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Managing Your Internet Business Associations
Monday, February 21, 2005 Posted: 16:01 PM (EST)
Everyone who pays close attention to their business associations on the internet will have done their research before
hopping into that proverbial alliance known as bed fellowship. Whether you are hosting third party advertisements, joining a listing service,
advertising in another domain, posting in forums or purchasing a security certificate, you will want to be absolutely sure who it is you are dealing with.
Doing the obvious isn't always enough. You can look through
their site and check to see that their content is complementary
to yours and that there are no "objectionable" associations
already in place, but this tells you nothing about who they
are, where they originate or where any submitted information
will be stored.
I make regular use of my favorite
whois
service to check domain ownership and administrative contact
information. It provides me with indepth information about the other business
and a better idea of where they originate. Sometimes a whois
service will refer you to another whois service. Other times
you may not get the ownership information that you seek. For
me, the inability to access domain ownership information will
always raise a red flag.
Internet associations are not always under your control and
most web designers have nothing in place to protect the business
from unauthorized website associations. For example, webmasters
use exclusionary statements in their robots.txt file to exclude
files, folders or entire websites from being visited and indexed
by a particular search engine. However, not all site visitors
are prepared to play by your rules.
At this domain, and because we only guarantee content delivery
to internet users from North America, we have in place a method
that checks the user agent of the visitor prior to their viewing
any page. If that user agent is in the list they receive a message
which explains the reason for their inability to access the
site.
| The software [user-agent] that you are using to access this site is not allowed.
Examples of disallowed user agents include e-mail harvesting programs, free download programs that copy websites and
its directory structure to personal hard drives carte blanche, repetitive and inappropriate consumers of bandwidth,
robots that do not obey robots.txt instructions, robots that originate from outside of North America and user
agents that index websites for the personal benefit of the operator who in turn has no intention of providing
meaningful search results to the general public. |
Ron Poole is the managing editor of Hair Say Headlines and Hair Say Newsroom.
Copyright 2005 Beauty By Us Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Hair Say Newsroom : RSS Feed Item6 _ Feb 21/05
