While there are many scams and frauds on the internet, many of which you can spot a mile away, there has been a massive increase in the number of SPAM internet hosting offers. It seems that more and more internet users are letting these SPAM hosting offers slip under their radar, and actually considering them!

Surely a good offer is worth considering?

When you receive a SPAM hosting offer, you should treat this as you would any other SPAM email - bin it!

You need to ask yourself a few questions before even considering opening it, which include :-

If the company are that good, why do they need to send you unsolicitored emails?

SPAM is actually illegal - would a reputable company act in this manner?
If you are even considering opening the email, you need to ask yourself if you are really happy with your current host. If not, you should start looking around yourself, not waiting for SPAM offers to drop into your inbox.

While there have been many instances of people signing up to SPAM hosting offers, there have also been reports that these offers where not quite what the customers had expected. Maybe the length of contract was longer than expected, were there any hidden charges or maybe the up time was not what you might expect?

At the end of the day, SPAM is SPAM and there are fundamental reasons why companies use this method of contacting you. You need to understand the mind set of these companies, and what kind of customer that they are looking to attract. Do you really want to be their next victim?

Some technology actually stops search engines from listing the content on a web site and your browser from viewing the content. Review your pages or if you are planning new pages, consider whether having any of these search engine blocking technologies is worth it. The effects of some these technologies might be nice to look at but that can be a two edged sword when it comes to receiving a page rank and being indexed.

Affiliate Links

Sites with affiliate links and that do not have original content are becoming banned by search engines. The problem is the duplicate content and spam. Affiliates will have to become creative and may have to resort to finding original content instead of the rewrites.

Databases

When a server provides database results, the search engine cannot view them because it is dynamic.

Directory Hierarchy

Keep your important content in the root level of your website because search engines do usually not see content that is buried deeper than three or four directories.

Dynamic HTML

Most search engines cannot search or index dynamic pages.

Flash

Flash has a few downsides. Trojans and viruses can infect other computers though the Active-X required to run Flash. Search engines cannot read either Flash navigation buttons or Flash presentations. Even some visually impaired persons get ill after seeing Flash animations. Flash also is a slow load technology and many visitors will stop the flash or leave the site if there is flash on it.

Forms

Search engines cannot search forms because they are unable to fill them.

Frames

The content within a frame is not searchable to a search engine. Provide the content in a non-frame version if possible.

Host Pages

When you use a free web page from an older company, many of the templates have an excess of coding including errors. Search engines will not search or index these sites.

Images

Do not have any important information in a graphic because the search engine cannot read it. You can keep your text in the logo if you make the information available somewhere else on the same page.

Image Maps

Search engines have a hard time with the links used in an image map and will avoid them. Provide conventional links on the same page.

JavaScript

Search engines cannot read links placed inside of JavaScript. HTML links should be placed on the same page.

Large Pages

Go for a page about 40 K because any bigger and the crowd will go elsewhere because of the slow load time.

Multimedia Files

If there is spectacular text in your media files, the search engine will not search or index it.

Password Protected Web Sites

Search engines cannot use the pages without a password.

WSYWIG HTML Programs

When you use a program that lets you create a website without any previous knowledge of HTML, the page you create with the software will have so much extra coding and error in the coding that the search engines will not search your page. Lucky, there are online validators to check your code for errors.

There has been much talk of increased processing power, and the need for quicker and quicker reply times, but how efficient are today’s breed of server?

The surprising answer to that is that they are not very efficient at all, when it comes to using power, and the mighty Google have flagged this as a major concern for the future. While the last three generations of Google’s computing infrastructure have seen a doubling of actual performance, there has been no improved performance per watt ( i.e. the efficiency with which systems use the power supplied to them). As a consequence a doubling in system performance has resulted in a doubling of the power required - meaning that power costs have doubled over the last three generations of system.

Unless there are some marked improvements in watt efficiency, there will very soon be a situation whereby the actually hardware costs less to acquire than the power required to run it for 12 months. This has massive implications for Google who have thousands of servers all around the world. Unfortunately, any increase in the cost base of the company would be passed on to the consumer at some stage, resulting in an increase in the cost of internet use.

While many of the server manufacturers are working flat out to try and come up with a solution, it appears that performance has benefited at the cost of power usage efficiency - an equation which will need to be addressed as soon as possible.