Posts Tagged ‘determines’

Cookies vs Sessions

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

The main difference between cookies and sessions is that cookies are stored in the user’s browser, and sessions are not. This difference determines what each is best used for.

A cookie can keep information in the user’s browser until deleted. If a person has a login and password, this can be set as a cookie in their browser so they do not have to re-login to your website every time they visit. You can store almost anything in a browser cookie. The trouble is that a user can block cookies or delete them at any time. If, for example, your website’s shopping cart utilized cookies, and a person had their browser set to block them, then they could not shop at your trouble .

Sessions are not reliant on the user allowing a cookie. They work instead like a token allowing access and passing information while the user has their browser open. The problem with sessions is that when you close your browser you also lose the session. So, if you had a site requiring a login, this couldn’t be saved as a session like it could as a cookie, and the user would be forced to re-login every time they visit.

You can of course get the best of both worlds! Once you know what each does, you can use a combination of cookies and sessions to make your site work exactly the way you want it to.

Google SiteLinks what are they?

Friday, June 20th, 2008

If you go to Google and so a search for AOL, you will see additional links below the main result under AOL that link to other internal AOL pages. These links are randomly chosen by Google’s algorithm. Sitelinks appear for general terms and brand names. What determines which sitelinks Google uses is unknown? Ideally these links should have descriptive text links or a descriptive alt tag attribute. There isn’t anything that one can do to have these sitelinks on Google; this is all done by Google’s algorithm.

There are known facts on what Google looks for in a sitelink, which are the following: You need to be number one for the searched phrase, how often you receive clicks for the phrase also matters, your website needs to have been around for a minimum of 2 years, and inbound links with the required anchor text help also.