SEO Expert – Venetsian Jacks

Comment spam seems to be one of the most common wordpress blogger problems. There are many tools to fight it, but it seems few of them are only the real solution to the problem. In this post, I’ll explain what wordpress comment spam is and how to defend yourself from it, as well as some of the really bad effects of spam to your website.

Since the beginning of wordpress, comment spam has became really popular SEO and eMarketing tool. Yes the people who do it are very well paid, and this type of website marketing is really popular and very dangerous. The biggest problem with it is that most of its utilizes are pharmaceutical companies and all their vendors which seem to be millions. I’m not sure what kind of money are involved with the whole thing, but I can ensure you that many search engines tried to stop them, but they still seem to be fully active. Just try to Google some pill and you’ll find around 50 million paged dedicated only to the V-pill and pretty much the same on other alternatives. Unfortunately to get such high results you’ll need massive — yes I most definitely mean virtually millions of pages — to rank on the first 100 results and that’s where WordPress and other blogging software comment spam comes in play.

There is a large discussion in the SEO world of the negative effect of commend spam. It is considered that link spam quite bad since most of the links are from the so called “bad neighborhoods”, but Google (the Search Engine’s) point of view is devious. Some say that websites are be penalized if they link to spam sites, others say that spam is simply part of the real life and websites are not penalized. Well, I’m not sure which one is right, but to be on the safe side I strongly recommend that you don’t link to any of those and therefore protect your site from nasty comment links. It is not only that they are bad links, they are also links which leak your PR and your website is devalued, therefore they really BAD. We should not even think about duplicate content because 100% of this comment spam is also on other sites which brings down your overall website quality drastically.

Comment Spam is a relatively simple technique which uses automated commenting scripts to inject into different type of website applications. If you’re a wordpress user and your website has some backlinks you’ll be most definitely getting few hundred comment spams a day, and maybe even thousands for larger websites. This massive spam required software developers to come out with different defense techniques, some of which are extremely popular as the Akismet plugin for wordpress, which seems to be pretty much the best solution out there. Unfortunately Akismet should not be the only anti-spam application you are running.

Lately I’ve been having rather strange problem. My website seemed to overload quite a bit, and all my efforts to optimize it with WP-Super-Cache and other similar plugins did nothing. This made me look a bit deeper into the whole problem and try to figure out what exactly caused its high load. I saw that there are few hundred akismet spam messages filtered every day, but I didn’t think that it is possible for them to do all this load. After a bit more careful analysis I found out that they can and they do cause all my high CPU load. It seems that a comment is first processed by wordpress and akismet in some weird way to figure out if it may be a spam, then a automated request for verification is sent to the wordpress API page where a pass or fail signal is sent. This delay in processing the request seems to be generating some of the load, and combined with few hundred other message injections it ended up into a considerably high amount of resources wasted on spam comments. This made me look a bit further into wordpress ani-spam plugins.

The first good wordpress spam filter seemed to be the CAPTCHA type of plugins. Ironically most simple captchas are already broken and crafty comment spam software seems to be able to avoid them (well, I figured out that after testing few different apps for a day or two). The best one, which also seemed most user friendly as it supported Audio text narration for the really unreadable text, seems to be ReCaptcha. It is a free “service” which requires a free registration. You can install it with the Automated WordPress Plugin Installer just search for reCatcha and you’ll find it. After installation it will give you the url for registration and you can get the API code from there.

It is quite unfortunate that reCaptcha and Akismet didn’t fix my load issue although they stopped 100% of the wordpress comment spam, which is still a great achievement. It seemed that reCaptcha was testing the client/visitor side, but the nasty spammers injected their comments directly into the wordpress-comments.php script which somehow bypassed it. I needed better defense system. This is where low level web server protection comes in.

I accidentally found out that most of the comment spam software is utilizing Pearl CGI scripts, and fortunately for all of us, pearl has special signature which is easily recognizable by firewall software. For this type of applications the low level apache module called Mod_Security seems to be the ultimate weapon in our wordpress defense program. By setting up a simple pearl crawler block which is actually built-in the default mod_security definitions. After a day of testing I’ve noticed 50% load decrease while all the visitor traffic was the same.

