Review: Host Gator

I've spent more than five months looking for a new place to put my blogs. I have more than 20 blogs on blogger, wordpress, and drupal. I wanted a place where I could put them all - even the ones with their own domain names.

At siteground I needed a new account for each blog. It wasn't really that I hated paying $300 a year for hosting. I made that back in 2 weeks as a Paid Blogger. The problem was that I had to access 20 different statistic sites, and manage 20 different dashboards.



I moved to hostgator. They allow unlimited domains, so all of my blogs and websites are on one Cpanel for $7.99. That is a $292 savings a year. Plus, I have unlimited sub domains, for improving search engine optimization. And I can also establish more than one PHP list, so I can satisfy all my members.

I have been at siteground, Netfirms, and on a couple of small hosting companies over the last year. I give HOSTGATOR

10/10 on knowledgeable service

10/10 on ease of set up

10/10 on 'keeping site up' (a website needs to hog 25% of the CPU for 90 seconds before they bring it down.)

10/10 on price
10/10 service
10/10 support


Learn more about blogging and making money online at wealthy-writer website.

Avoid Free Domain Name Offers

Almost every web host, forum host, or blog host now offers free domain names. Even other sources such as Paid Post services offer free domain names. I’ve been hit hard 2 or 3 times by these free domain sites.

The deal is great for the first year. After that, you’ll pay much more to review the domain than godaddy.com will charge. I’ve had bills as high as $40 per year to renew.

I learned the second lesson the hard way. When you leave, the domain doesn’t leave with you. I worked hard to promote one domain. The company promised to transfer the domain for months. After a year I gave up trying to get the domain that I’d worked up to PR4 and was now ‘aged.’ I continued to try and buy the domain and watched for it to expire. Eventually, it was sold for $4000 to a company in Italy.

All my link building work was lost. My loyal visitors were going to another site. My friend’s links lead to another website.

There is a saying that nothing is free. This goes for domain names. A website’s entire success can hinge on its domain name. Losing this because you need to change web host, or need a larger host, can cripple a website, or even force a webmaster to start over again.


Learn more about blogging and making money online at wealthy-writer website.

Socialspark: Three Types Advertising

Posts: The posts work in the same way as all posts – sort of. The entire system is designed to balance the number of bloggers looking for a post, and the price offered. The objective here is 100% on the advertiser’s side. The only ‘bonus’ the blogger receives is the ability to sign up to wait for that advertiser’s next campaign or release of posts.

When signing up for SocialSpark, use an email addy that accessed every day. The email states that you have 6 hours to finish the post. Many posters are finding that you have 12. That is fairly tight, and may be designed to give the advantage to pro bloggers.

You’ll still need to ‘haunt’ SocialSpark and catch the new opportunities as soon as they surface. There are not many yet. Hopefully the number will grow.

Sponsored: These are the pop-up boxes that appear when a website is first opened. The price fluctuates, but the blogger is paid daily. This type of format is optional, so no blogger has to stay away from SocialSpark because they fear the pop-ups.

I don’t think that the sponsored ops will cause problems for anyone but bloggers who buy traffic. I know that my traffic generating venue does not allow pop-ups.

Spark: This is one of the biggest bonuses. Sparks create a blogger network.

Bloggers can post their own ops to bring it to the attention of other bloggers. Some of the opportunities are BlogUback, which trades links. Some of them are just typical cyber-spam, but there are some great chances to earn some good back links.

This is a great way to get reviews of your blog in return for reviews of other blogs. The problem? Are these considered posts? Will the Advertisers consider them paid posts? If so, then they kind of lose their value. I have contacted support. I’ll post their answer shortly.

It is important to note that Sparks are unpaid. They are great for people to ‘learn the system’ and get into practice without risking a negative vote.

FREE Place to Advertise Your Business

Everyone knows that building links is one of the hardest parts of ecommerce business management. Anyone who wants their domains to receive traffic need to earn a profit and watch your business grow, knows that web advertising can be impossible. This problem doubled for tens-of-thousands of business owners when Google doubled their price.

