Category: Articles

Looking through my 404 logs I came across an interesting entry.

404||www.buydentalequipment.com/warning_this_is_english_domain_to_solve_this_problem_submit_site_in_atoall.com.html||66.249.68.11||Mozilla/5.0
(compatible; Googlebot/2.1;
+http://www.google.com/bot.html)||2009-09-19 03:49:11


I thought it odd that google was trying to reach a page on my website that seemed to be an advertisement.

I think this is a rather unique and somewhat shady marketing trick. atoall.com seems to have generated a list of bogus links for literally thousands of websites. They did this so that Google would find these invalid links in hopes that more astute webmasters like myself would find them in our 404 logs.

Running a google search for this page results in about 5,500 hits. Every single one of them leading to a 404 page on various websites.

Sneaky Sneaky. Hopefully Google will catch on and put a stop to spamming via their bot.

An update to an old post. I found a much cleaner solution using jquery.

The setup:

<div id="clickable">
  <h2><a href="#">Clickable Text</a></h2>
</div>


Now the jquery:

$(document).ready(function(){

  $("#clickable").click(function(){
    window.location=$(this).find("a").attr("href"); return false;
  });

});


A nice clean solution that plucks the link from the div and makes the entire thing clickable.