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The World Wide Web infrastructure provides a standard way for one page to link to another page (the HTML anchor element). It also provides a way to find what page a person was on when he clicked on a link to your site (the HTTP referrer header). Move Announcer uses this information to find what pages contain links to your old site.
Once we know which pages link to your site,
Move Announcer visits them and uses several heuristics to determine
the person responsible for those pages. Some pages have the owner explicitly
stated with a special HTML tag embedded in the page,
but most do not.
Unfortunately, while we almost always find the correct e-mail address,
occasionally an address that appears to be the webmaster's reaches someone who
is not responsible for the page. We apologize if that has happened
to you. Most people won't receive another such message, but
if you would like to opt out of all future move announcements, you may
enter your address here. AuthenticationIt is vital that only an authorized webmaster or owner of a site is able to announce a move. We have several procedures in place to ensure that this happens. First, each person who submits a move announcement must have a valid, working e-mail address so that if there are any questions about the validity of the move announcement, we can contact him or her (see our Privacy Policy). Second, we only allow someone who is able to change the content of the old web site to initiate a move announcement. This eliminates the possibility that, for instance, a competitor may fraudulently announce that a web site has moved to his or her own site. We do not, however, manually verify that contents of the new site are the same or substantially similar to the contents of the old site. Not just anyone can send a move announcement of your site.
To ensure that the person requesting the announcement is responsible for
the site in question, we e-mail the requester a small text file (moveannc.txt) that
must be temporarily placed on the site that is moving. We then read
that temporary URL in your site
(e.g. http://www.example.com/~user1234/moveannc.txt)
and start announcing! Since only the webmaster can place the file
there, fraudulent move announcements are highly unlikely. Webmaster SpecificationMove Announcer uses two standard HTML methods to specify the owner or webmaster of a web site. One is the <LINK REV=MADE...> tag and the second is the <ADDRESS> tag. If either of these is present in a page, Move Announcer will know the correct address of the webmaster. The <LINK REV=MADE...> tag should be placed in the <HEAD> section of the
HTML text and would look something like this: The tag establishes a link between that page and the person who created the page in a standards-conformant manner, yet is invisible to the user.<LINK REV=MADE HREF="mailto:webmaster@example.com">. If you don't want to put a <LINK REV=MADE...> tag with your address
on every single page
on your site, just put it on your home page and put a <LINK REL=START...> tag on
the other pages in your site something like this: This tag establishes a link between the current page and home page of your site. Move Announcer will use this tag to read the address from your home page instead.<LINK REL=START HREF="home.html">. The <ADDRESS> tag is used to denote a visible portion of your page that contains a contact address for the webmaster or owner. In most browsers, the text enclosed within the address tags is italicized. An e-mail address between the <ADDRESS> and </ADDRESS> tags is the address Move Announcer will use to contact the webmaster about bad links on the page. The LINK and ADDRESS tags are documented in the HTML 4 Specification (the use of REV=MADE to specify the document author is documented in the HTML 3.2 Specification). If one of these two methods specifying the webmaster is not found on the page, Move Announcer will use other heuristics to determine the webmaster of a page. These methods are less reliable, yet can still determine the owner of a page in most cases.
Here is the source code of a sample page that uses both methods of specifying the
webmaster address (shown highlighted). Only one need be present per page.
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Test Page</TITLE> <LINK REV=MADE HREF="mailto:webmaster@example.com"> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1>This is a Test Page</H1> <ADDRESS>This page was designed by <A HREF="mailto:webmaster@example.com">webmaster</A> </ADDRESS> </BODY> </HTML> |
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