There’s nothing more frustrating for a webmaster than having to wait to be crawled. After you’ve perfected your on-site SEO, created some great content, and ensured you have a spider-friendly link structure, all you can do is sit back and wait for the search engine crawlers to come a-knocking. Google will crawl your site at a frequency it determines, and while you can use Google Webmaster Tools to set a crawl rate, that will just limit crawls to a rate below the one you specify to prevent your server from getting hammered. It won’t encourage Googlebot to pay a visit any more frequently if its algorithms decide that there is no need. There are, however, methods you can use to speed up the bots crawl rate, and today we’ll  have a look at 4 of them.

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There’s nothing more embarrassing for a web-based company than allowing their user’s personal data to be revealed on the open Internet. Websites and services have an ethical duty to protect the private data entrusted to them, and yet, time and again, we hear of hugely popular web services like LinkedIn and Last.fm engaged in password practices that are very definitely not the best.

On top of the ethical duty, there are significant costs associated with lax security, including danger to business continuity, loss of reputation, and legal consequences for failure to adhere to data protection regulations.

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