I'm making something that requires me to pass information from one domain to a subdomain. The subdomain would be in an iframe on the domain. I know I can use cookies, sessions, or a database. But I'm trying to save processing time so I thought about using the referrer. I know that some people turn the referrer off for some reason, but exactly just how many. If they do, this won't work for them.
Oh and I can't use the URL to pass information.
I'd say < 0.001 % of all Internet users have ever heard about referrers. Even a smaller portion of them will be willing to switch them off. Even a smaller number of them will be able to.
Related
What's another way, instead of recaptcha, to protect the booting page?
My customers do not like to be filling these things out and I'm out of ideas
Without more details, it will be difficult to know what is appropriate for your situation. Here are some things that may or may not work for you depending on your situation:
Instead of a CAPTCHA use a simple question. Arithmetic perhaps. Or asking someone to type a word that is undistorted rather than distorted like a CAPTCHA. Or having someone always type the same word into a box. This is nowhere near as strong as a CAPTCHA, but it may be enough depending on your needs.
Password protect your site. Depending on your needs, you can use a shared password, individual accounts specific to your site, or something like Facebook Connect / OAuth / OpenID.
You can try a robots.txt file, but that will only keep well-behaved robots away. Attackers will, of course, ignore it.
You can firewall off your server so people can only access it from a certain subnet. If everyone using the site has access to the same VPN, then they can use VPN to access the site.
If you don't like any of #Trott's suggestions - A simple CAPTCHA replacement, but I am not sure for how long (a somewhat sophisticated attacker could crack it):
Add this into your form:
<input name="dummy" value="" style="display: hidden"/>
Then in your server code,
if params['dummy'].empty?
# user
else
# spambot!
end
This relies on spambots compulsively filling out unknown form fields (so that they don't leave out any mandatory ones); but a user will never see it, and thus always leave empty.
I have a client who has brought a truck load of domains he wants me to redirect to his site.
A few of them are the same name with different top level domains (mysite.com, mysite.co.uk etc etc) but a lot of them are keyword related (mylocation-businessType.com etc etc).
I am wondering if either of these will be negative for SEO. I am thinking the top level domain changes will be fine, and expected by google, but the keywords might be views as a bit hacky?
What are the good people of stackoverflow's view on this?
If they are redirected properly then they'll have no effect at all. The only advantage will be if the name makes sense and a user might type it in. eg. identical names with and without hyphens.
For this situation all of the other answers are correct, you won't get any benefits in Pagerank, etc. and it wouldn't be useful except to pickup direct traffic to your domain names that you are then redirecting.
How would it affect your SEO though? That's a little trickier. Two ways of looking at it:
1.) Competitors could do this to you and it'd be completely out of your control. If redirecting a bunch of domains did any real harm to rankings it'd be a great way to do negative SEO, or "Google Bowling," and could be used to take down a site's rankings. That isn't the case though, so it probably wouldn't have too much of a negative effect.
UNLESS
2.) The nameservers for your redirected domains match the nameservers for your main domain. Pointing all domains to the same set of nameservers will help show that all domains are under the control of the same webmaster.
Even if you are using different nameservers and using 301 redirects as recommended, if the server with your redirects comes back to (at least) the same Class C IP address as your main site's server, a search engine would still be able to tie you together as likely being run by the same owner.
Either of these setups can identify you as the source of the redirects and devalue the ranking ability of your main site since there is a much higher likelihood the redirects are coming from you.
winwaed is correct. If you're doing a proper 301 redirect, the other domains are only valuable if people directly type them in. They won't rank, won't get any link juice, and won't get any inbound links. If you do seed inbound links, google will treat them as if they point to the target of your 301 redirect. It's a waste of time to just directly do that for SEO purposes.
The way to use each of those domains for SEO would be to build a bit of unique content on each one, get some inbound links, and then link out to your target page. Not really worth doing unless you really spend a lot of time at it, and google still tends to penalize obvious gaming of the system like that.
They won't contribute toward ranking, however keyword domains do get some amount of advantage for those terms. So, the way to use them is to build sites on all of them and funnel traffic to the main site.
Of course, they can also be used for extra backlinks, but you really want different C class IP addresses from the servers. For that reason you might want to go with SEO hosting.
Matt Cutts from Google explained it in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA
and here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a70ygsHgvMw
He also said if he was doing this, he would redirect each of sites to the target sites' different important pages. If the redirected domains had pageranks before, they will still flow pagerank (not exactly but a lower pagerank).