The best thing I found, which I already wrote about in some previous posts on War against the Content Scrapers where I’m commenting my problems with duplicated content issues as also mostly utilizing pearl and php scripts. Mod_Security also has option to block all unknown user-agents which is pretty much what I’m suggesting in my previous post. In this way you protect yourself from comment spammers as well as duplicate content scrapers.

I think I forgot to mention that mod_security is apache module and therefore you will have to recompile apache with it. To do this you will have to have root access to the server and if you don’t have your own VPS or Dedicated Server then you have to check if your web host can set it up for you. If your host doesn’t have it, you can check out our $3.95 per month wordpress hosting service from maiahost.com which supports mod_security as well as Suhosin (another wordpress protection server module).

If you have better suggestions please keep me posted. I’m 100% spam secure now so don’t try to spam me he he he ..

Venetsian wordpress comment spam, wordpress, wordpress spam

Reliable web hosting? Well that’s pretty much the same as saying Expensive Web Hosting. I’ll explain here why.

Why do you need reliable web hosting?

Well, if you don’t want to have frequent website failures, data loss or being treated like an idiot from your web hosting provider, then you most probably need reliable web hosting provider. The worst thing you ever want is your website which you’ve invested so much development efforts to suddenly go offline because your host was not careful and did something stupid. If you have good website, with good traffic and good income, do not hesitate to invest in better, more reliable web hosting provider, otherwise you may wake up one day and find your website gone, hacked or spreading viruses to your own visitors/clients. Everyone, every self respecting professional should rely on a reliable hosting provider instead of cheap resellers who get your money and suddenly disappear along with your hard labor!

What is Reliable web hosting

We all judge the quality of one web hosting service provider by the sum of quality points for few major properties such as support level, server configuration restrictions, website speed and hardware reliability. Unfortunately all of those parameters are directly linked to the costs associated with that parameter and if one desires to obtain good overall web hosting reliability it will be quite costly at the end, but fortunately for us we can have some turnarounds are have very good reliability at most affordable prices based on the formula I’m giving you at the end of this post. I would like to stress the fact that the costs of reliability are also directly linked to your own webmaster skills since the more experience you have the cheaper your hosting is. But before we start I would like to explain what exactly web hosting actually is and what is involved in the whole thing.

What is Support Level

Based on my personal experience I’ve found out that there are few very important things to consider before purchasing a hosting plan from a new (to you) company. It is quite unfortunate that nowadays web hosting reviews are not really accurate as most of them as paid by the actual web hosting company and most of the times deviate from the truth. In order to really acquire some early on experience is to contact them with some simple pre-sales questions that will give you the basic idea of they will be good support or not. For example you can ask the following questions:

question: Hi, I’m interested in purchasing a web hosting from you guys, but I was wondering if (my desired package here) is running on raid hard drive configuration for data security?

If you get answer like, “I don’t know” or “no” or they’re not really quick on answering this question, then most probably this is not a good company for you to start hosting with since you’ve learned two very important thing from a single answer and those are that a) they don’t have any data loss prevention device, and b) their support may not have experience in the web hosting industry. If they say “yes” and are quick to say it, then you should try to get some more information by asking some common hosting problem issues.

question: Hi, with my previous web hosting company I used to have some file permission errors and I had to change each file manually. Is that the same with you?

In most cases file permission errors are if your host is not running PHP SuEXEC which is vital to file writing and modification which is nowadays used by all Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, CMS MS and etc. SuEXEC is also considered to be with better security because if it is missing you risk of being hacked by another hacked account on the same server since all accounts are with same user “nobody” if SuExec is not enabled. Based on my experience SuEXEC is really helpful since allows smooth CMS operation especially if you’re new to the web hosting industry and don’t know how to change file permissions yourself.

question:One of my websites was injected with malware which was caused by bad web hosting security. Do you know if you guys have this problem or it was fixed with your servers?

At some point everybody had his site hacked atleast once (my photo gallery Gallery 2 was hacked last fall and injected with a Trojan Horse which pretty much made me remove the whole CMS due to high security risks!). Based on my own hosting experience that CMS hacks seem to be common but there are also common preventions which are eventually implemented with the hosting companies. It is a good idea to ask the host early in the presales if you will be having this problem because it is a serious issue which you should be really careful as if hacked your website may start sending SPAM emails and even redirect your search engine traffic to other websites (yes that is possible and its really hard to find if you don’t monitor your traffic stats carefully).

