My son loves browsing the internet, and he's found a message board he wants to join. I'm uneasy about letting him do it, partly because he has to give his email address, and other information. What are your recommendations on children joining websites?

First things first. Somewhere on the website your child wants to join, there should be a link with a title something like "Terms Of Use" or "Privacy Policy".

In theory, this link is prominently located on the home page, but that is not necessarily the case. You may need to search to find it. In some cases, the Terms of Use (TOU)/Terms of Service (TOS) and Privacy Policy won't even appear until you start registering. Not a problem; you can start the registration process and then cancel it if you don't like the usage details.

Read through the information carefully - especially the Privacy Policy. If the site caters to children, it is required to tell you specifically what information it will collect from your child, and what purposes it will use that information for. You should read and consider this before you let your child join.

Next, you should consider running a search for the website, to find out what other people think of the website your child wants to join. If you are satisfied that the site appears to be reputable, and you are comfortable with their TOU and privacy policy, then walk through the registration process with your child, making it clear that your child is not to join other websites without your approval. As I said in another post about children and the internet you should try to make the internet a family experience.

Dear Professor Puzzler, My son is always pestering me to go online, and I am very uneasy about letting him browse the internet, because I know there's some really trashy websites out there. Have any suggestions?

The internet can be a frightening place.

It's like a city--there are places that are filled with bright lights and dazzling and exciting attractions. There are beautiful parks, museums, and zoos. There are also slummy, dirty, dark places where you wouldn't go in broad daylight. How much do you let your child wander the city alone?

You should be even more concerned about letting your child wander the internet alone, because in some cases the difference between the brightly lit park and the slum district is one click. I can go to google.com, type in one search term, and have a plethora of inappropriate websites (hate sites, pornographic sites, etc) listed on my computer screen.

Browse the internet with your child. Help your son find the brightly lit places, and make the internet a family experience.

As your child grows older, he will begin having more freedom--both at school and at home--and the best thing you can do for him while you have the opportunity is to teach him appropriate use of this powerful (yet oh-so-frightening) resource we call the internet.

2016 Update: Internet use has become ubiquitous among children in the decade since this was written. Everyone seems to have a smart phone, and parents tend to forget that the same resources (good, bad, and ugly) that are available on the home computer are also available on the phone. The warning to proceed with caution is as important as ever!

Dear Sir, We recently started a Listserve for our club and the member list was installed in the software.

Using my address as an an example the format was: ---- at ----.com instead of my actual address.

The list was on the site, which was reasonably restricted for members only, for less than 72 hours. Many seniors (members) were EXTREMELY concerned the address was available to the world and they were going to get more spam than they already were and their privacy was totally compromised. A System Engineer advised us this was next to impossible. Your comments on such a probability would be greatly appreciated!

Hi ---, That's a nice looking site you have there. I agree with your sys eng. You have three things going for you:

1. The list is restricted to members only. This means a bot is not going to 'stumble across it'. Someone would have to obtain a membership in order to harvest those email addresses. (a question to ask: how easy is it to obtain a membership?)

2. Even if they can get a membership, nobody is going to sit and manually enter all those email addresses, just so they can spam them.

3. Someone would have to specifically program a bot to convert your email address format into real email addresses. Now, if your list contained hundreds of thousands addresses, a spammer might think it was worth the bother to break in and snag those addresses. But with a much smaller membership, they probably wouldn't think it was worth their bother, even if they did get in. I hope that is helpful to you.

Best wishes!

I finished developing my website, and I want to get it included in search engines, so people will start finding it. I've gone through the submission routine at each search engine, but it's taking forever for my site to appear in their lists. Is there anything I can do about that?

This article is about search engines, and was originally written in 2006. It has been tweaked a bit to more accurately reflect current (2016) search engine practices.

Don't just sit around waiting to get into the search engines, because if you do, it probably will take a long time to get listed. Search engines are notorious for taking their jolly good time about looking at submitted sites.

But remember this: all the time you're waiting for them to get to your site, they are looking at other sites that are already listed. In fact, most of my sites get inspected by the google search engine on a daily basis. Annoying, isn't it? In the time you're waiting for google to look at your site, they've probably looked at my site fifty to a hundred times.

The reason is that my site has been in google for a long time, and it is a reliable site that is hardly ever down, and has never attempted to 'trick' the search engines. So google likes me. So what can you do while you wait?

• Look for other "popular" websites that are willing to link to yours. Imagine if you could convince me to put a link to your website on my homepage (by the way, don't ask, because I won't do it! ;)). Now google is going to come across the link to your page every time it looks at mine! Do you think you'll get listed faster that way? You bet you will.
• Consider paying for inclusion in web directories like Yahoo! I know, it's painful; some web directories charge up to $300, just to have one of their editors look at your site. No guarantees that they'll include it, and no money back if they don't. But if you can get into a high powered, high traffic directory, that'll help you out with the search engines.
• Slow and steady wins the race. Don't get anxious and start engaging in questionable practices like spamming the search engines with requests. In the long run it's much more important to have a well built foundation and a solid website. Then when you finally get listed, the search engines will love you, and they'll never let you go.

* Here's a statistic to really annoy you: When I published the "Ask Doug..." website, I didn't do any search engine submission. I simply posted a link to the site on the home page of my software site. Care to guess how long it took for google to list this site? Less than 30 hours. That's right. Barely more than a day! Sickening, isn't it? But that shows you the importance of getting high profile links to your site.

Are there any special requirements for how I format the text in my hyperlinks in my web pages?

Basically, you should make sure that your hyperlinks contain text that is descriptive of the page you are linking to. This seems obvious, but if you're not thinking about it, you may do something like the following: Click here to play Diamond Slide. When you have a link like the one above, you are really saying that your page is about "click here". When in fact, it is about a game called "Diamond Slide". 

So a better link would be: Click here to play Diamond Slide. 

Even better would be a link like this: Click here to play the Diamond Slide Game.

Why does this matter? There are two reasons:

• It can improve your search engine rankings. Some search engines will use the text in hyperlinks to help determine the relevancy of a page. So the first example tells the search engine your page is "relevant" for the search term "click here", while the second example tells the search engine your page is "relevant" for the terms "play" and "diamond slide." Why is the third example even better? Because it informs the search engines that the link is a game.
• Website visitors with physical disabilities may have a hard time following links like the first example. The reason is that users with some handicaps may view a web page by "tabbing" through the hyperlinks, and looking at the text of the link.

2016 update: Remember that Google and other search engines are very complex algorithms for predicting the kinds of content people want to look at. They are complex, but they're still just algorithms, and they are prone to being duped by people who want to subvert the algorithm. The fact that link anchor text can affect a page's ranking led to something called "Google bombing," which is what happens when a large number of people all put the same anchor text leading to a specific page. For example, a group of people Google bombed President George W. Bush by making links to his White House biography that had anchor text: "miserable failure." Thus, when people searched "miserable failure," they were directed to the White House page for GWB.