#robots.txt google

[nixcraft]

Are you a content creator or a blog author who generates unique, high-quality content for a living? Have you noticed that generative AI platforms like OpenAI or CCBot use your content to train their algorithms without your consent? Don’t worry! You can block these AI crawlers from accessing your website or blog by using the robots.txt file.

Web developers must know how to add OpenAI, Google, and Common Crawl to your robots.txt to block (more like politely ask) generative AI from stealing content and profiting from it.

-> Read more: How to block AI Crawler Bots using robots.txt file

[realjdobypr]

Demystifying Technical SEO: A Beginner's Guide

The Importance of Technical SEO Having a strong online presence is crucial for any business or individual looking to succeed. While many are familiar with the basics of SEO, such as keyword optimization and content creation, technical SEO often remains a mystery. Technical SEO involves the behind-the-scenes elements that ensure your website is accessible, fast, and easy for search engines to…

[planetplymouth]

Schema Mark Up - SEO - Wordpress - Answers

I can work on Schema mark up and robots.txt implementation for WordPress users and agencies Call David 07307 607307 or E Mail hello@davidcantswim Income to local Plymouth charitySchema is a type of structured data that you can add to your WordPress website to help search engines understand your content and display it more prominently in search results. Schema markup is also used by social media…

[vera-grayfly]

Odd. Blocked cc bot and gpt bot - then Google Search Console says it can't crawl my site

Hmmm. Interesting. I blocked the common crawl bot and GPT bot on my robots.txt file - then a few days later Google Search Console says it can't index some pages due to my robots.txt file. Pretty sure CC and GPT don't have anything to do with Google

[realityfragments]

NYT Says No To Bots.

The content for training large language models and other AIs has been something I have written about before, with being able to opt out of being crawled by AI bots. The New York Times has updated it’s Terms and Conditions to disallow that – which I’ll get back to in a moment. It’s an imperfect solution for so many reasons, and as I wrote before when writing about opting out of AI bots, it seems…

[smellslikebot]

"how do I keep my art from being scraped for AI from now on?"

if you post images online, there's no 100% guaranteed way to prevent this, and you can probably assume that there's no need to remove/edit existing content. you might contest this as a matter of data privacy and workers' rights, but you might also be looking for smaller, more immediate actions to take.

...so I made this list! I can't vouch for the effectiveness of all of these, but I wanted to compile as many options as possible so you can decide what's best for you.

Discouraging data scraping and "opting out"

robots.txt - This is a file placed in a website's home directory to "ask" web crawlers not to access certain parts of a site. If you have your own website, you can edit this yourself, or you can check which crawlers a site disallows by adding /robots.txt at the end of the URL. This article has instructions for blocking some bots that scrape data for AI.

HTML metadata - DeviantArt (i know) has proposed the "noai" and "noimageai" meta tags for opting images out of machine learning datasets, while Mojeek proposed "noml". To use all three, you'd put the following in your webpages' headers:

<meta name="robots" content="noai, noimageai, noml">

Have I Been Trained? - A tool by Spawning to search for images in the LAION-5B and LAION-400M datasets and opt your images and web domain out of future model training. Spawning claims that Stability AI and Hugging Face have agreed to respect these opt-outs. Try searching for usernames!

Kudurru - A tool by Spawning (currently a Wordpress plugin) in closed beta that purportedly blocks/redirects AI scrapers from your website. I don't know much about how this one works.

ai.txt - Similar to robots.txt. A new type of permissions file for AI training proposed by Spawning.

ArtShield Watermarker - Web-based tool to add Stable Diffusion's "invisible watermark" to images, which may cause an image to be recognized as AI-generated and excluded from data scraping and/or model training. Source available on GitHub. Doesn't seem to have updated/posted on social media since last year.