If you get satisfying answers to the above questions you should ask few more with which you will be able to determine how much help your web will give you if you accidentally get in trouble. Note that those questions are based on your current experience and if you feel somehow knowledgeable about them you should not bother to ask, but if you don’t know how to handle them its good idea to know if you will be getting help or not. Also note that some web hosts do not include FREE help in non-web-hosting-issues which can sometimes be all your questions if you don’t have previous webmaster experience. For example you should not expect your web host to explain/teach/do stuff that is supposed the-webmaster-duties such as uploading/changing/modifying themes, content and etc. Some web hosts do that but in almost all cases this is paid separately per hour labor. What you should also ask the web hosting provider is what you are offered as free support:

question: What is uncluded in the free support for (my hosting package).

If you get that all support is paid then you most probably will get good quality support but at a price. It is quite dangerous if you they tell you that all their support is free, which basically means that you will get no support at all. It is considered better to have paid but reliable (when you need it) support rather than limited or virtually no support. As I said above this is also one of the things you should base upon your own experience and if you don’t need much support you can go with the free support hosting providers. You should also ask what type of support is offered for you:

question: If I ever need support what is the fastest way to contact you and get response? Also what’s the typical response time on support tickets/emails?

The final question before purchasing your new hosting package is to check out what contact means your host is providing. It is really best if you have (even limited) phone support [You should even call them on the phone to obtain that information instead of live chat or email] and also ticketing system (much better than emails but harder to manage). If they offer contact phones to both sales/billing and technicians you’ve just found your new web hosting provider, otherwise you should check few more companies and compare what they offer before running with this one. Note that it is industry standard to have telephone sales/billing support and ticketing/email support for technical questions so don’t run away if you get that, although its great if they offer phone tech support!

I guess those 3-4 questions will give you a good idea of what you’re getting involved with as all the other parameters can not be directly interviewed and require you to build your own experience with that company which may be in the first few days. That’s why you should ask (check) if your web hosting provider is offering 30 day full money back guarantee which will hopefully reduce the risks you might experience. Based on my own experience if you’re not happy with your hosting within the first few days, then you should not hesitate to cancel and find other company to host your websites.

Server Configuration Restrictions

I’ve intentionally left this one as second since most new webmasters won’t really need much and they’re better off with more support, but if you are experienced webmaster then your set of tools is your best weapon and the more access you have the most freedom to grow your website. Based on my own experience I find two major Website Hosting Control Panels to be CPanel and Plesk. There are many other CUSTOM ones, but in most cases I would advise you to get a host with one of them instead of custom because those seem to contain a standard set of web hosting controls which guarantee that you will be able to perform most configuration changes in order to run a successful website. Unfortunately this may not be present in custom ones and in such cases its better to go with CPanel as it offers most flexibility (if fully enabled by your provider since they can limit some of its functionality).

Basically what Cpanel and Plesk offer is the following:

• Email Account Manager and Webmail client
• Built-in File Manager
• Built-in Website Traffic Stats Software such as AWStats
• Addon and Subdomain Manager
• MySQL database manager with PHPMyAdmin web manager
• Apache Handler, Domain DNS editor (for MX record modifications)
• Other not really used

It is also good to know if you can enable or even request custom PHP extentions to be enabled/installed on your account as this seems to be a bit tricky and risky on the web hosting provider’s side (possible security implications). If you don’t need any then you shouldn’t care but if you want to run a Video type of site then you might need custom ones which are almost never included in the standard shared web hosting packages, so you should research a bit more before jumping into hosting before knowing what you really need from your hosting provider.

Website Speed

Basically the website speed is a relative thing since it depends on too many factors and can not be easily estimated, but you should atlest have a website that starts to load within 2-3 seconds and is fully loaded in a dozen. Note that the initial “start to show content” is what the actual main PHP/Server processing is involved as the rest is pretty much to download the images and other files associated are more dependent on your own internet connection rather than the capacity of the server. If you do have high speed DSL or even better (optic) connection then if the whole website does not load in 12-15 seconds than its most probably a slow server or network farm. Based on my own experience I find that the CPU (which determines the “start-to-load” speed) is most of the times overloaded easier than the Network Pipe (which determines the image/file load) as CMS systems tend to use vast amount of resources in peak times (when the page load request is processed). You should also consider that your package may be limited in those main resources and therefore load slower than other ones which makes your goal to find affordable good speed web hosting provider.

