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Avoid it like a SARS patient (sorry to anyone who has, knows someone who has/had SARS).
In reality GG has said it all. Auto submit or query programs are frowned upon and actually against Googles guidelines so stay away from them.
You may well be able to get away with it and im sure countless people do everyday but that is really not the point.
Yeah? Then what about that 4x4 yahoo backlinks checker thingy the Webmaster World hosts, and those other thingies that check across all datacentres with one click? Isn't that regarded as "automatic or programmatic queries". Maybe Google should look at banning WW.
Now I'm not sure what to do. The site is nice and sells a product that would be of interest to my visitors. Should I write to them and ask them to take my site down and I'll take their site down. After saying their site was great and I'd be glad to link it's awkward to back out.
Google Guy would one link to this site matter? Of course who knows, I may have linked to other places like this.
But the grander answer is does it benefit your visitors?
I run a site which lets users search queries for www, www2, www3 & all the www-sj datacenters (any 3 at the same time).
GoogleGuy correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think my site or some of the other simular google dance sites are doing anything wrong. Reason for this is that I use javascript and frames so the I'm not requesting info from google. Visitors to the site are making requests to google directly. We just help them :)
[edited by: heini at 1:06 pm (utc) on May 24, 2003]
[edit reason] removed url/drop [/edit]
By definition, if it only does this by a human clicking on a button, this is manual and not automatic. Now, if I were to have a bot check all datacenters every 5 minutes 24/7, that is automatic.
I'll assume that around 20,000 webmasters are subscribed to all dance alert maing lists combined. And if each of those 20,000 where checking 2 times a day (*cough* some 100 times *cough*) for the start of the dance manually there would be 40,000 page hits a day.
What is better for google 120 server hits or 40,000 server hits a day?
I would be careful about any program that does automatic or programmatic queries to Google. That's in our guidelines, and holds for any such program.
I went to the Axandra page and now I understand the problem. They apparently do a seaerch and give the webmaster related pages. The webmaster then writes to those pages. They also have software to set up directory pages.
GG, I do understand why one would best not use Axandra for building their site links. But what I want to know is if my one link to that site that uses Axandra can cause a PRO for me.
If I hadn't been active on this forum I would not have thought to be concerned. What about all those other folks who link without knowing this?
Arelis is a tool and like other tools, it depends solely on the user. For ex - A Gun - Is it bad or good? The gun is good if the user use it to protect against thieves, but is bad if he use it for being the thief himself.
Arelis is the software link management tool and allows user to query Google for links. It is bad only when the users become the link vultures and query links too aggressively -and I would like to encourage those who possess Arelis not to query links from Google or other SE as it abused their TOS and bandwidth. Moreover, I find that it may look like to have save you time, but actually that may not be so in your quest for quality links.
When you query links from Google, Arelis will add the title and description of the "link" pages as well as the e-mail address. (its new version allows you to get those info from the homepage). Often I found that these info are not what the link partners really want as specified on their add url pages as well as the e-mail addresses. It is much more effective if you manually check backward links from Google and add site manually - then everyone is happy including Google and your potential quality link partners.
The reason that I use Arelis is, not to query for links, but to internally manage the link partners and most importantly to verify link on later dates. When the links become big, it is too time consuming to recheck all links by hand. I run Arelis to verify if my links are still on the same page when we first agree. If I find that the link partner move my link to another page as it is prevalent today, then I will have a look whether I am happy or not and whether to ask them to restore the links back or remove that partner.
Annej, I will leave your question to GG whether linking to that partner is good or bad. But Arelis has the feature in itself to remove [Arelis] in their templates, so perhaps your partner might not have studied Arelis properly in details and perhaps he or she is the link vulture.
FYI, I did use Arelis but I myself don't link to those sites who don't take the word Arelis out.
I don't use the Arelis "find patners" features to query search engines. I find sites by manually searching and checking sites for quality and relevance. When I want to link to a site I use the "Add site" button and manually add the site details. This takes less than a minute.
But, the feature that makes Arelis so good at managing links is that I have created a template that perfectly matches my site, complete with graphics, nav bar etc that Arelis uses to automatically create my links pages. My links pages have quite a few categories and sub categories. With one click Arelis will re-create my directory using the template for every page. One more click to upload to the server and job done.
The pages created are pure html, no scripting, and no mention of the word Arelis. You could not tell that the pages were not hand coded, and nor can google.
It is also great for keeping track of links you have requested, who replied, did they want to link back, who hasn't replied etc. Actually, I wished more people would use Arelis, then maybe I wouldn't keep getting requests for links from the same sites time after time.
Using Arelis in this way is no different to using Dreamweaver templates to speed up and automate maintaining web pages.
You can do automated queries against search engines, but you don't have to, and I bet a lot (maybe most) users don't, they use it simply because it is a great time saving tool that helps you keep track of links. And google can't object to this.
If the other site has a "created with Arelis" or similar and google ever decides to penalise links pages with the word "Arelis" then it may be a problem, though I doubt you woul ever get banned for linking to them.
I believe they did penalise directories created with Zeus, and identified Zeus directories because the default directory index was called something like Themeindex. It doesn't make sense to do this, just because it can do automatice queries doesn't mean you do, but that's google logic for you.
Following the same logic any sites created with Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Adobe GoLive, Notepad should be penalised because they do give you the ability to create hidden text.
If the other site has no mention of the word Arelis, then I can't see it would ever be a problem, if it does, then it may one day be a problem. Personaly, if the other site is a quality site that may be useful for my visitors, I link to it.
