Courtesy on the Web

There is almost no such thing as true courtesy on the World Wide Web. People are rude to each other in their comments. But websites are also rude to each other. Here are a few examples of the lack of courtesy on the Web.

Irresponsible Crawling "Crawling" is the practice of using software (programs called "spiders" or "robots" or "crawlers") that retrieve Web pages for a database. Search engines crawl the Web all day long and they process what they find and then share it in their indexes. When you search Google or Bing for pages, they only show you pages that they have found by following links on Web pages.

Now it is common for people to write "rogue" crawlers that just collect Web page data so that they can resell it as part of a service. Most of these services are offering "business intelligence" or "social monitoring". They don't pay websites any money for the data they collect or the resources they use in collecting that data. So everything you publish on the Web may be resold by someone else.

Rogue crawling has made hosting websites more expensive because it uses up so much server time and processing power. Most people don't know how to stop these rogue crawlers, which keep coming back again and again to grab the same pages over and over again. The next time you hear about a hot new startup company, don't be so quick to wish them well. They may just be another group of bottom-feeders scraping your website for their own gain.

Theft of Content Some websites grab your blog's RSS feed and republish all your articles. They usually put advertising on the pages where your articles are republished. These content thieves are too lazy to create interesting content of their own. They may even write special programs to find your articles and crawl those pages if you only publish brief article summaries in your RSS feed. These thieves deserve no sympathy when their websites are penlized by Bing and Google. After all, they are not paying you any commissions on their earnings.

Facebook Spies on People In case you haven't heard, Facebook finally admitted in March 2013 that they use the "LIKE" button on millions of websites to follow non-Facebook users around the web. Every time you visit a page with a Facebook "LIKE" button their network is told about your visit.

Search Engines Use Your Content Bing and Google have been criticized by many companies because the search engines extract product information and other data from their websites and then display that data to searchers. The net effect of doing this is to increase advertising revenue for the search engines and to discourage their visitors from actually visiting other websites. In March 2013 Google was forced by the European Union to give companies the opportunity to "opt out" of this gratuitous resharing of their data (for which Google has never offered any commissions or compensation).

Spammy Marketers Ruin Your Websites If you operate a blog, a forum, or a guest book you may have noticed a lot of weird comments have been left by people. The comments may feature one or more links pointing to websites you would never visit or recommend to your friends and visitors. These spammers, as they are called, use other people's websites to violate search engine guidelines. They are embedding links on vulnerable websites in the hope that those links will be trusted by the search engines. There are some tools to help block these spammers but most people don't know these tools exist or how to use them.

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