Image processing... things

these are popular now, but there seems to be some confusion regarding the goal of these tools; these aren't meant to "kill" AI art, and they won't affect existing models. they won't magically guarantee full protection, so you probably shouldn't loudly announce that you're using them to try to bait AI users into responding

Glaze - UChicago's tool to add "adversarial noise" to art to disrupt style mimicry. Devs recommend glazing pictures last. Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)

WebGlaze - Free browser-based Glaze service for those who can't run Glaze locally. Request an invite by following their instructions.

Mist - Another adversarial noise tool, by Psyker Group. Runs on Windows and Linux (Nvidia GPU required) or on web with a Google Colab Notebook.

Nightshade - UChicago's tool to distort AI's recognition of features and "poison" datasets, with the goal of making it inconvenient to use images scraped without consent. The guide recommends that you do not disclose whether your art is nightshaded. Nightshade chooses a tag that's relevant to your image. You should use this word in the image's caption/alt text when you post the image online. This means the alt text will accurately describe what's in the image-- there is no reason to ever write false/mismatched alt text!!! Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)

Sanative AI - Web-based "anti-AI watermark"-- maybe comparable to Glaze and Mist. I can't find much about this one except that they won a "Responsible AI Challenge" hosted by Mozilla last year.

Just Add A Regular Watermark - It doesn't take a lot of processing power to add a watermark, so why not? Try adding complexities like warping, changes in color/opacity, and blurring to make it more annoying for an AI (or human) to remove. You could even try testing your watermark against an AI watermark remover. (the privacy policy claims that they don't keep or otherwise use your images, but use your own judgment)

given that energy consumption was the focus of some AI art criticism, I'm not sure if the benefits of these GPU-intensive tools outweigh the cost, and I'd like to know more about that. in any case, I thought that people writing alt text/image descriptions more often would've been a neat side effect of Nightshade being used, so I hope to see more of that in the future, at least!

[theminecraftbee]

Hey, I really like your profile and your posts and if you let me, I would make such an amazing mural out of it!😭❤️ If you don’t mind one of your posts could be my inspiring muse for an art project i’m working on for a client💕 You will totally get paid for it as well as a bonus; you’ll also get credits🤍

so this is fascinating to me because ON PRINCIPLE i'm fine with people including stuff i wrote in collages (although i'm not sure how 'mural' works here). i know too many webweavers to like, NOT be fine with collage. i'm also totally fine with people making "murals" based on my stuff, although i'd be wary of doing it as an art project for a client because i write fanfiction, man, and you know. copyright.

however, there's no way this blog is a real person. click through and it has all the hallmarks of a scam blog: it was made only a day ago, its reblogs don't add up to paint a picture of any specific kind of person and indeed seem to mostly be random, and of course this ask is entirely incoherent. ESPECIALLY since... i'm not an artist. i REBLOG a bunch of art but i'm not an artist.

so i'm kind of curious what this ask is trying to get me to do. i will say, bot: you DO NOT have permission from me to use stuff i didn't make but merely reblogged. i know the fearmongering answer is "gasp it's getting permission to TRAIN AN AI ON YOU" but i sort of doubt that. (for one: all it has to do is ignore robots.txt if it wants to trick you into allowing web crawlers, and if your blog is on google most unethical ai crawlers can like, access your stuff anyway. for another why would they lie about that in this specific way. for another another... that's generally not how that works.) then maybe the next answer is like, some sort of art reposting scheme? but hell if i know why they'd send an ASK about it. it's entirely possible this is a "legitimizing" move in tumblr so they can start doing bigger scams. it's also possible that with that promise of "you will totally get paid" that they're trying to scam me out of my payment information so they can steal from me.

in general this is an interesting new form of scam ask. i am going to block this blog now and recommend you do the same i just felt i had to answer this to both clarify that actually, i AM fine with you recursing my works (i am a little uncomfortable with you making money off of it though ngl) or using them in collages, but i am like 100% certain this is somehow a scam.

uh. buyer beware i guess.

[lukadjo]

Hey!

Do you have a website? A personal one or perhaps something more serious?

