Archive for November, 2010

New Domains vs Aged Domains!

There are many things that Google, Yahoo, MSN (Bing) factor into their algorithm when considering page rank of your web site. One of those factors is the age of the domain. The older the domain the better….it will give the search engines an appearance of longevity thus giving a higher relevancy score with the search engines. People put more faith in a business that has been around for awhile…so does the search engines. One good idea would be to purchase your domain as long in advance as you can.

There are two factors that are considered when the search engines are looking the age of a domain. First of all the age of the web site. More times than not the search engines will put your domain in a holding cell known in the industry as the “sandbox”. The sandbox theory can last for 3-4 months or longer. We will talk a bit more about that later in this article. The other factor is the length of time your domain has been registered.

The age of the web site is based on how long the site has been on the web and how long the site has actually had content included on the site. Another factor is how long the site has been promoted or when the last update on a site has occurred.

The search engines will also take into consideration when the domain was registered and for how long. The longer the registration time (two, five or even 10 years) the more the search engines will give relevancy to your site. Little things which we would normally consider as unimportant can accumulate into either a good thing for recognition or a bad thing because we didn’t pay attention to these little details.

Recently Google made some additional changes that will affect our page ranks. They now look at the incoming links and how old they are. They take into consideration the age of the web site content and the date the domain was registered. There was a lot of other things that was changed, however, we won’t discuss those changes in this writing.

We mentioned earlier about the “sandbox effect”…this is one way the search engines uses to minimize search engine spam. By giving a waiting period this will allow the search engines to see if your site is going fall off line or is your site going to stay around for a while.

If you are in the sandbox there are some things you can do while your waiting to get out of the sandbox. You can hone your writing skill by writing articles about your opportunity and post that information to blogs, forum, ezines or article directories. You can also concentrate on links and back links to your site or maybe even some pay-per-click. If you continue promoting your site during the sandbox penalty phase, when you emerge you may come out with a respectable page rank.

Don’t get discouraged here, this is just part of the process. Keep on working as if you had a high page rank and everything will work out to your advantage in the end. You many have to work a bit harder than you like, however, the reward will far outweigh the efforts you put into this part of the process.

You may want to consider a domain name that was registered before and let go for whatever reason. This may help you to avoid the sandbox effect. Most pre-owned sites with a page rank will cost you more than a new domain. Depending on your situation the extra expense may be well spent. Your renewal per year will revert back to normal renewal rates.

Keep track of your domain age so you can compare your site to your competitors web site age. If the competitors site age is much older than your site they may have a bit of an advantage with the search engines.

In Summary….make sure you register your domain for as long as you can afford. I recommend five to ten years if possible. This will indicate to the search engines that you plan to stay around for awhile. This will help to increase your score with the search engine regarding your domain’s age. Register your domain name as far in advance as you can.

There’s not one single factor that regulates this process….so do your homework and understand the various aspects of search engine positioning. There are many factors in the algorithms the search engines use to position your site on the interent. Understanding as many factors of how the search engines look at your site for ranking….this will help you in building your opportunity for the maximum efficiency….now and in the future.

If you have additional questions or need some personal mentoring you can contact the eBiz Solutions Team at the contact information listed below. The Team is standing by to assist you in your “quest for online success”.

“Let’s Build Your Business Together”

Larry L Miller SEM/SEO Consulting

Related Registering A New Domain Articles

If you want to extend your online web presence in less timeframe then consider multiple domain hosting services. Here the users can use this particular hosting for running multiple websites altogether from just one account. Thus all the domains can be controlled from just one single location.

Check out the amount of disk space that is being given by the service provider to the respective websites. It is not necessary that for running multiple domains, too much of disk space may be required at the starting level. Plan about the number of websites that you need to host and content that you want to put inside them. No website would like the situation when they have less amount of disk space than required. So prior research and calculation is better.

Another important aspect to look out for in multiple domain hosting is the amount of bandwidth you are getting. Unlike disk space bandwidth is dependent upon the type of website you are hosting. For instance site that has more number of videos need higher amount of bandwidth. Thus its quantity should be proper and not lesser than necessary otherwise your site’s loading speed would be seriously hampered and would de-motivate the visitors. So if you are planning to host multiple domains, this point should be taken care.
Email support feature is another feature that needs to be monitored while taking multiple domain services. If you have a website and run your online business through it, then you need to communicate with the customers and for that emails are inevitable. They need to have authentic email accounts given to the employees. This feature is also necessary for technical, billing and customer service department. Thus the hosting company should provide with required number of email accounts which helps your business to develop and grow.

