its a valid link you are endorsing. One of the first virus to have infected Facebook was spread through a short URL. It would send private messages to people with accounts with short URL. People ended up clicking on it.

Twitter:

There is no option but to use shortened URLs on Twitter but never post a link without a comments. You have no idea for checking where that short URL is leading, and hence accompanying text msg about what the URL is all about an absolute necessity.

Email:

Again the same rule applies that if you do post a short URL you have to accompany with a description of where the URL leads the person clicking on it. I have not seen this trend often on Emails but it does happen sometimes. It can be annoying to the person reading as he has no way of checking where the URL leads him. Ideally never use short URL in emails as it seems like either you are spamming or maybe you want to hide the link for some reason.

I follow these rules and its better to have your own rules especially if your are a blogger. Short urls are great for Twitter but also a very handy way for sending you down to a infected website and making you vulnerable.

My advice is avoid using a shortened URL when ever possible. What do you think?

This Post When should you not use shortened urls? is Published on Devils Workshop .

Get traffic stats of any website with Chrome and Firefox

Posted: 20 Jan 2010 10:45 PM PST

If you are using Chrome and interested in stats about the website you are viewing on the browser you will love this extension for Chrome. Its named SitezMeter and allows the user to easily look up details while on a website. About 3 months ago I did review Alexa toolbar for Firefox and started to search for something similar for Chrome. Here I came across SitezMeter extension for Chrome.

SitezMeter add-on can be really handy for SEO and SEM specialist along with being a must have for webmasters and website owners.

sitemeterz

About SiteMeterz

SiteMeterz works with both Firefox and Chrome. It displays information you need in a pop up instead of providing you with links to some website.
The pop up includes an overview of stats of the website you are viewing with the browser.
I could see Google Page Rank, Alexa Ranking and Compete Rank.
I could also compare websites and their relevant stats within the extension or add-on.
There were some graphs to make the stats more interesting but I do not think they could be called a serious representation of data. It is more sensible to think of the graphs as representative of trends.

Go ahead and try out if you like looking up site traffic details and rankings. If you have Firefox click here for the add-on. If you have Chrome click here to install the extension.

This Post Get traffic stats of any website with Chrome and Firefox is Published on Devils Workshop .