This news means BIG things for AutoMapIt customers since FTP is no longer a necessity… you don’t need to host the sitemap on your own site, you just need to add a link to your robots.txt file that points to your sitemap on AutoMapIt’s servers! No need for FTP and no need to remember to make your own uploads… Once you signup and activate your domain, your site will be picked up by the search engines!

It has never been easier to make sitemaps for your website than it is at AutoMapIt right now!

Google has used these headers when requesting your pages for years and I’ve written about how they can help your website before, but the crawlers at AutoMapIt haven’t adopted this practice until now.

Before you can take advantage of this bandwidth saving feature, you will need to make sure that your site supports this HTTP header request. The Header Checker here at AutoMapIt has been re-designed to show you whether your server supports this feature or not. The bottom line of the header report states whether your website will ~likely~ support this because depending on the URL that you check, it may or may not hold true for other pages of yours.

As long as the Header Checker reports that your site supports the If-Modified-Since header, there is nothing else for you to do. When AutoMapIt crawls your pages, we will automatically ask if the page has been modified since the last time we checked it. If there have been no changes, the data from the last crawl will be used and we will not download the page from your site. The extreme scenario is that this will help you save up to 7.5 GB of bandwidth per update, but this will depend on how many URLs you have and how large your files are.

What gets in the way?

Apache is built to handle these headers automatically, no tweaking needed… unless your URLs are parsed through the PHP interpreter or other server-side ‘page creators’. I know for a fact that PHP breaks this ability on Apache… not sure of other servers or pre-processing languages (ASP, PERL, ColdFusion, RUby, Python, etc.). I have a fix for this in PHP by downloading my ServHead zip file (unzip it and include() the file into your pages at the top of the page).

This file is intended to be included into your pages and works with static files passed through the PHP interpreter. If your pages are entirely generated from a database (php-nuke, osCommerce, Joomla, phpBB, and many many more), then this script will require a tweak to get the lastmod datestamp from your database. Of course, if you can’t get this to work yourself, I can be contracted to make it work for a small fee The code in that zip is free for you to use and modify, but it is my code… I’m keeping the rights to it so that I can continue to offer it for free… personal or commercial use.

Preserving Net Neutrality is the only way to preserve true freedom. To level the playing field for all and to allow each individual person to make their own individual choices about what to read, listen to, view, or contribute.

The corporations that charge users for their connection are already profitable. ‘Usage taxes’ by these corporations is un-american in that we, the people, are not represented by these corporations. They serve their own interests which is precisely why the United States of America declared her independence from an entity that served it’s own interest just over 200 years ago.

How can one promote the fall of Net Neutrality and still declare themselves an American? This goes against the basic ideals behind being an American. Protect this country, and in fact, the world by promoting free speech and preserving Net Neutrality. Vote NO for the dictators who represent their own corporate interests and Vote YES for the vast majority of individuals to have un-fettered access to information and services on the web.

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If you, the people, are interested in what the major media corporations are doing to prevent your free and open access to the web, please visit the Net Neutrality website.

Corporations are currently trying to control what you can and cannot view on the web as well as who gets to use their ‘fast lane’ while the rest of us are relegated to their slowest traffic lanes. You pay to use their connection… why should the places you visit have to pay as well? What if your favorite sites are so slow that you are practically required to use the corporations own (more expensive, less open) services?

This is not a doomsday scenario… it is happening now according to the corporations own words. If the USA (free speech, no taxation without representation) can do this and get away with it… what hope is there for countries that are supposedly “not as free as America”? Please visit the Net Neutrality website and stand up for yourself and others.

Because the advertising is direct, this means higher profits for publishers AND lower fees for advertisers! Since the ad-centers such as AdWords and text-link-ads aren’t playing middleman, the publishers can keep 100% of the revenue and charge lower prices to make more! Advertisers are able to find websites that offer direct advertising and don’t have to pay premiums that would go to the brokers.

This isn’t a ‘complete’ no-brainer… what are ads on your site worth? How much should you pay for advertising? This is where the ‘real world’ comes in. Don’t charge more than you would pay for a similar ad, and don’t pay for ads that don’t bring in good traffic. Time to pay closer attention to your stats and referrer logs!