In order to handle the management and administration functions you would require detailed management tool. A good hosting company provides this tool also through effective control panel. In case if you are not experienced and new to this field, such features enable you to manage your domain just from one location successfully. Thus such features should be checked out before taking the hosting services from any web hosting company.

Copyright © 2010

Related Domain Name Services Articles

Domain registration is generally very easy. In fact you can simply contact your local domain registrar and give your details like name, address, contact info and of course the name of the domain you want registered and your domain gets registered. Alternatively you can simply go online to your domain registrar’s website and if the facility is provided just fill out a simply online registration form with your name and other details and submit to register your domain. It’s as simple as that.

The problem arrives generally for most of us after the domain has been registered. We keep hearing all these words like name servers, domain pointing and forwarding, domain locking and other things which make it all a nightmare. But it is not as bad as you think. Domain management, once you understand the various aspects to it, is actually a very simply task. We look at some of the aspects in domain registration and management which you might have to go through while setting up your website.

Name Servers

Name servers are probably the most common words used after you have registered a domain. Your hosting company will tell you to change your domain name servers to their address in order for your web hosting service to function properly. So what are name servers?

To put it in simple language, name servers are the name of your server. It basically tells a domain where your website files are located so every time someone types your domain name in their browsers, the domain exactly knows where to go to show your website files – your homepage etc.

Name Servers generally look like this:

Assuming you are hosting with xyz hosting company then your name servers should generally be:

NS1.XYZ.COM

NS2.XYZ.COM

Note the NS could be followed by 3 or 4 depending on your hosting company. Your hosting company will generally provide their name servers to you when you register with them.

Domain Forwarding / Domain Redirect

Domain forwarding or also know as Domain redirect means if you have multiple domains registered and you want one of your domains to quite simply point to another domain that you have as an active website.

This technique allows you to have a single website be available under multiple domains. For example you can register your domain in both .com and .net format and then make the .net domain address forward to your .com website. That way you don’t have to spend on having two different websites hosted for each of your domain extensions.

Domain Locking

This is quite new to the world of domains but is a very important one and you should always be aware of your domain’s status – i.e. whether it is locked or unlocked.

Now, how does domain locking make a difference to you? Firstly if your domain is not locked, then malicious software or hackers have the ability to shift the domain in to their name or shift the domain’s name servers on to their web site which could cause lot of embarrassment to you. Not just that in some cases, hackers can pull the domain from your domain registrar to theirs, giving them full control of your domain.

In general you should always make sure your domain is in locked status. Of course when you need to change the domain’s name servers etc for your own use then you can unlock a domain. But always make sure moment your work is done and the name servers or any other information you are trying to change has been completed, immediately lock your domain. If you can’t lock or unlock your domain, please contact your domain registrar regarding this.

More Domain Name Servers Articles

I explain Domain Name Servers and Name Servers to a friend of mine all the time. He builds web sites part time. I know he’s not alone; DNS confuses a lot of people.

The internet works by assigning an address to each device attached to it. This address is called an Internet Protocol Address or IP Address for short. It’s a 32 bit number that’s commonly written as 4 segments or octets (called an octet because each 4th is 8 bits) such as 10.10.1.1 or 216.54.217.22. Each octet can range between 0 and 255. This address works just like your street address: a packet (a chunk of communication between two devices) leaving your computer and heading for Google moves through devices call routers that route traffic on the internet. The router looks at the destination IP Address and knows which way to send the packet. Just like a letter moves through various post offices and delivery vehicles (mail man, mail trucks, airplanes, etc.) your little packet of internet traffic moves across various communication channels (phone lines, cable lines, fiber, etc.) and providers (UUNet, Cogent, Level3, Time-Warner, AT&T, Sprint, AboveNet, etc.). It finally arrives at its destination and is processed and a return packet is sent back… in just the same way, it finds its way back based on your IP Address.

The Internet would be pretty hard to use if you had to remember all those IP Addresses when you wanted to visit a web page, so a naming scheme is used that allows you to enter a name that is easy to remember instead of a sequence of numbers. So, how does your computer get the IP Address of a web site when you type in the name? That’s where Domain Name Servers do their job.