Whatever the case, if you don't want AI companies training on your website's contents, add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: anthropic-ai Disallow: / User-agent: Claude-Web Disallow: / User-agent: CCbot Disallow: / User-agent: FacebookBot Disallow: / User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow: / User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / User-agent: PiplBot Disallow: / User-agent: ByteSpider Disallow: / User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: / User-agent: cohere-ai Disallow: / User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: / User-agent: Omgilibot Disallow: / User-agent: Omgili Disallow: /

There are of course more and even if you added them they may not cooperate, but this should get the biggest AI companies to leave your site alone.

[mariacallous]

Less than three months after Apple quietly debuted a tool for publishers to opt out of its AI training, a number of prominent news outlets and social platforms have taken the company up on it.

WIRED can confirm that Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media, the USA Today network, and WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast, are among the many organizations opting to exclude their data from Apple’s AI training. The cold reception reflects a significant shift in both the perception and use of the robotic crawlers that have trawled the web for decades. Now that these bots play a key role in collecting AI training data, they’ve become a conflict zone over intellectual property and the future of the web.

This new tool, Applebot-Extended, is an extension to Apple’s web-crawling bot that specifically lets website owners tell Apple not to use their data for AI training. (Apple calls this “controlling data usage” in a blog post explaining how it works.) The original Applebot, announced in 2015, initially crawled the internet to power Apple’s search products like Siri and Spotlight. Recently, though, Applebot’s purpose has expanded: The data it collects can also be used to train the foundational models Apple created for its AI efforts.

Applebot-Extended is a way to respect publishers' rights, says Apple spokesperson Nadine Haija. It doesn’t actually stop the original Applebot from crawling the website—which would then impact how that website’s content appeared in Apple search products—but instead prevents that data from being used to train Apple's large language models and other generative AI projects. It is, in essence, a bot to customize how another bot works.

Publishers can block Applebot-Extended by updating a text file on their websites known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or robots.txt. This file has governed how bots go about scraping the web for decades—and like the bots themselves, it is now at the center of a larger fight over how AI gets trained. Many publishers have already updated their robots.txt files to block AI bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other major AI players.

Robots.txt allows website owners to block or permit bots on a case-by-case basis. While there’s no legal obligation for bots to adhere to what the text file says, compliance is a long-standing norm. (A norm that is sometimes ignored: Earlier this year, a WIRED investigation revealed that the AI startup Perplexity was ignoring robots.txt and surreptitiously scraping websites.)

Applebot-Extended is so new that relatively few websites block it yet. Ontario, Canada–based AI-detection startup Originality AI analyzed a sampling of 1,000 high-traffic websites last week and found that approximately 7 percent—predominantly news and media outlets—were blocking Applebot-Extended. This week, the AI agent watchdog service Dark Visitors ran its own analysis of another sampling of 1,000 high-traffic websites, finding that approximately 6 percent had the bot blocked. Taken together, these efforts suggest that the vast majority of website owners either don’t object to Apple’s AI training practices are simply unaware of the option to block Applebot-Extended.

In a separate analysis conducted this week, data journalist Ben Welsh found that just over a quarter of the news websites he surveyed (294 of 1,167 primarily English-language, US-based publications) are blocking Applebot-Extended. In comparison, Welsh found that 53 percent of the news websites in his sample block OpenAI’s bot. Google introduced its own AI-specific bot, Google-Extended, last September; it’s blocked by nearly 43 percent of those sites, a sign that Applebot-Extended may still be under the radar. As Welsh tells WIRED, though, the number has been “gradually moving” upward since he started looking.

Welsh has an ongoing project monitoring how news outlets approach major AI agents. “A bit of a divide has emerged among news publishers about whether or not they want to block these bots,” he says. “I don't have the answer to why every news organization made its decision. Obviously, we can read about many of them making licensing deals, where they're being paid in exchange for letting the bots in—maybe that's a factor.”