Hardware Reliability

We all know that cheap hardware is never reliable, so be advised if your cheap hosting provider seems to be a bit unreliable when something fails. A good hosting provider invests a fair amount in hardware and keeps the server up to date with regular 3-4-5 months scheduled downtime for hardware replacements. Based on my own experience I found that hard disks are the first thing to fail and they do fail quite often – approximately once a year (which at web server terms is often when you can have a server up and running for a whole year without a single system restart!! We have two of those and I’m really proud of them.). If possible you should try to get some information on scheduled maintenance early on when you signup or even in pre-sales. It is good if they have such in hand because this means that they are prepared to change stuff and won’t panic when something fails early. This is most evident with larger companies as they do their own data center warehousing compared to all small ones which pretty much lease servers from the large web hosting providers and resell it.

Now as conclusion – Reliable Web Hosting is better, but pricier

The primary share of the price you pay will always be for the support you get, the cheaper the hosting is the less support you should expect. Don’t think that for $3.95 a month any company will be able to provide you with top level tech support for the price of a Starbucks cup of coffee. A average technical support person should have atleast bachelor degree in Computer Science which pretty much rounds his price at around $25-$50 per hour labor and for $3.95 per month hosting don’t expect full day work. Again based on your own web mastering experience you should evaluate if you want to get better support or cheaper, just don’t expect miracles from less than $10 a month web hosting package. Don’t get me wrong, if you pay for Shared Hosting more than $20 a month for a single website hosting there is something weird in that and either you’re having really large and successful website (I do hope this is your case) or you’re just overpaying for something that you don’t really use. Note that I don’t include the support price in that, just for the server rent costs, as you can have some special support requests which are paid additionally.

I do hope this article explains how the hosting industry works and will help you find a good web hosting company that will make your web experience better. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to comment here!

Venetsian Web Hosting reliable hosting, Web Hosting

The Perfect Link Bait

Since Link Building is a hard and complicated process, the best possible way is to invest your link building budget into Affiliate Marketing revenue share system. Sharing a fair percentage to affiliate marketers will outsource your link building efforts to them. The more revenue you share the more links you will get. The best of all is that you will be able to monopolize your products on all Search Engines as your own website will appear on the top search engine listings. Assuming you are selling products or services a 5% to 25%-30% (or based on the average affiliate revenue share percentage for your product/services niche). This can only be done if your invest a proper SEO affiliate marketing system.

In order to achieve maximum result, your affiliate marketing system should cover few basic requirements:

• To be built in or added as a plug-in to your current product content management system
• To allow individual product product and custom landing pages control.
• To offer various affiliate marketer statistical information and research tools as well as good ad-channeling system.
• To be SEO friendly.

The first three are apparent in most popular online shopping cart software but some of them are not really good in SEO. In order to have successful SE optimized product page you will have to add few lines of code which pretty much change the whole affiliate sales tracking process. This is something I red a while back and implemented myself few months ago, and now I find huge amount of good quality backlinks to my product pages. The whole thing that it does is that it redirects (301 Permanently Moved) any affiliate tracking link (ex: http://mywebstore/category/product?aff=affiliateid) to the plain product page URL without any tracking id (ex: http://mywebstore/category/product). but still tracking the affiliate referral with a php function call. Using this method you can prevent duplicate the duplicate content issue which is pretty common to the bad shopping cart software and in this way boost your search engine rankings as each affiliate link counts as relevant backlink.

