Although this tip can (and should) be used for your normal website development as well, it is particularly relevant for WordPress websites where you’ve quite possibly paid for the theme you’re using and spent hours writing some of your plugins.
In a default WordPress installation directory listing is not protected, which means that anybody who knows you’re using WordPress can very easily gain access to your themes and plugins as shown in the screenshot below just using their internet browser and appending /wp-content/plugins/ or /wp-content/themes/ to your URL.
Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed something about referrals: Google Images is very very valuable in attracting users to your website, and it’s equally much easier to get high rankings in the image search results than it is in native search results. The annoying thing about Google Images however, is the way it simply offers the image up to the viewer in a separate frame, making it easy for visitors to simply steal/view your image directly and leave again, never actually paying any attention to your site and potentially reducing your income if the site is monetised with advertisements, and removing any value to you of the visitor.
Aside from detecting visitors by their IP address, which I have covered in a previous post, you may also want to be able to detect what the referring website that you visitor has come from is, and react accordingly.
Spam crawlers trawl the internet hopping from page to page, searching for unprotected email addresses in your source code. When they do find one, and even worse: if they do find your email address then you best hope you have good filtering because that email address will be squirrelled away and appear on thousands of spam mailing lists for literally years to come. I recently logged into an email account at HotPop that I abandoned almost five years ago just to discover that it was still being inundated with spam every day, even now.
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Now that Microsoft is advertising Bing on Channel 4, will SEO techniques change in a temporary panic?
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