Last year, The New York Times reported that Apple was attempting to strike AI deals with publishers. Since then, competitors like OpenAI and Perplexity have announced partnerships with a variety of news outlets, social platforms, and other popular websites. “A lot of the largest publishers in the world are clearly taking a strategic approach,” says Originality AI founder Jon Gillham. “I think in some cases, there's a business strategy involved—like, withholding the data until a partnership agreement is in place.”

There is some evidence supporting Gillham’s theory. For example, Condé Nast websites used to block OpenAI’s web crawlers. After the company announced a partnership with OpenAI last week, it unblocked the company’s bots. (Condé Nast declined to comment on the record for this story.) Meanwhile, Buzzfeed spokesperson Juliana Clifton told WIRED that the company, which currently blocks Applebot-Extended, puts every AI web-crawling bot it can identify on its block list unless its owner has entered into a partnership—typically paid—with the company, which also owns the Huffington Post.

Because robots.txt needs to be edited manually, and there are so many new AI agents debuting, it can be difficult to keep an up-to-date block list. “People just don’t know what to block,” says Dark Visitors founder Gavin King. Dark Visitors offers a freemium service that automatically updates a client site’s robots.txt, and King says publishers make up a big portion of his clients because of copyright concerns.

Robots.txt might seem like the arcane territory of webmasters—but given its outsize importance to digital publishers in the AI age, it is now the domain of media executives. WIRED has learned that two CEOs from major media companies directly decide which bots to block.

Some outlets have explicitly noted that they block AI scraping tools because they do not currently have partnerships with their owners. “We’re blocking Applebot-Extended across all of Vox Media’s properties, as we have done with many other AI scraping tools when we don’t have a commercial agreement with the other party,” says Lauren Starke, Vox Media’s senior vice president of communications. “We believe in protecting the value of our published work.”

Others will only describe their reasoning in vague—but blunt!—terms. “The team determined, at this point in time, there was no value in allowing Applebot-Extended access to our content,” says Gannett chief communications officer Lark-Marie Antón.

Meanwhile, The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI over copyright infringement, is critical of the opt-out nature of Applebot-Extended and its ilk. “As the law and The Times' own terms of service make clear, scraping or using our content for commercial purposes is prohibited without our prior written permission,” says NYT director of external communications Charlie Stadtlander, noting that the Times will keep adding unauthorized bots to its block list as it finds them. “Importantly, copyright law still applies whether or not technical blocking measures are in place. Theft of copyrighted material is not something content owners need to opt out of.”

It’s unclear whether Apple is any closer to closing deals with publishers. If or when it does, though, the consequences of any data licensing or sharing arrangements may be visible in robots.txt files even before they are publicly announced.

“I find it fascinating that one of the most consequential technologies of our era is being developed, and the battle for its training data is playing out on this really obscure text file, in public for us all to see,” says Gillham.

[simnostalgia]

I've recently learned how to scrape websites that require a login. This took a lot of work and seemed to have very little documentation online so I decided to go ahead and write my own tutorial on how to do it.

We're using HTTrack as I think that Cyotek does basically the same thing but it's just more complicated. Plus, I'm more familiar with HTTrack and I like the way it works.

So first thing you'll do is give your project a name. This name is what the file that stores your scrape information will be called. If you need to come back to this later, you'll find that file.

Also, be sure to pick a good file-location for your scrape. It's a pain to have to restart a scrape (even if it's not from scratch) because you ran out of room on a drive. I have a secondary drive, so I'll put my scrape data there.

Next you'll put in your WEBSITE NAME and you'll hit "SET OPTIONS..."

This is where things get a little bit complicated. So when the window pops up you'll hit 'browser ID' in the tabs menu up top. You'll see this screen.

What you're doing here is giving the program the cookies that you're using to log in. You'll need two things. You'll need your cookie and the ID of your browser. To do this you'll need to go to the website you plan to scrape and log in.

Once you're logged in press F12. You'll see a page pop up at the bottom of your screen on Firefox. I believe that for chrome it's on the side. I'll be using Firefox for this demonstration but everything is located in basically the same place so if you don't have Firefox don't worry.

