Hi, A friend, looking at my site online, pointed out this line in my source code: <img src="http://ads.digitalpoint.com/t-68432-46403-9340-22583-48600.gif" width="1" height="1"> It seems inconsistent with the generated file names that DP have created to avoid leaving footprints, to I presume it's some kind of an accident? Is this a new thing? If so, I don't think it will be very long before the search engines pick it up. Cheers L
It's used for statistics: if you are a real user (not a bot/spider) this image will be loaded and advertisements with id 68432 .. 48600 will be given 1 view. (it's that little image you can see when you click on "stats" next to one of your own advertisement on the admin page)
Well, firstly, if it didn't matter, I don't think DP would have gone to the trouble of providing randomly generated files to avoid leaving a footprint. Secondly, here's a quote from Google's site, http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/facts.html Not sure this really applies to DP, as I'm sure my e-mail address isn't being distributed by them, but Google intended treating a backlink as a vote for that site due its content being relevant and useful to the visitor; randomly generated link-exchanges do not achieve that. It's logical that search engines will not give weight to these kind of links if they are able to recognise them through footprints.
If you think you are doing anything wrong in the eyes of Google, you really shouldn't be using it. It's an ad network, not a link network. Beside that point though, spiders would need to spoof as an end user's user agent in order to see it (it's made to only track end user impressions only so it will only show for popular browsers that can support it). More importantly, it's all been covered before...
Hi, I'm very happy using the DP ad network. I did search for this on the forum, but couldn't find anything about it. Thanks for all the info. Cheers L
Shawn are you giving out our e-mail addresses for link sharing! How dare you.. Why I oughta.. I mean google says right there you do! <runs away crying>
There, there, Shawn wouldn't do anything like that. It was all a bad dream. Now go back to sleep and it will all be better in the morning.
It's not all that bad. I've seen some very prominent sites using digitalpoint and no effect on rankings, even on the latest update where a lot of people have been wiped out.