So, we're trying to up our application in the rankings in the search engines, and one way our SEO guy told us to do that was to register similar domains...for example we have something like
http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html
so..we acquired the domain parks.com (again just an example).
Now when people go to http://www.parks.com ...we want it to display the content of http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html.
I could just put a forwarding page there, but from what i've been told that makes us look bad because it's technically a permanent redirect..and we're trying to get higher in the search engine rankings, not lower.
Is this a situation where we would use the Server.Transfer method of ASP.net?
How are situations like this handled, because I've defiantly seen this done by many websites.
We also don't want to cheat the system, we are showing relevant content and not spam or tricking customers in anyway, so the proper way to do achieve what i'm looking for would be great.
Thanks
Use your "similar" domain names to host individual and targetted landing pages that will point to your master content.
It's easier to manage and you will get a higher conversion rate.
Having to create individual page will force you to write relevent content and will increase the popularity of the page.
I also suggest you to not only build landing pages, but mini sites (of few pages).
SEO is sa very high demanding task.
Regarding technical aspects: Server.Transfer is what you should use. Never use Response.Redirect, Google and other search engines will drop your ranking.
I used permanent URL rewrite in the past. I changed my website and since lots of traffic was coming from others website linking mine, I wanted to have a permanent solution.
Read more about URL rewriting : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx
I work for an ISP and I have a server with thousands of users 10MB of free storage. They get this free storage with every e-mail account they have with us. An example of a users storage address: http://users.example.com/~username/
One problem I can see is scanning the server for user names to see what accounts are available, basically getting a list of all our customers valid e-mail addresses. This would be very, very bad.
So I'm wanting to redirect to our homepage if someone comes across a users account that is empty (I'd say 90% of them are completely empty). I also do not want to simply -Indexes them and use a custom 403 because the few customers that do use them, want +Indexes.
I know I can always just tell the customers to put a htaccess file in their directory with Options +indexes if they want directory listing, but that's a last resort.
How can I make it pretty much impossible to tell what accounts are on the server but not in use at all?
I can't see a way to do this with Apache rules alone - and even if, it would be pretty expensive, scanning for files on every incoming request.
I would build a script that puts the appropriate .htaccess file, redirecting to your home page, into every completely empty account.
Maybe run it hourly, and make users aware that if they populate a directory for the first time, it may take up to an hour until their changes take place? I think that would be a reasonable time frame.
I am using an IP location lookup to display localised prices to customers depending on whether they are visiting from the UK, US or general EU and defaulting to the US price if the location can't be determined.
I could easily force the system to believe I'm from a specific country for testing but still there is no way of knowing for sure that it's displaying correctly when a visitor from abroad accesses my site. Is the use of some proxy the only viable way of testing a site like this? If so how would I go about tracking down one that I can use to test my site from various countries of origin?
You should be able to achieve that by using proxies. http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html has a bunch. That site just came from a Google search; I've never used proxies like this before though, so there may be better sites out there.
This is not about how to test, but rather how you identify your visitors.
Instead of using IP-lookup to determine their geographical location, you should instead grab the information about the locale they use from the useragent string.
F.instance, I'm a norwegian, and when I go to useragent.org I see that my browser sends "nb-NO" as the language my machine uses.
You can easily use that to customize currency, dates etc on your site.
If the website is indexed in Google's cache, you can visit the google with the proper URL address. ex. http://www.google.co.uk/
And see if it's displaying properly in the cache.
#Frode:
Checking system locale in iseragent string might be misleading.
I go to Canada, and set my system locale as French. So it might show the user EU prices as opposed to showing US price. Many such cases are possible where locale wont give accurate info about the end users desired "price class" in this particular application mentioned.
=AD
If you want to use geo-ip location to detect a user's language, using a proxy probably is the best way to do so.
There are a lot of lists of open proxies on the web, mostly listed with the countries. Google has quite a lot of search results on this topic. Of the top results, I have used SamAir to test some stuff before.
Searching for a working open proxy with an acceptable speed in the correct country can be a tedious task. Also keep in mind that you should not use any these proxy servers to submit any sensitive data, because you never know who runs them. This could be a kinda trustworthy ISP (ie. not from GB ;D), a honeypot to collect data, or an illegal open proxy hosted by some trojan.