So you'll need to click on some link within the website. You should see the area below be populated by items. Click on one and then click 'header' and then scroll down until  you see cookies and browser id. Just copy those and put those into the corresponding text boxes in HTTrack! Be sure to add "Cookies: " before you paste your cookie text. Also make sure you have ONE space between the colon and the cookie.

Next we're going to make two stops and make sure that we hit a few more smaller options before we add the rule set. First, we'll make a stop at LINKS and click GET NON-HTML LINKS and next we'll go and find the page where we turn on "TOLERANT REQUESTS", turn on "ACCEPT COOKIES"  and select "DO NOT FOLLOW ROBOTS.TXT"

This will make sure that you're not overloading the servers, that you're getting everything from the scrape and NOT just pages, and that you're not following the websites indexing bot rules for Googlebots. Basically you want to get the pages that the website tells Google not to index!

Okay, last section. This part is a little difficult so be sure to read carefully!

So when I first started trying to do this, I kept having an issue where I kept getting logged out. I worked for hours until I realized that it's because the scraper was clicking "log out' to scrape the information and logging itself out! I tried to exclude the link by simply adding it to an exclude list but then I realized that wasn't enough.

So instead, I decided to only download certain files.  So I'm going to show you how to do that. First I want to show you the two buttons over to the side. These will help you add rules. However, once you get good at this you'll be able to write your own by hand or copy and past a rule set that you like from a text file. That's what I did!

Here is my pre-written rule set. Basically this just tells the downloader that I want ALL images, I want any item that includes the following keyword, and the -* means that I want NOTHING ELSE. The 'attach' means that I'll get all .zip files and images that are attached since the website that I'm scraping has attachments with the word 'attach' in the URL.

It would probably be a good time to look at your website and find out what key words are important if you haven't already. You can base your rule set off of mine if you want!

WARNING: It is VERY important that you add -* at the END of the list or else it will basically ignore ALL of your rules. And anything added AFTER it will ALSO be ignored.

Good to go!

And you're scraping! I was using INSIMADULT as my test.

There are a few notes to keep in mind: This may take up to several days. You'll want to leave your computer on. Also, if you need to restart a scrape from a saved file, it still has to re-verify ALL of those links that it already downloaded. It's faster that starting from scratch but it still takes a while. It's better to just let it do it's thing all in one go.

Also, if you need to cancel a scrape but want all the data that is in the process of being added already then ONLY press cancel ONCE. If you press it twice it keeps all the temp files. Like I said, it's better to let it do its thing but if you need to stop it, only press cancel once. That way it can finish up the URLs already scanned before it closes.

[dawnfelagund]

How to Block AI Bots from Scraping Your Website

The Silmarillion Writers' Guild just recently opened its draft AI policy for comment, and one thing people wanted was for us, if possible, to block AI bots from scraping the SWG website. Twelve hours ago, I had no idea if it was possible! But I spent a few hours today researching the subject, and the SWG site is now much more locked down against AI bots than it was this time yesterday.

I know I am not the only person with a website or blog or portfolio online that doesn't want their content being used to train AI. So I thought I'd put together what I learned today in hopes that it might help others.

First, two important points:

I am not an IT professional. I am a middle-school humanities teacher with degrees in psychology, teaching, and humanities. I'm self-taught where building and maintaining websites is concerned. In other words, I'm not an expert but simply passing on what I learned during my research today.

On that note, I can't help with troubleshooting on your own site or project. I wouldn't even have been able to do everything here on my own for the SWG, but thankfully my co-admin Russandol has much more tech knowledge than me and picked up where I got lost.

