alexaVerifyID meta header?

This was once a service to aid webmasters with SEO, to claim a website you had to add content to your HTML. While Alexa still provides this service as a subscription, the use of the META tag is no longer required as support was dropped in May 2016!


<meta name="alexaVerifyID" content="your-verification-id-here" />

“Referrer-Policy” HTTP Header

A relatively new HTTP Header that is supported by most modern browsers (except MSIE) is the “Referrer-Policy” header. There have been previous attempts to implement similar protections through use of the ‘rel’ (or ‘rev’) attributes on links to external websites. The latest approach takes a different approach and prevents leaking of internal URLs, and in some cases parameters, to external websites. This is important from a security perspective as you might maintain some sensitive information in your page urls, that would otherwise be inadvertently shared with an external website.

Clearly, you’ll need to determine your own level of security based upon your needs. Example: ‘no-referrer’ would be the most strict and would prevent the browser from sending the ‘Referer'(sic) header even to your own websites pages.

Example header values:

Referrer-Policy: no-referrer
Referrer-Policy: no-referrer-when-downgrade
Referrer-Policy: origin
Referrer-Policy: origin-when-cross-origin
Referrer-Policy: same-origin
Referrer-Policy: strict-origin
Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
Referrer-Policy: unsafe-url

Implementation can be accomplished in many ways, the most simple being and addition to your HTTP server configuration similar to the one shown below for Apache 2.x:

Header always set Referrer-Policy strict-origin

REFERENCES:

Yandex Search Engine

While “Google” may be ubiquitous with “search” for most users in the United States and much of the world, there are still several other strong contenders that many people know nothing about. One such example, from Russia, is Yandex.

Getting your website indexed by this search engine is easy.

  1. Visit the webmaster website at https://webmaster.yandex.com/addurl.xml
  2. Register for an account, you can use single-sign-on from many social media websites such as Facebook, Google or Twitter.
  3. Click “Add Site” or “Add URL”
  4. Enter your domain name and submit
  5. There are several methods provided, easiest to implement is usually ‘txt’ file, as you can execute a Linux/Unix command line “touch” to create the empty file on the server as needed.
  6. Verify that your site is now linked to your account
  7. Site indexing can take a while, if it is not already indexed, in the meantime you can now modify some information about your domain(s).

REFERENCES:

Revisit-After meta tag

Once in a while I’ve seen this tag in the HTML source of older websites, I too had implemented it at one time, but forgot the reason. Here’s what I’ve turned up, and as such have removed it universally.

This tag was at one time used by one small search engine in Vancouver Canada, it was never picked up by the larger search organizations and as such has very little relevance.

<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”7 days” />

REFERENCES:

Prevent Robots from indexing portions of content

Yahoo! initially introduced a CSS class that can be used to notify robots/spiders that a specific section or fragment of content should not be included for search purposes.

class=”robots-noindex”

REFERENCES:

Link ‘canonical’ tag

This tag is applied to the page to define the preferred URL to be stored in most search engines, and reduces the odds that heuristics will be used and leave you will multiple listings of duplicated content (example: http://www.example.com/ vs. http://example.com/)

It can also be applied so that the URL’s exposed by search engine results do not expose the underlying technology such as PHP/JSP/ASP in the filenames)
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.giantgeek.com/" />

robots-nocontent

SEO is always a tricky matter as it’s always changing, way back in 2007 Yahoo! added a means to ‘hide’ specific content on your page from it’s spider with the user of a CSS class that can be used anywhere on your page. True…. this can be abused, but is generally good to keep common content such as navigation and/or ads out of the index. Unfortunately, only Yahoo! supports this.

class="robots-nocontent"

NOTE: this is an obsolete practice, and should be removed unless you plan to support beta versions of MSIE6.

The story behind this tag is one of virtue. Microsoft, as they do TOO often, added a ‘feature’ in beta versions of Windows XP (MSIE 6.0) that enabled the browser itself to analyze the content on a given page, and insert links to other websites. This was "e;spun" as being good the the visitors of your website, because they could be exposed to related products or services. Unfortunately, the webmaster and site owners had no say in what content was being linked or to where… which could be a competitor!

This tag was added as a method to prevent these "Smart Tags" from operating on websites… in the end, Microsoft did not leave this feature (enabled?) in the released version of Internet Explorer 6!

BTW, there are some JavaScript libraries today that offer similar functionality, but they are not related to this tag.

Implementation:
Add the following to the <head> section of your webpage(s):
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE" />

REFERENCES:


Ego searching – skotfred

So, here’s a little more about me… feel free to network with me if you’d like…

Direct linked to my profile:

Indirectly linked:

I’ll add more links as I become aware of them.