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Footprint Help

AlexRAlexR Cape Town
edited March 2013 in Need Help
Does anyone have any experience in footprints? I'm doing some research here & found sometimes exact gives more results than generic and sometimes the other way around.

Powered by Plogger -     533 000
"Powered by Plogger" - 4 550 000

Powered by Burning Book -      28 900 000
"Powered by Burning Book" -  2 680 000

"Powered by Easy Guestbook"-   3 660 000
Powered by Easy Guestbook - 67 600 000

My Questions Are:
1) Is it better to use the "exact match" or broad match for simple phrases like above (not combined phrases like ["powered by" "add comment"])? 
2) @sven - Is it important to find the exact post page/login page?

Hoping to tweak this aspect a bit and need some guidance. 

Comments

  • OzzOzz
    edited March 2013
    1) exact match is necessary as footprints without qoutes will give you all sorts of engines but mostly not the ones you are searching for. the best footprints are the ones that only appear a single time per page so you won't get 30 results of the same site.

    example:
    "powered by plogger" <-- you find this on every single site of someones webpage in the footer area and the search engine will show you more than one result of one single webpage normally
    "powered by plogger" inurl:"register.php" <-- this will only appear on one single site of the webpage (registration page) so you get 1 different domain per search result

    2) not that important when the register button/link is visible on every page of that website which is normally the case

  • AlexRAlexR Cape Town
    @Ozz - thanks for great post. Very informative!

    What about "PHP Version 4.4.4"

    Since these platforms are always updating is it better to maybe have "PHP Version *.*.*"

    OR to list them one by one:
    What about "PHP Version 4.4.4"
    What about "PHP Version 4.4.3"
    What about "PHP Version 4.4.2"
    What about "PHP Version 4.4.1"
    What about "PHP Version 4.4.0"
    etc?

    To get better results?


  • OzzOzz
    edited March 2013
    those footprints could help to get a better diversity for search results but only make sense if there are already (hundreds of) thousands of sites indexed with that footprint.

    example:
    "php version 4" <--- 10 000 000 results

    "php version 4.1" <- 2 000 000
    "php version 4.2" <- 1 000 000
    "php version 4.3" <- 7 000 000

    as the overall search result for that footprint are splitted in smaller fragments you are getting more diverse results. remember that you get only up to 1000 results per search term in the search engines.
  • AlexRAlexR Cape Town
    @Ozz - do you know if in SER it takes each search phrase in the .ini and applies it to a keyword if we let it run long enough?

    i.e. if I have "golf" as 1 keyword and select 1 SE (Google) and there are 5 footprints in the .ini will it apply all 5 to that keyword or does it just apply 1 random footprint? 

    On you other point about more diverse results - so it would make sense to split these out if they have more than 100 000 unique results. Interesting...
  • OzzOzz
    footprints are used randomly if i'm not wrong but the longer a project is running the chances are high that every keyword is used with each footprint (if keywords are used for searching). 
    if you want to scrape all keywords with all footprints than use a 3rd party scraper. 

    regarding diversity. yes, that makes sense to me, but only if its really usefull with platforms that have many thousands of potential targets (= only the most common ones and not some niche directory engine that is used just a few times around the world).
  • sawa73sawa73
    The best is to find yourself the good footprints, the footprints in SER are not the best one.

    Lots of sites hide the "powered by ***" and other obvious footprints.

    And the footprints for find register page are not the best because there isn't a lot of keywords in these pages.
  • AlexRAlexR Cape Town
    @sawa73 - how do you find the hidden "Powered by.." footprints?
  • OzzOzz
    edited March 2013
    footprints are nothing more than phrases that most of the sites you target share. because of that just compare those sites and find accordances.
  • HeisenbergHeisenberg
    edited March 2013
    This thread is kind of along the lines of what i was thinking of asking, but mine is..

    When SER searches with a footprint like "Powered by Burning Book"...


    It's what i was thinking as well that the footprint should be "like this",
    but when the keyword is added to the footprint is the keyword inserted in inverted commas too, or is it just inserted as a plain keyword?!

    So in other words does SER search for..

    "Powered by Burning Book" "keyword"

    or

    "Powered by Burning Book" keyword?!

    I've been watching it while its running and its showing it as the second one i mentioned but im not sure if it does. I hope it does though as this seems to pull up more results than having the keyword in inverted commas. Hope it makes sense :)
  • LeeGLeeG Eating your first bourne

    The option is there to have the keyword both ways

    Put keyword in quotes when used in searches

    About the third tick box down from the keyword box

    No tick in the box and it should be used in your second example

     

  • HeisenbergHeisenberg
    LeeG Thanks i must have missed that, just what i was looking for :)
  • optimizatoruloptimizatorul Melbourne
    This is the right footprint: "Powered by Easy Guestbook"-   3 660 000, other pages means that they returns pages that contain a part of the expression searchesd.
    -------------------
    i am a seo fan
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