I've been hearing about this footprint that the engines leave etc. Could someone be so kind as to take time out of their busy life and enlighten me on this? Please be technical, I am quite curious about this.... =) Bri
I think you might be talking about footprints on your own site that the search engines can find. What most people talk about when leaving a footprint on a site has, more-or-less, to do with blackhat type stuff, but not always. A footprint is a way for search engines to find repetition between your pages/sites. For instance, let's say you would build a huge network of 300 sites, all varying IP C class IP addresses, which is a great idea for getting links...but...since you wanna do this as quick as possible, you use the same template per site. Now, the content may not be the same and even the layout, but the template has a small piece of content at the very bottom that says "Design by Widget Marketing". Their's a footprint. A simple "Design by Widget Marketing" search will bring up all the sites using that "spam" network and G (or whichever search engine) could easily apply a filter to discount all the links and content on those sites. If that's not the answer you were looking for...well...you know what to do.