Category Archives: Internet

Rel=”nofollow”

Blogging, Internet, Search, Software

Recently a bunch of people (precompiled list, thanks Google) decided to make an attempt at reducing the significance of comment spam on websites.

The concept, in short, is that any feedback provided by the user with links in it, will have the rel=”nofollow” attribute in place. When the search engines index the page, they won’t count any links with rel=”nofollow” as an incoming link to that particular site; thus removing the reward for a spammer.

The reason I’m undecided about the outcome/reason behind this method, is that it will remove the reward for a genuine user to gain popularity through participation. The sake of example, lets consider someone who participates online all the time, is an active part of the community, however does not feature in other sites blogrolls. He gains popularity for his site through participation on other peoples sites. Now, with the rel=”nofollow” in place, he loses that popularity; thus reducing his position in search results.

In my opinion, it is the users problem to make sure their site isn’t spammed (think of it like mowing your lawn) and the search engines job to rank the content.

I think there are alternatives and I’ll write about them shortly.

IIS & Invalid Folder Names

Internet

Recently at work, I was working on cleaning up some of the pages which are used to view the statistics of various domains. One in particular is the branded domain that is used for marketing purposes, while the actual content for the site resides at sub-domains.

For the sake of discussion, lets assume the branded domain is www.domain.com, while each of the sub-domains are broken down by year; yyyy.domain.com.

The existing structure of the statistics, only allowed for a single years worth of statistics to be stored (logically speaking). Under the document root, there were simply a bunch of folders representing the current month and previous months that had elapsed.

Doing the logical thing, I created folders named yyyy.domain.com with sub-folders named by monty with a yy suffix on them. After spending considerable time collating all of the statistics for the domain (there are tens of gigabytes of log files), it was finally complete.

As I went to view the statistics, I was greeted with a rather strange error message from IIS:

  1. HTTP 403.1 Forbidden: Execute Access Forbidden

You would normally interpret that sort of an error as a permission problem. For instance, you were running some sort of script/cgi and the virtual host had no execute permissions. Well after checking the vhost information, script execution was turned on. So for the sake of testing, I increased it to scripts and executables. Still nothing, I was beginning to wonder what was going on. I then checked the permissions on all the folders I had created (I created them over the network, thought maybe the right rwx permissions hadn’t come across), nope.. they were fine too.

After a couple of hours of head scratching and googling, still nothing. There were thousands of pages relating to actual cgi/script/executable problems, however mine was plain static HTML.

The problem: I named my folders yyyy.domain.com. For some reason, IIS considers a folder with dots/periods in them to be invalid.

The solution: remove the dots in the sub-folders and replace them with underscoress (_). Bing, worked like a charm.