Step 1: Block AI Bots Using Robots.txt

If you don't even know what this is, start here:

About /robots.txt

How to write and submit a robots.txt file

If you know how to find (or create) the robots.txt file for your website, you're going to add the following lines of code to the file. (Source: DataDome, How ChatGPT & OpenAI Might Use Your Content, Now & in the Future)

User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /

AND

User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: /

Step Two: Add HTTPS Headers/Meta Tags

Unfortunately, not all bots respond to robots.txt. Img2dataset is one that recently gained some notoriety when a site owner posted in its issue queue after the bot brought his site down, asking that the bot be opt-in or at least respect robots.txt. He received a rather rude reply from the img2dataset developer. It's covered in Vice's An AI Scraping Tool Is Overwhelming Websites with Traffic.

Img2dataset requires a header tag to keep it away. (Not surprisingly, this is often a more complicated task than updating a robots.txt file. I don't think that's accidental. This is where I got stuck today in working on my Drupal site.) The header tags are "noai" and "noimageai." These function like the more familiar "noindex" and "nofollow" meta tags. When Russa and I were researching this today, we did not find a lot of information on "noai" or "noimageai," so I suspect they are very new. We used the procedure for adding "noindex" or "nofollow" and swapped in "noai" and "noimageai," and it worked for us.

Header meta tags are the same strategy DeviantArt is using to allow artists to opt out of AI scraping; artist Aimee Cozza has more in What Is DeviantArt's New "noai" and "noimageai" Meta Tag and How to Install It. Aimee's blog also has directions for how to use this strategy on WordPress, SquareSpace, Weebly, and Wix sites.

In my research today, I discovered that some webhosts provide tools for adding this code to your header through a form on the site. Check your host's knowledge base to see if you have that option.

You can also use .htaccess or add the tag directly into the HTML in the <head> section. .htaccess makes sense if you want to use the "noai" and "noimageai" tag across your entire site. The HTML solution makes sense if you want to exclude AI crawlers from specific pages.

Here are some resources on how to do this for "noindex" and "nofollow"; just swap in "noai" and "noimageai":

HubSpot, Using Noindex, Nofollow HTML Metatags: How to Tell Google Not to Index a Page in Search (very comprehensive and covers both the .htaccess and HTML solutions)

Google Search Documentation, Block Search Indexing with noindex (both .htaccess and HTML)

AngryStudio, Add noindex and nofollow to Whole Website Using htaccess

Perficient, How to Implement a NoIndex Tag (HTML)

Finally, all of this is contingent on web scrapers following the rules and etiquette of the web. As we know, many do not. Sprinkled amid the many articles I read today on blocking AI scrapers were articles on how to override blocks when scraping the web.

This will also, I suspect, be something of a game of whack-a-mole. As the img2dataset case illustrates, the previous etiquette around robots.txt was ignored in favor of a more complicated opt-out, one that many site owners either won't be aware of or won't have time/skill to implement. I would not be surprised, as the "noai" and "noimageai" tags gain traction, to see bots demanding that site owners jump through a new, different, higher, and possibly fiery hoop in order to protect the content on their sites from AI scraping. These folks serve to make a lot of money off this, which doesn't inspire me with confidence that withholding our work from their grubby hands will be an endeavor that they make easy for us.

[sa6566]

What is the best way to optimize my website for search engines?

Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines:

Keyword Research and Planning

Identify relevant keywords and phrases for your content

Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to find keywords

Plan content around target keywords

On-Page Optimization

Title Tags: Write unique, descriptive titles for each page

Meta Descriptions: Write compelling, keyword-rich summaries for each page

Header Tags: Organize content with H1, H2, H3, etc. headers

Content Optimization: Use keywords naturally, aim for 1-2% density

URL Structure: Use clean, descriptive URLs with target keywords

Technical Optimization

Page Speed: Ensure fast loading times (under 3 seconds)

Mobile-Friendliness: Ensure responsive design for mobile devices

SSL Encryption: Install an SSL certificate for secure browsing

XML Sitemap: Create and submit a sitemap to Google Search Console

Robots.txt: Optimize crawling and indexing with a robots.txt file

Content Creation and Marketing

High-Quality Content: Create informative, engaging, and valuable content

Content Marketing: Share content on social media, blogs, and guest posts

Internal Linking: Link to relevant pages on your website

Image Optimization: Use descriptive alt tags and file names

Link Building and Local SEO

Backlinks: Earn high-quality backlinks from authoritative sources

Local SEO: Claim and optimize Google My Business listing

NAP Consistency: Ensure consistent name, address, and phone number across web

Analytics and Tracking

Google Analytics: Install and track website analytics

Google Search Console: Monitor search engine rankings and traffic

Track Keyword Rankings: Monitor target keyword rankings

[topseoprocess]