Google hates paid linking, but for many websites, the only way to build the thousands of posts necessary for success is to pay bloggers to write a post for your business. It doesn’t really matter if they review your product or service. All that matters is whether they include a keyword anchored link.

Until now, the ad agencies controlled all the campaigns. IZEA recently released a new platform that lets Advertisers control the campaigns. An advertiser may put a campaign out for bloggers to vote on. Or, they may hand pick bloggers. Do you only want bloggers who will write reviews? Do you only have enough money for 50 posts? Do you only want your link on blogs that are in your niche? It doesn’t matter anymore. You can pick and choose. It doesn’t cost anything to sign up for IZEA’s SocialSpark. The system (the evolution of PayPerPost) is one of the best on the net. www.socialspark.com

There is a type of advertising where you can get FREE ADVERTISING by exchanging reviews with bloggers. Take a look

Great New Page Rank Building Tool

Have you ever wanted to go blog hopping without the guilt? Smorty has created a new system that allows you to do just that. Much in the same way Diva Network is designed to let bloggers work together to build links, Smorty has added a tool that lets bloggers review each other's work. Best of all, it is free.

It is about time someone created a system where bloggers could support other bloggers. This is a great system. For every review you do for another blogger, someone does one for you. You do not need to activate all the blogs that are listed with smorty. All you need to do is activate the ones that you want to promote.

If you want someone to write a blog review your home blog then you will put the review on your home blog. To make it more 'fair,' smorty also matches blogs by Page Rank. This way, a blogger will not find themselves writing posts for PR0 sites and then posting a review on a PR4 site.

This is not a reciprocal links system. Smorty set up the system so that Blogger A reviews Blogger B. Blogger B reviews Blogger C. Blogger C reviews Blogger A. This keeps all the SEO and Page Rank algorithms clean.

Tutorial: Search Engines Won't Index My Website

Search Engines Won’t Index Your Blog

I have a couple of blogs that the search engines will not index. I can run the site through my WEBCEO software program and it shows the sites indexed on Google and Yahoo, plus a few others, but when I check out the site, it is not indexed.

In fact, there are websites with PR3 which are still not indexed. Not being indexed does not necessarily mean the webmaster has done something wrong.

SiteMap

There are several ways to index a site. One way is to add a site map to the website. This might not always be possible. If you have a Google account, try adding your FEED file and let Google use that as the site map – as with all Google tools, it doesn’t always work. I find that it works on two-thirds of my blogs.

Google has a hard time verifying Google’s own blogger. I’ve followed 3 sets of instructions and none of them worked. However, I verified Drupal and Wordpress without any problems. If you can get your site verified and use the sitemap tool to get indexed.

I did a little twist and got one of my sites indexed. The site was http://work-at-home-guru.blogspot.com/ WEBCEO said 61 pages were indexed. I did a site and link search and found almost 70 pages. But, when an advertiser did their search they didn’t find any search engines had indexed the site. Google wouldn’t let me ad /feed to the sitemap. I tried to verify the site – wouldn’t work.

So, I made a RSS feed at www.feedburner.com and let Google search that. Do not worry about errors. The objective is not to get the site indexed well, but to make Google take a look at the site.

AdWords

If the site is commercial and the site needs to be indexed quickly, then join Google’s PPC program. Their rules state that there is no minimum, but people I know who have AdWord accounts state that the minimum is $50. This is not bad because you get advertising for it.

The benefit of this program is that Google must index the site before finding websites to advertise on. That means an instant index.

Problems

There are a few reasons why a website may not be indexed. First, is broken links. Search engines may stop at a broken link and assume the site is down. They may remove a site that was previously indexed.

Some websites such as Google and HotBot will not index sites with no inbound links. One way to get indexed is to link to a website or blog on a page ‘other’ than the index page.

Flash intros, videos and images may result in the spiders skipping a website. The index page must link to the rest of the site, if not – as in the case of flash intros – there is no links to the index page from the inside pages. Result, search engines will not index the site.

Most search engines will not index a free site.

Linking to a banned or benched website may result in the search engines refusing to index a site.

Submitting the site monthly can result in the site being ‘pruned’ from the database, or just not indexed in the first place.

Dynamic URLs are often overlooked. Any domain name that contains symbols and ? and &, are often ignored.

