Well, I recently took the plunge and installed Windows Vista on my PC. I won't go on at length here about what an incredible pain in the you know where it was, but it did bring something to the forefront for me.

The initial security settings are such that I had to manually accept cookies that websites download into Internet browsers. What I had no idea of though was exactly how many there are.

Any website with a tracking program, including this one, uses tracking cookies to see how users move through and interact with a website. If however, you choose to visit a website with an ad on it, then you get two. One from the site, the other from the ad. If the site has multiple ads, you get a new one from each ad company that is represented.

One site I visited, I counted no less than 8 cookies. On the first page.

I realize that for some features it is quite useful to track your presence on. Others not so much. I'm not a big fan of giving out my IP address to every ad company on the planet.

So I started blocking them. It doesn't really affect functionality unless your buying something from that site. I couldn't believe the amount of people trying to collect my information.

That being said, don't block my cookie on this site. I use it only to track how people move through my site so I can make improvements to site navigation etc.

Search engine optimization can be greatly assisted by the information that tracking software generates, with the help of cookies. But it can also go overboard.

Or you can do what most people do and turn off the alerts so you never know who's watching what you do online... (cue big brother theme music here)..

Labels: search engine optimization