Less than 10% of Shop Window quota remaining for account

[Scotiaweb]

I keep getting the message "Less than 10% of Shop Window quota remaining for account". This morning I have two.

The only advice offered in the email is to stop bots. I have therefore searched out and, I hope, implemented a "no index, no follow" on the main page. Then I find reference to creating pages that can be indexed.

This seems to be conflicting advice. Stop the bots/don't stop the bots?

Also the regular emails do not give any other advice about what to do about the quota running out. It's a bit like saying "your road is running out and your car is about to hit a brick wall", without offering the useful advice:

Put your foot on the brake.
Or steer onto another course.


I really need to prepare.

Are you going to stop my account?

If so I will start to run down the Shop Window part of my site and/or look for another solution elsewhere.

Can we have more useful advice about what is going to happen and when, please?

[Bud]

I've had this problem before and found that it could really be prevented using a robots file.

I don't know how familiar your are with robots files so please excuse this if it is covering something you have already done or know:

In your root folder create a file "robots.txt"

In that file put the following code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /Contact.php
Disallow: /goto.php

User-agent: ShopWiki
Disallow: /

User-agent: Yanga
Disallow: /

User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: MJ12bot
Disallow: /


This should drastically cut down the amount of traffic/calls from bots that don't do you any favours - worked a treat for me.

This thread may also be of use: http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/affiliate-marketing-lounge/102443-where-do-i-find-robots-txt.html

Hope that helps.

[Scotiaweb]

Hi Bud

Thanks for that. No I am not very technical so I hope I have done this right. Just dropped a robots.txt file (with your text as is) in the Shop Window folder and uploaded it.

The fact remains that the messages from Shop Window are not very helpful. Other than bots, we cannot control the number of calls in Shop Window and if, as the emails seem to suggest, there is some restriction looming, we need time to take down our Shop Window links and look for other options.

Can someone tell us what is going to happen.

As I said the current advice suggests our sites may crash into the brick wall, but it doesn't say whether we do an emergency stop and take down our sites, or do a U-turn and look for other options.

[Andy]

Nobody really knows what is going to happen tbh. I doubt it'll be too long before we find out though.

The best thing you (and everyone else) can do is try to save calls.

I would add the following to your robots.txt too:



User-agent: SapphireWebCrawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: IRLbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Twiceler
Disallow: /

Those three went nuts on my site, especially Twiceler. Have a look here to get Twiceler to stay away from your site ASAP: http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/

If you have a Google webmaster account, you could ask google to slow their crawl down for now, that should save you a few calls too.

There are other ways, but as you said you're abit of a novice, I won't go into them right now.