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‘Twas the night before Google, when all through the web,
Not a spider was crawling, not even MSN;
The websites were hosted on servers with care,
In hopes that one Googlebot soon would be there;

My pages were organized all usable and light,
While visions of traffic danced in my sights;
Reading client requests, and wearing my cap,
It’s time to settle down to build that image map,

When deep in my web logs there arose such a clatter,
I logged into cPanel, what could be the matter?
Away to Excel I flew like a flash,
Tore open the data and thought of the cash.

Unmistakable footprint of a busy web page page
Showed the luster of activity in spite of its age,
When, what to my wondering eyes should I see,
But a miniature robot, crawling A, B, and C.

An undefined program, so lively and quick,
I though in a moment it must be a trick.
More rapid than eagles its code blocks they came,
What was this user-agent with unrecognized name?

64.68.92.29!
72.14.207.99!
The referrers kept coming and I hoped they would stay,
Don’t dash away! dash away! Oh don’t dash away!

For I knew that these robots were only the start,
To many more visits into my shopping cart
So into the index the scrapers they drew,
Servers full of content, and a little spam too.

And then, in a fortnight, I saw in my logs
That traffic had come to visit my blog.
As I wrote another post, with contextual ads,
My bank account did grow, more money I had.

It all seemed so easy, this cash flow at hand,
How was I to know most considered it spam;
Ad blocks as menus, and more ads as text,
Who needs real content when you’re paying the rent.

When it finally happened I cursed my bad luck,
My traffic was gone, I screamed out “Oh
Why did it happen, and happen to me
An update called Florida, I was not filled with glee;

Back to the drawing board I started anew,
And built another site with ads from Yahoo;
Google had loved me and now it did not,
But never would I yield to some spidering bot.

My profits returned, still it wasn’t the same
Each night in my sleep I would hear the bots name;
Googlebot oh Googlebot, please come back to me,
I promise I’ll be good, come back and you’ll see;

The bot it did come with a new sheriff in town
Matt Cutts was him name and he wore a big crown,
Fighting spam was his game and my he was good,
At detecting hidden text and a bad neighborhood;

He wrote in his blog, to his team gave a whistle,
When spam is too much, well launch another missile.
But I heard him exclaim, as he continued the fight,
SEARCH TRAFFIC TO ALL, IF YOU BUILD A GOOD SITE.”

Merry Christmas Everyone!

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