I heard at the Search Engine Strategies conference earlier this month in Chicago that the Ask Jeeves spider doesn’t cope well with websites that don’t have robots.txt. So if you don’t have a robots.txt file hosted on your blog’s document root, create a blank one.
Another detail often missed by bloggers is to create your own custom favicon.ico file. The favicon is a little 16 pixel by 16 pixel image that appears in the location bar on people’s web browsers; many of the RSS readers use it as well. Peter Brady at Performancing has some interesting things to say about whether or not bloggers need to have a favicon. My take on it is this: with a custom favicon, you look cooler and more with it, plus it differentiates you from the rest of the pack in your subscribers’ RSS subscription lists. If you don’t have time to mess around creating one in Photoshop, you can do a quick and dirty one pretty easily using the free web-based tool Favicon Generator. It took me all of two minutes to create my favicon for my blog using this tool.
The robots.txt info is quite strange. I doubt there is a strong correlation between the quality of content on a web site, and the use of a robots.txt file. If that’s the case, using it as a metric to determine relevancy makes no sense.
Comment by Ed Kohler — December 20, 2005 @ 12:08 pm
Robots.txt and Favicon
Business Blog Consulting makes a good point on the need to have a robots.txt file and a favicon for your blog, two things I personally need to pay more attention to. They also point to the Favicon generator, which allows you to set up your own favicon …
Trackback by The Blog Herald: more blog news more often — December 20, 2005 @ 3:31 pm
Ed, I’m sure Ask Jeeves isn’t making a correlation between content quality and the existence of a robots.txt file. Their spider just has a quirk in its spidering behavior that will hopefully at some point get fixed.
As an aside, file not found errors for robots.txt and favicon.ico are the two most prevalent errors in your web site’s error log. If you ever check your error log for errors to fix, it makes life easier if you don’t have the robots.txt and favicon.ico 404 errors to sift through.
Comment by Stephan Spencer — December 20, 2005 @ 4:10 pm
Hey Ed, causing more trouble are you?
For an innovative use of robots.txt, check out Brett Tabke’s blog: http://www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt
Comment by Lee Odden — January 3, 2006 @ 12:16 pm
[…] how to create one, or don’t know what I’m talking about, then you should read my post Favicon and Robots.txt – Must-Haves for your Blog. Filed under: Blogging Tools, Business Blogging : […]
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[…] If you don’t have a custom favicon, don’t know how to create one, or don’t know what I’m talking about, then you should read my post Favicon and Robots.txt – Must-Haves for your Blog. […]
Pingback by Business Blog » Blog Archive » Brand Yourself on Your Blog, in Your Feed, with a Photo and Sig Line — June 20, 2008 @ 3:26 pm