WebProNews

Bots Take The Fun Out Of Online Poker

The government doesn't need to kill online poker. Bots will do it for them. Feel like chancing your money with an arithmetic machine? Neither does anybody else.

Fear The Bots For Quality Score

Since Google added a new layer of complexity to the AdWords system this year in the form of Quality Score, not a lot has been published about how it works or why it does a certain thing.

Confusing Search Engine Bots?

There are two primary factors to getting a page ranked - discovery and relevancy. By and large, search engines are clever creatures, but the very best webmasters will always send out the right signals to gently guide the search engines, and in return receive great rankings for their content. Search engines discover content using their bots (or ‘crawlers’), and determine relevancy (and by extension ranking) using advanced algorithms.

Brand Protection vs. Link Baiting

Any publicity is good publicity...

Brand Your Own AIM, But Add Value

AOL today is releasing its AOL Instant Messenger code to developers.

Man DDoSed eBay With 20K Bots

The wheels of justice finally turned up a guilty verdict in a 2003 case where an Oregon man, working with others, used a 20,000 PC bot network to hit eBay with a DDoS attack.

Bots, Aggregation and Content Creation

There is a helpful post of Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web that takes a balanced look at the topic of Bots and Content Creation / Aggregation.

Using mod_rewrite against stupid comment spam bots...

You'd think the comment spammers would be a bit smarter, but apparently not. Over 80% of all attempted spam hits on my site provide no HTTP Referer data.

Risky Tactics That Lure Search Bots Into Your Site

If you've got one or a few pages in Yahoo's index but are having trouble getting more pages indexed one thing that might work is putting links to your deeper, unindexed pages high in the code of the pages that are indexed.

Search Bots Behaving Badly

In a classic bit of Internet history (1998/12/30), a newsgroup member explained the GoogleBot to a poster complaining of its rude behavior.