Name Servers. A Name Server holds the information that relates the IP Addresses for a web site to the names used to access that web site. If you want to have a web site with a domain name, you have to register or purchase (more like rent) the domain name from a service call a registrar. When I registered the domain name for my web site, I told the registrar what Name Server I was using, Most people will use the Name Servers provided by their hosting facility (where they rent the server space for their web site). That Name Server is configured to have a “zone” for my domain and that zone contains records that relate a name to an IP address, this is called an “A Record”. An “MX Record” is used to identify the mail server for that zone, for example, I have an “A Record” for my domain that points to the IP address of the web server, and the “MX Record” points to the mail server for my domain. These may or may not be on the same server. When someone sends me email, their mail server will request the Name Server for my domain and will get it’s IP Address, then it can request the MX Record and get it’s IP Address, and then it can send packets of mail to the mail server for my domain.

Domain Name Servers. A Domain Name Server stores the domain names and associated IP Addresses for a period of time.

This is stored or cached on a server called a Domain Name Server, or DNS server for short. If the time specified for caching a domain name / IP Address relationship has passed the DNS server will remove it from its cache. When a request for an IP Address is made, and the DNS server does not have that address in its cache, the DNS Server will make a request to a set of special servers on the internet that hold the addresses for all the Name Servers and which domain names each one controls. It can then send a request to the name server for that domain to get the IP Address for the domain name and return it to the computer or device making the original request. All Internet Providers have several DNS servers and as you browse the internet your computer is constantly sending requests to these DNS servers to get (or resolve) IP Addresses for the domain names you type in or links you click on.

A web site’s name to address relationships are stored on Name Servers, as you browse the Internet, DNS servers either provide the address back to your computer from cache, or, look up the Name Server for your domain and then gets the correct Name Server to get the IP Address.

Now you too understand DNS and Name Servers!

Related Domain Name Servers Articles

Even though computers work strictly with numbers, the DNS (Domain Name system) used in computer networks uses words because humans find words easier to remember. People are more likely to remember “google.com” than a series of numbers.

DNS makes the IP numbers more human-readable by translating them into words, and vice versa (like a telephone book). DNS servers accomplish this task by having an alternative set of “records”. Following is a list of the records you’ll find most useful. There are other types of records such as TXT records, but they’re not necessary for the majority of applications.

The IP address(es) that the website can be located at is contained on the “A” host record. An IP address is in the following format: 123.45.678.9. Every network has an IP address that is unique to it.

The opposite of A records, PTR (Pointer) records are adopted by Reverse Map zone files to tie a host name to an IP address.

A Mail exchanger record, commonly referred to as MX record, is a kind of resource record in the Domain Name System (DNS) that defines the procedure to route Internet e-mails. An MX record has a preference field and a host name field. Similar to “ydomain.tld 13000 (10) ydomain.tld”, some hosts may have multiple MX records.

A CNAME Abbreviated from canonical name and often phrased “a CNAME record”, a DNS zone record which specifies the authentic, or canonical, computer host name corresponding to its aliases. Every computer that hosts a web site needs to have an IP address, or they won’t be connected to the web. While the IP address is produced by the DNS from its domain name, once in a while an IP address will be generated by several different domain names, in which occurrence the CNAME will become a valuable tool. A website can be known by many different CNAME aliases, but each one requires a different CNAME record. A CNAME record is most commonly utilized for accepting “www.” when the domain is typed in.

NS (Nameserver) Records – NS records list the allowable name servers in the domain. Below is a sample of a very simple DNS zone.

sampledomain.org. 86400 IN NS ns1.samplehostname.com. sampledomain.org. 86400 IN NS ns2.samplehostname.com. (Each domain must have at least two NS records) customers 14400 IN A 569.20.67.199 (This is a subdomain “A” record – it would look like customers.sampledomain.org whe you type it in your browser) sampledomain.org. 14400 IN A 569.20.67.199 mail.sampledomain.org. 14400 IN A 569.20.67.199 webmail.sampledomain.org. 14400 IN A 569.20.67.199 ftp.sampledomain.org. 14400 IN CNAME sampledomain.org. www. 14400 CNAME sampledomain.org. sampledomain.org. 14400 MX (10) mail.sampledomain.org.

The DNS zone records explains the rest.

TTL – 14400 and 86400 – TTL specifies the amount of time, in seconds, “Time to Live” that client side programs may cache the record. The record should be cached if it is set at 0. 0 to 2147483647 (68 years) is the allowed range.

Class – IN – The class indicates the record type. Internet is also called IN. Every other option is outdated. You can use IN if your DNS is on the Internet or Intranet.