How Website Technical Analysis is Beneficial for SEO

Conducting a technical analysis of your website is crucial for improving your SEO strategy and overall digital presence. This guide will explain how a comprehensive technical analysis can benefit your SEO efforts.

Introduction

Technical analysis involves evaluating various backend aspects of your website to ensure optimal performance and search engine rankings. By addressing technical issues, you can enhance user experience and improve your site's visibility. This guide will cover the key elements of a technical analysis for SEO.

1. Improving Site Speed

Site speed is a critical factor for both user experience and SEO. Faster loading times lead to lower bounce rates and higher search engine rankings. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix speed-related issues.

2. Ensuring Mobile-Friendliness

With the increasing use of mobile devices, it's essential to have a mobile-friendly website. Technical analysis helps ensure that your site is responsive and provides a seamless experience across all devices. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to ensure your site’s mobile compatibility.

3. Fixing Broken Links

Broken links can negatively impact user experience and SEO. Use tools like Screaming Frog to identify and fix broken links, ensuring that users and search engines can navigate your site efficiently.

4. Optimizing Site Structure

A well-structured site helps search engines crawl and index your pages more effectively. Technical analysis involves evaluating your site’s URL structure, internal linking, and navigation to ensure they are optimized for SEO. A clear and logical structure enhances user experience and search engine visibility.

5. Enhancing Security

Website security is crucial for protecting user data and maintaining search engine rankings. Ensure your site uses HTTPS encryption and conduct regular security audits to identify and fix vulnerabilities.

6. Improving Crawlability and Indexability

Ensure search engines can crawl and index your content effectively. Check your robots.txt file, XML sitemaps, and meta tags to ensure they are correctly configured. This ensures that search engines can access all important pages on your site.

7. Monitoring Technical SEO Metrics

Regular monitoring of technical SEO metrics such as site speed, crawl errors, and mobile usability is essential. Tools like Google Search Console provide valuable insights into your site’s technical performance and help you identify areas for improvement.

8. Using Structured Data

Implementing structured data (schema markup) helps search engines understand your content better and can enhance your site’s visibility in search results. Technical analysis includes evaluating and implementing structured data to improve your SEO.

9. Conducting Regular Audits

Technical analysis is not a one-time task but requires regular audits to ensure your site remains optimized. Keeping up with the latest SEO best practices and search engine algorithm updates is crucial for maintaining and improving your site’s performance.

For example, leveraging professional SEO company services can ensure continuous technical optimization of your site.

Conclusion

Performing a technical analysis for SEO is essential for ensuring your website’s optimal performance and search engine visibility. By improving site speed, ensuring mobile-friendliness, fixing broken links, optimizing site structure, enhancing security, and monitoring technical SEO metrics, you can enhance user experience and search engine rankings. For expert assistance in technical analysis and SEO, explore our Digital Marketing Services and SEO company.

[realityfragments]

Blocking AI Bots: The Opt Out Issue.

Those of us that create anything – at least without the crutches of a large language model like ChatGPT- are a bit concerned about our works being used to train large language models. We get no attribution, no pay, and the companies that run the models basically can just grab our work, train their models and turn around and charge customers for access to responses that our work helped create. No…

[rushsmith13]

What is SEO and how does it work?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's a set of practices aimed at improving a website's visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal is to increase the quantity and quality of organic (non-paid) traffic to a website. Here’s a breakdown of how it works:

Keyword Research: This involves identifying the words and phrases that people are using to search for information related to your site. Tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs can help you find relevant keywords with good search volume and low competition.

