Tax Day …. more like “Extension Day” for me. I haven’t filed my taxes on time for nearly a decade. I don’t mind paying taxes, I just wish it wasn’t such a pain. I hate keeping receipts and filling out paperwork.
In semi-good news, it was reported that Slurp, the spider that powers Yahoo!, which they inherited when they bought Inktomi back in early ’03, has been updated. Now, a year or two again they updated it to Slurp 2.0, but it was just a name change only as the spider still sucked and would be trapped in very basic navigational setup.
They are now claiming that this new version will be a lot better. I can’t wait to give it a test run. First thing is to see if it still gets confused over session ids (SID). Yahoo! is famous for indexing a 500 page site and showing 20,000 pages in their index because they indexed the same page over and over because a different session ID was being served since Slurp doesn’t accept JavaScript or cookies.
If you are cloaking or doing any type of delivery based on IP addresses with Slurp, Yahoo! states they are retiring the IPs and issuing new ones. So, pop open your log files and track down those IP addresses. I highly recommend using IP addresses over using the User-Agent, as a FireFox extension can exploit your cloaking or IP delivery system easily.
The main reason I started the SEO Revolution was out of frustration. Frustration at all of the lies and misconceptions that are posted in forums, given as advice in teleconferences, and even taught in live workshops. "So why didn't all of this work?" " Why wasn't my site successful?" " Why am I still stuck in a rut?" 