This article is from the April 2002 Issue of Update.
I've had a few emails from strange people, asking if I'd help them smuggle money out of (usually) Nigeria. What's this all about?
Just a few? Count yourself lucky — I stopped counting when I reached 20. It's a scam, and a pretty poor one at that. If you respond to the message saying that you're interested in helping out, you get a reply asking you for your bank account details (theoretically so that they can deposit the money in your account), but which, so I'm told, they will then try and use to withdraw money from your account. Quite how I've no idea, but then I've never been foolish enough to reply! This particular scam was popular a few years ago and seems to be undergoing a revival. Best thing to do is hit your delete key.
I've deleted pages on my website, but various search engines still display the non-existent pages. What can I do?
If you want to get rid of the pages quickly the easiest thing to do is to go to those search engines and click on the 'add URL' link, and provide them with a link to the pages that don't exist any more. When the spider comes to visit the page to re-index it, it will see it's no longer available and will delete references to it from its database. However, it could still take a month or two for the page to entirely disappear from its index. The other thing to do is just nothing, since the spiders will revisit your site at some time in the future, realise the pages are no long available, and delete them at that point. Or, you could create new pages with exactly the same URL and simply say 'this page no longer exists' and provide a link to your home page instead, which would be a nice helpful thing to do for your visitors.
I want to see which other web pages link to my site. What's the best way of doing this?
Most search engines will provide a little bit of syntax that you can use for this purpose — both AltaVista and Google use link: and Alltheweb uses link.all: while HotBot uses a menu option in its Advanced search function. However, while it's very easy, I would suggest that you use various search engines to obtain a good overall view of this. I tried it with my own site and found that I got wildly different results; 350 from Hotbot, 505 from Alltheweb, 200 from Google and 715 from AltaVista. You may also wish to eliminate links from your own site, and the easiest way of doing this is to add in a qualifier to ignore your own host. Since AltaVista performed best I'll show you how with that one — link:www.philb.com — host:www.philb.com
Site of the month
My site of the month is the Internet Archive (www.archive.org/). This is a fantastic site to spend some time at. The site archives many thousands of web pages; they've got 28 versions of my home page for example, going back to 1997. You can see how a website develops over a period of time, so it's great for web designers to trace how sites have changed, and it's also of value for searchers who can't access a particular site because it no longer exists — you may find a copy in the archive. Thoroughly recommended.
Phil Bradley is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and author. Visit www.philb.com for free information on internet introductions, search engine articles, web design tips and a host of other free information. Now out: 2nd edition of The Advanced Internet Searcher's Handbook. If you have any questions about the internet send an email to philb@philb.com with the subject header 'column query'.