web visitors?

Neil Jones Neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk
Thu Oct 18 11:48:16 EDT 2001


On 16 Oct, in article
     <00c501c15697$eb975b20$9b0f1218 at gscrk1.sc.home.com>
     gatrelle at tils-ttr.org "Ron Gatrelle" wrote:

> I was just recently at a butterfly web site.  The home page said I was
> visitor x,xxx.  By the time I had roamed around the site and left the "You
> are visitor number" _____ had gone up by four.  Actually, what had happened
> is that the meter was not counting visitors at all - it was counting hits -
> so each move I made while at the web site clicked the meter up one more
> number.
> 
> This is kind of a mild pet peeve of mine.  I say kind of as I think most
> people who put up a web sites and then utilize a counter do not
> intentionally intend to mislead those who "visit" the site into thinking
> the site is hugely popular and very busy.  But some surely know exactly
> what is happening and_ intend_ to deceive. 

There are many such deceptions on the net. Usually they take the form 
of fooling the search engines to encourage people to visit.
One of these is to use the meta tags to misdescribe the site.
Meta tags are hidden pieces of code that you do not see on your browser.
Search engines however can see them and use them to find out about the
subject of the web site.

 
> Let me use our TILS site as an example. 

Indeed. It is a very good example.

Let's look at the meta tags from the index page. 

<meta name="keywords" content="butterfly, butterflies, moths, lepidoptera, naba, naba.org, taxonomic report, international lepidoptera survey, gatrelle, lepsoc">
<meta name="name" content="butterfly, butterflies, moths, lepidoptera, naba, naba.org, taxonomic report, international lepidoptera survey, gatrelle, lepsoc">
<meta http-equiv="Keywords" content="butterfly, butterflies, moths, lepidoptera, naba, naba.org, taxonomic report, international lepidoptera survey, gatrelle, lepsoc">
<title>The International Lepidoptera Survey</title>

There is something just a little odd here. I wonder what the words "naba" and
 "naba.org" are doing in there?
Considering that Ron is one of the staunchest critics of the North American
Butterfly Association, I wonder why his web site is describing itself
to the search engines as being THEIR web site? 

-- 
Neil Jones- Neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk http://www.nwjones.demon.co.uk/
"At some point I had to stand up and be counted. Who speaks for the
butterflies?" Andrew Lees - The quotation on his memorial at Crymlyn Bog
National Nature Reserve


 
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