Only text is indexed. If the page has no text, then there is no index. Search engines cannot enter passwords, fill in forms, sign up for RSS, or newsletters. If the website asks people to do any of these before continuing – the sub pages will not be indexed.

Search engines will not index large pages, or ones that load slow. No web page should be more than 50k

404 message. Web hosting companies are not 100%. If the site is down when the robot comes looking then they will ignore the website.

Scripts cannot be indexed. A scripted menu is harder to index than a static one written in HTML.

Sometimes frames and scripts can make a search engine think they are at the end of the site and leave.

Template may be so complex, with far too many tags. This can make it difficult to get indexed. The webmaster may need to change templates.

What Next?

If the site is still not indexed and has a blog in it, try to manually ping the blog to a service such as pingoat.com or some of the others.

How to Submit

There are right ways, and wrong ways, to submit to search engines. Most websites are indexed organically. The search engines follow a link from one site to another, delving deep into the site. The indexing times can take anywhere from days to months.

One urban legend was Google’s sandbox. This doesn’t exist in the true sense. It just takes time for a site to be indexed. Most search engines may index only 300 – 400 pages. Getting the site indexed deeper can involve several techniques including setting up sub-sections and sub-domains and submitting them to search engines, individual page submission, and linking to that page from an outside source.

Submitting one page at a time which links to other pages is called creating a "hallway page." This will get previously ignored web pages indexed, and it may also improve the ranking. It is important to remember that web pages found organically receive more value than ones submitted. So letting Google follow links to un-indexed pages increase their rank.

Avoid Redirects, no-follow links, and meta refresh code. Most search engines will refuse to index these web pages.

If a web page does not change for several months, then search engines may purge it from their databases. Search engines love new content. That is why optimization must be done every few months. An old page may be re-submitted after part of the content or page is changed.

Text

Make sure the web pages are not full of code that cannot be indexed. Search engines will long look through a page indefinitely, past affiliate codes, meta info, heading info, dynamic menus, graphics, video, links, and finally to content. They may leave.

Robot File

All sites should have a robot file that tells the search engine what information is important. It contains meta information.

Archives

Archives can make it easier for search engines to dig deeper into the website. Check your CODE. Did the template designer put a no-follow code in it?

Free Brochure Maker

I found this great new tool that lets you make brochures with a mailing panel, without mailing panel, or a flier. Best of all, it is free, online, and prints on your home printer. This is not one of those widgets that are hosted by printing companies which force you to buy 250 copies.

Just create a flier by clicking your favorite layout from the selection. Then add your text, front and back. Then print. The brochure maker lets you print front, then back, for people who do not have printers capable of doing both in one action.

The brochure maker has no 'buy ups' or add ons needed. It is perfect for business owners who only need the occasional brochure, and want the freedom to change the content and layout for different clients.

Don’t Slam the Competition

Many businesses work hard to offer more than the competition. They go the extra mile. They take a bigger profit cut. These are all good promotion and marketing tactics. They are the foundation of a solid marketing campaign that will work for small ecommerce business owners as well as brick-and-mortar business owners.

The problem comes when the business owner starts to highlight the differences. There is a fine line between highlighting the best in your business and bad mouthing the competition. Even if the complaints are legit. Even if there are thousands of reviews stating the same thing as your internet marketing campaign does. If you badmouth the competition clients will see ‘you’ as the bad one – sale lost.

Avoid Buying Directory Links

Buying links in directories, for a few pennies may seem like a good bargain. You’ll get more traffic, but at what cost? September 2008, when Google decided that buying links was illegal, webmasters were in a rage. Blogs were dropping from PR4 to PR0 over night.

The only blog I had that dropped was a PR3, it went down to PR0 – and has never started to climb up. I looked at all 30 blogs I manage, and the only thing that made this blog stand out was that I had bought $500 worth of directory links.
This has made me afraid of listing in the directories – just in-case Google sees the website as ‘suspect’ and drops the PR. It is very frustrating. Google has made it almost impossible to follow their rules.

It is making me so frustrated with Google that I am starting to favor RealRank, at least they are honest about their algorithms.