Recently in seo Category

Most search engines' spiders obey the robots.txt commands.

Basically you can instruct a search engine to not index certain parts of your site or disallow some spiders from accessing your site entirely.

Unfortunately some search engine spiders are either badly written or intentionally evil and totally ignore any commands you might try to pass them via the robots.txt

One such robot is Voila.

Voila identifies itself with the UserAgent string:

VoilaBot BETA 1.2

Depending on the type of site you have you're probably best advised to block it entirely.

If you have access to iptables then you can simply issue a series of commands similar to this one:

iptables -I INPUT -s 81.52.143.15 -j DROP

I'm trying to get a full list of the IP ranges used by Voila, but so far I've found two which you could block. They are:

193.252.148.0/23
81.52.142.0/23

On one server the VoilaBot had caused the sites to become completely unresponsive with the load average climbing constantly!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Cuil Killing Websites?
• Got Search Engine Crawl Issues
• New Google Webmaster Tool Aids Robots.txt Creation
• Analyze and create robots.txt files in Google

Dave Davis from RedFly Marketing has an excellent interview with Aaron Wall of SEO Book

It looks like the latest pagerank update is currently underway.

Based on previous updates this could take several days to complete and stabilise.

Some people will probably be very happy, while others won't be ....

Such is the way

SeoMoz are running a survey on search marketing / SEO

I tried to complete it earlier, but my connection was a bit flaky!