Overview

HotLink protection prevents other websites from directly linking to files (as specified below) on your website. Other sites will still be able to link to any file type that you don’t specify below (ie. html files). You can use hotlink protection to keep other sites from linking to your images, videos, and other files. If another site links directly to your images or other files, they will be using your bandwidth to display those files rather than theirs.

Enabling Hotlink Protection:

To enable Hotlink protection follow the steps mentioned below

Step 1. To access Hotlink Protection, click on the icon above the words Hotlink Protection on the main screen of your cPanel interface.

Step 2. Enter the names of sites that you wish to access your files in the first field which already contains the names of your site(s).

Step 3. Enter the file types that you wish to let those sites access by entering their extensions in the blank field next to Extensions to allow (seperate by commas):

Step 4. Enter the URL you wish to redirect links to that are not allowed in the blank field next to ?Url to Redirect to:

Step 5. If you wish to allow the sites you have entered to directly request files (view images or videos by typing their url into a browser), click on the box next to Allow direct requests

Step 6. Click on Activate to enable Hotlink Protection.

Disabling hotlink protection:

If you no longer wish to use Hotlink Protection on your site, you can disable it with the Hotlink Protection Menu.

Step 1: To access Hotlink Protection, click on the icon above the words Hotlink Protection on the main screen of your cPanel interface.

Step 2: Scroll down to the bottom of the menu, and click on Disable.

Google offers several operators which provides useful information about your site such as no of indexed pages within your site, pages that links to your site and many more. In a Google search box, just type the operator and your domain name.

Operator                 Description                             Search format

site:              Indexed pages in your site                   site:www.yoursite.com

allinurl:          Pages that refer to your site’s URL        allinurl:www.yoursite.com

link:              Pages that link to your site                    link:www.yoursite.com

cache:           The current cache of your site               cache:www.yoursite.com

info:             Information we have about your site       info:www.yoursite.com

related:        Pages that are similar to your site             related:www.yoursite.com

There are many other different operators you can use such as allinanchor, inanchor, allintext, intext, allintitle, inurl etc. Using above operators you can have the required search results. Typically these operators modify the search in some way, or even tell Google to do a totally different type of search.

Absolute URL :
Dictionary meaning of word absolute is : not dependent on any thing ie independent having its own existence, same is the meaning of absolute urls.
An Absolute URL is, thus, something that is independent or free from any relationship from the rest. When you use an absolute URL, you point directly to the file you give exact location of the file.

eg : “sitename.com/images/welcome.gif” is an absolute url as it specifies that an image file welcome.gif located in the images directory, under yoursitename domain.
You should always opt for absolute url when referring to other site.Generally such url are long and hence are not much preferred by lazy webdeveloper they like to use relative urls. While changing directory structure you need to rewrite whole path of the new directory and file which can be cumbersome but as far as SEO is concerned spiders like to crawl absolute url.

Relative URLs :
A relative URL points to a file/directory in relation to the present file/directory.
They have short urls as they are referring to root directory/subdirectory.Relative urls helps webmaster to maintain the site without rewriting the whole path again and again if they had made any changes in directory.

eg : ../image/welcome.gif is a relative url (The initial two peroids (..) in the url instruct the server to move up one directory (which is the root directory), then enter images directory and finally point at welcome.gif file )
Relative urls are to used wisely otherwise an error may occur and the intended file may not open.Relative URLs are short and does not require to write whole path so due to its short typein nature they are more popular and are commonly used by webmasters.

Many a times you need to move or rename some of your pages for some reason , if you are utilizing .asp (Windows Active Server Pages) as the underlying technology for your website, then there is a simple 301redirect method that you can utilize for changing URL name.This 301 method allows you to implement a Permanent move/rename of your webpages.

Implementation :

Consider a page named old-page.asp that is to be renamed or to new-page.asp, firstly remove all of the code of that page and place the code given below in that old page.

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.yoursitename.com/new-page.asp"
%>

In the above 301 redirect example, you need to change the Location to the URI of your new page. Include the full URI path unless you are redirecting to a root level page (index.asp, default.asp, etc.). If you are setting up a 301 redirect for a root level page, keep the URI short and without the index.asp file name.
for example… “Location”, “http://www.yoursitename.com/sub-directory/”

Once you’ve included the above code at the top of your old-page.asp, you should crosscheck that it is returning the proper server header response using tool to check Server header content.
Doing so, we instruct the spiders to update their index and replace the old URI (old-page.asp) with the new URI (new-page.asp).

After applying 301 redirect you should not be able to browse to the old-page.asp (unless you have auto redirects turned off in your browser).
Always keep you old url (www.yoursitename.old-page.asp ) in place for sometime and include a message which will alert visitors about redirection and of new url and request them to update their bookmark as per new url .

Comment Spamming is one of the major problem faced by all the blog owners. Spammers are not interested to redirect your traffic but are trying to increase their (or their client’s ) search engine ranking. By leaving comments on your site, the spammers’ sites can achieve a slightly higher search engine ranking.Spammers don’t want to degrade your site but they just want to get people to their sites and make a larger profit.

How to tackle this comment spamming ?

*) Don’t ban specific IP address :

Once you got the spammer’s IP address you would normally banned it, but it rarely helps you much as most comment-spammers make use of ‘open proxies ’ using which they have their spam comments, so you never be able to eradicate them from your site.

*) Don’t allow to insert HTML code.

Spammers generally attack your site if you provide them any source for getting into your site such as inserting some html code or anything like that.
If you feel the need to allow the user to include links, there are a number of ways by which you can provide them this functionality, without making your site vulnerable to attack. The most common method is to inform the user that all URLs will be converted to links automatically, then convert any content that starts with http:// to a link.

*) Use Non-Descriptive Form Names.

Good programming requires the use of descriptive names, but in avoiding comment spam, you should stay away from names that describe a form’s fields. Form element names like “Comment” make it too easy for spammers to access your comment system.

*) Use rel=”nofollow” for All Links.

For any reason, you want to allow your visitor to include links in their comments, then don’t forget to add rel=”nofollow” tag, doing so you informs search engines bots to ignore the link, so the spammer gains no benefit from adding links in their comments.

Robots.txt file is a simple text file which is responsible for preventing crawling of your site’s pages. Suppose you have certain pages which are not SE friendly such as pages including repeated keywords, some hidden tags with keywords and some other bugs which may be responsible for getting your site banned from search engines.

The robots.txt file is a simple text file which can be created using Notepad.
It should be saved at root directory of your site. eg.http://www.yoursitename.com/robots.txt.

Format :
User-agent: robot or spider name
Disallow: files or directories.

If you want to exclude all the search engine spiders from your entire domain, Just use this tiny code, but be sure you need it.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

If you want to prevent your certain directories, you can specify them in Disallow field.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directoryname1/
Disallow: / directoryname2/

Similarly if you want to restrict specific files then type in the path of the files.
User-agent: *
Disallow: / directoryname1/filename.html

If you don’t want certain spiders crawling your site, which are not useful for you or are just eating up your bandwidth, you can specify them in User-agent. Eg. You don’t want bot of Alta vista (Scooter) from crawl your whole site use following code.
User-Agent: Scooter
Disallow: /

While using robots.txt file you should be careful, It may stop your specified pages from appearing in search engines.There are many hundreds of bots and spiders crawling the Internet, most of them respect your robot.txt file while some may not.

Note :

(*) You can include comments in your robots.txt file, by putting a pound-sign (#) at the front of the line to be commented.
(*) You can find the names of robots which are crawling around your site in your log file..