On-Page SEO: This focuses on optimizing individual pages on your site to rank higher. Key elements include:

Title Tags: Descriptive and keyword-rich titles for each page.

Meta Descriptions: Short summaries of page content that appear in search results.

Headings: Using proper heading tags (H1, H2, etc.) to organize content.

Content Quality: Creating high-quality, relevant content that answers users’ queries.

Internal Linking: Linking to other pages within your site to improve navigation and spread link equity.

Technical SEO: This ensures that search engines can crawl and index your site efficiently. It includes:

Site Speed: Ensuring your site loads quickly.

Mobile-Friendliness: Making sure your site is responsive and works well on mobile devices.

Sitemap: Creating and submitting a sitemap to help search engines understand the structure of your site.

Robots.txt: Directing search engines on which pages to crawl and which to ignore.

Off-Page SEO: This involves activities outside your site that impact its authority and rankings. Key elements include:

Backlinks: Getting other reputable sites to link to your content. Quality backlinks act as endorsements of your site’s credibility.

Social Signals: Engagement on social media platforms can indirectly influence rankings.

User Experience (UX): Improving the overall experience on your site, such as easy navigation, engaging content, and a clean design, helps retain visitors and reduce bounce rates.

Analytics and Monitoring: Using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your site’s performance, monitor traffic sources, and adjust strategies based on data.

SEO is an ongoing process since search engines frequently update their algorithms. Staying current with SEO best practices and adapting to changes is crucial for maintaining and improving your site's rankings.

[babbybones]

Oekaki updatez...

Monster Kidz Oekaki is still up and i'd like to keep it that way, but i need to give it some more attention and keep people updated on what's going on/what my plans are for it. so let me jot some thoughts down...

data scraping for machine learning: this has been a concern for a lot of artists as of late, so I've added a robots.txt file and an ai.txt file (as per the opt-out standard proposed by Spawning.ai) to the site in an effort to keep out as many web crawlers for AI as possible. the site will still be indexed by search engines and the Internet Archive. as an additional measure, later tonight I'll try adding "noai", "noimageai", and "noml" HTML meta tags to the site (this would probably be quick and easy to do but i'm soooo sleepy 🛌)

enabling uploads: right now, most users can only post art by drawing in one of the oekaki applets in the browser. i've already given this some thought for a while now, but it seems like artist-oriented spaces online have been dwindling lately, so i'd like to give upload privileges to anyone who's already made a drawing on the oekaki and make a google form for those who haven't (just to confirm who you are/that you won't use the feature maliciously). i would probably set some ground rules like "don't spam uploads"

rules: i'd like to make the rules a little less anal. like, ok, it's no skin off my ass if some kid draws freddy fazbear even though i hope scott cawthon's whole empire explodes. i should also add rules pertaining to uploads, which means i'm probably going to have to address AI generated content. on one hand i hate how, say, deviantart's front page is loaded with bland, tacky, "trending on artstation"-ass AI generated shit (among other issues i have with the medium) but on the other hand i have no interest in trying to interrogate someone about whether they're a Real Artist or scream at someone with the rage of 1,000 scorned concept artists for referencing an AI generated image someone else posted, or something. so i'm not sure how to tackle this tastefully

"Branding": i'm wondering if i should present this as less of a UTDR Oekaki and more of a General Purpose Oekaki with a monster theming. functionally, there wouldn't be much of a difference, but maybe the oekaki could have its own mascot

fun stuff: is having a poll sort of "obsolete" now because of tumblr polls, or should I keep it...? i'd also like to come up with ideas for Things To Do like weekly/monthly art prompts, or maybe games/events like a splatfest/artfight type thing. if you have any ideas of your own, let me know

boring stuff: i need to figure out how to set up automated backups, so i guess i'll do that sometime soon... i should also update the oekaki software sometime (this is scary because i've made a lot of custom edits to everything)

Money: well this costs money to host so I might put a ko-fi link for donations somewhere... at some point... maybe.......