Reader's Comments

Here's a twist on organizing your site before the search engines find you:

I started a humble home page / website with my ISP, GTE. At GTE, all non-commercial homepages have a mandatory URL http://home1.gte.net/USER_NAME/index.htm where USER_NAME is of course your login name. You can have hundreds of pages, but you must have one page with this URL. Naturally, most people use it as the base home page.

The site had been up for a month, when my wife was conducting a job interview. She asked about the candidates interests, he said he liked music. She said, "You should visit our website, my husband likes music, too." She wrote down the URL for him.

He didn't want the job. A week later, he calls in and leaves a message on her voice-mail. He has visited the site, and did not think it appropriate that she be giving out the URL, as it's quite offensive. This would have been baffling, except that he read the URL into the voice-mail. He had typed USERNAME instead of USER_NAME (the names have been changed to protect the innocent) and landed on someone else's home page, only to be confronted with hard-core porn!

Embarrasing lesson learned. Now the mandatory URL of http://home1.gte.net/USER_NAME/index.htm just has a pointer link to the "real" home page of http://home1.gte.net/USER_NAME/NoPlaceLikeHome.htm This latter "NoPlaceLikeHome" is what we use in signature files or any other way that we pass the site URL along. Since the page filename is fairly unique, any "fat fingering" of the path name will give a 404 error, and not dump the user into uncharted waters.

-- Todd Peach, June 8, 1998

Two comments First about the statement "You might have paid $25,000 for a flashing GIF or a Java animation. AltaVista does not care. It won't even download the ugly thing."

Believe me I hate to add even one extra hit to the following pathetic site so take my word for it and don't go find it. If you type in the string "moron123" on AltaVista, the search will result in, believe it or not, only one page. AltaVista does not return this page based on any actual textual content,