The basic idea is that you try to remove single points of income or traffic from your site. I don’t mean remove Google as a source of traffic, but if they account for more than 75% your traffic and for whatever reason, they change their algo and shake you loose… you wouldn’t be getting any more users to your site. If the only source of income for your site is Google Adsense (or ONLY any other single source) and that source dries up by going out of business, canceling your membership, or any other problems… you wouldn’t be making anything else from your site.

With multiple sources of traffic, with multiple revenue streams… your site will stand the test of time and weather what comes it’s way. The article at tropicalseo.com will give you specific metrics to measure your site against that will help make your site more defensible, virtually eliminating the risk that any single change in a factor outside of your control will permanently sink your website.

Most session IDs use a 32 character string of numbers 0-9 and letters A-F (hex-based). This means 16 possibilities for each character to the 32 (character) power or 3 with 38 zeroes after it… yup, a lot of potential page with different URLs all saying the exact same thing as each other. By stripping out the session IDs, these pages are consolidated into one.

Another issue that a tool like this could help to fix would be the ability to exclude URLs with certain keys or key/value pairs altogether. Yes, AutoMapIt has these as well. These types of filters are handy for skipping past pages such as action=buynow or redirect_to=htpp:///xxxxxx which typically all look the same and don’t really contain any unique content to the other pages like these…

Imagine a 1,000 page catalog… every item description page has a link to a ‘print version’, ‘buy now’, ‘tell-a-friend’… it usually doesn’t matter which product is shown… the tell-a-friend has the same form on it with a unique identifier. The only difference between one page and the other is the product ID code. Aside from possible a 6-8 digit ID number, those are 1,000 tell-a-friend pages that are exactly the same as each other. Plus 1,000 buy now pages that are exactly like each other… and 1,000 pages worth of print versions exactly like their parent pages.

That’s a TON of bandwidth that can be saved by using filters and tools like Dynamic URL Rewriting from Yahoo! Well, Yahoo has taken the first step toward this bright future and hopefully webmasters can continue to help Yahoo help the webmasters.

If you haven’t done so already, get over to Yahoo! and setup your filters… then come back to AutoMapIt and use the same filters AND MORE to help out the other search engines.

tags: Dynamic URL Rewriting, sitemap, seo

It’s about a new trend in making money for websites. I can back this up from an SEO perspective… if you build a unique and genuinely useful website, you are almost doomed to succeed. It seems the new trend will favor sites that step away from the pack and concern themselves with visitors first and income… also first.

Actually, this has been true for a good, long time. The pioneers and groundbreakers have traditionally done well, but so have many who have taken a ‘repeat’ idea and pushed it’s boundaries into new territory. One thing about most internet success stories… they focus on the visitors and what keeps them coming back. From features to service, putting your customers first is good business sense.

AutoMapIt contains many advanced features and stats. Sometimes it helps to ask what something means or how to make changes to improve your site. This Live Help system will keep me in closer contact with you for those times that you need a little more information than what’s written on the page.

After this, my spiders will visit your website and analyze the data it collects. You will have 6 sitemap formats uploaded to your website automatically, or available for download within minutes. As always, AutoMapIt will continue to spider your website from time to time in order to create updated sitemaps regularly. We still offer site search for your website with representative images for each of your pages in the search results. Just add a small bit of code to your pages and AutoMapIt will show your product next to the link in the search results.

tags: google sitemaps, sitemap generator

AutoMapIt has long used a simple spider to handle all of the information that I try to cram into your site stats. The philosophy behind this new technology uses ants as inspiration. The new ants each work individually from cached copies of your pages that the scout ants bring back to the anthill. Once we have your pages stored in the anthill, an army of statistic-grabbing ants sinks their mandibles into your content and determines keyword analysis, populates the site search engine that I offer, checks for broken links, webmaster guidelines violations, and overall spiderability and health of your site.

This new technology allows me to produce sitemaps for you in a fraction of the time that it used to take meaning a shorter time to wait for your sitemaps and a more regular spidering schedule. because of the architecture, I can now deliver your sitemaps to your server before AutoMapIt finishes calculating the additional stats!

The server load has overall been reduced due to this upgrade from about 10MB per running spider down to about 1MB per ant which allows me to coordinate the timing better and shift the number of ants crawling sites to increase the stats-ants when there are fewer sites to be crawled.

I have also added an adaptive crawling feature since the spider was sped up so fast. This technology senses when your server is having a difficult time trying to keep up with the spider and slows the rate of page requests down to match your servers rate of comfortability. The system adds a longer delay between crawling your pages whenever your server slows down, automatically!