The following code is part of my own affiliate tracking script:

affiliate-system-file.php

// records the IP address where the user comes from and the Affiliate Marketer who brought this user to our website
function AffiliateIn($user) {
        // if we don't have affiliate variable defined then this should not be tracked,
	if(!empty($user)){
		// This is user marketed by affiliate and we must record it to database
		/* Login to Database Server */
		mysql_connect("localhost","database_username","database_password") or die ('I cannot connect to the database because: ' . mysql_error());
		mysql_select_db("database_name");

		/* Insert the Tracking Code to Database */
		mysql_query("insert into `affiliate_tracking` (`ip`,`affiliate_id`) values ('".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."','$user')");

		// redirect the user back to the original product page without tracking ID in order to prevent search engines from thinking this is duplicate content and to count this link appropriately.
		header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
		header ('Location: http://mywebstore/category/product');
		die();
	}
}

function AffiliateOut($sale){
		/* Find if this sale is affiliate sale */
		$web_visitors=mysql_query("select `affiliate_id` from `affiliate_sales` where `ip`='".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."'");
		if(mysql_num_rows($web_visitors)>0){
			$current_web_visitor=mysql_fetch_array($web_visitors);
			$affiliate=mysql_query("select * from `affiliate_users` where `id`='".$current_web_visitor["affiliate_id"]."' limit 1");
			mysql_query("insert into `affilaite_sales` (`affiliate`,`sale_id`,`sale_amount`) values (".$affiliate["id"].",".$sale["id"].",".($sale["value"]*affiliate["revenue_share_percentage"])."));
		} else {
			// THIS IS NOT AFFILIATE SALE
		}
}

product_or_landing_page.php (may be on all pages except checkout page)

// LOAD AFFILIATE TRACKING
require("affiliate-system-file.php");
AffiliateIn($_GET['aff']);

checkout.php (where the payment is completed/ after verified)

// LOAD AFFILIATE TRACKING
require("affiliate-system-file.php");
// Checks if this was affiliate sale and records it
AffiliateOut($sale);

NOTE: The script shown above is not complete. I’ve tried to show only the concept.

Venetsian Link Building link bait, Link Building

During the last year I’ve been specializing in PHP Web Hosting administration and took a course in Advanced Web Security. This was partly due to the increasing threats from numerous hacker attacks on popular content management systems such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and others. In this post I will try to explain some of the major issues and hopefully help you strengthen your web hosting security (if you have your own VPS server or Dedicated Server since on Shared Web Hosting plans you don’t have permissions to edit the system configuration).

Due to various reasons php seems to be one of the most flexible web development platform, unfortunately being flexible sometimes leads to numerous security holes which can sometimes lead to a compromised websites. This is especially serious in popular website content management systems where “one” plugin or even the “CMS core” contains “insecure” code. In order to explain what insecure code is, I will list you some of the most popular types of “insecure” statement which most of the time eases data manipulation but it does more harm than good at the end.

• Register Global Variables = OFF – yes I know that global variables are very easy to work with, but this thing is so dangerous as all variables passed in a GET or POST calls to your scripts are auto-processed and if you don’t declare with null all your variables before you use them. To be safer you should use $_POST["variable"] or $_GET["variable"] since they don’t override all your variables. Note that they sill can be compromised and its a very good idea if you do some pattern matching prior to processing all input.

• Disable Dangerous PHP functions and never use them! Some of the most fatal security ones are dl,system,exec,passthru,shell_exec you can disable them from php.ini by editing the disable_functions value. In general those commands are not really used and should be avoided. Note that for example shell_exec is used by ImageMagic and you should not disable it if you use it. The best way to avoid such security issues is not to use those commands. We have found that EVAL for example is the most compromised function as it allows the execution of php code and if in combination with insecure global variable it can lead to a potentially destructive hacks.
• Remote URL injections using allow_url_fopen NOTE: if enabled, allow_url_fopen allows PHP’s file functions — such as file_get_contents() and the include and require statements — can retrieve data from remote locations, like an FTP or web site. . The problem is that this function is enabled by default in standard PHP configuration which means that you should disable it in order to prevent some of the serious PHP code exploits. Note that (from my experience) the actual Remote URL file inclusion is used in extremely rare cases which pretty much gives you the possibility to have this function disabled by default. From around 4,000 websites we had only 2 or 3 to use it.

It is sad to know that the list of possible php security issues are a big list and new ones are constantly added with each new version. That’s why it is our duty to try to keep our source code secure as possible (in my view as a professional php programmer) and keep the Apache/PHP configuration with lowest possible hazardous functions (in my view as a web hosting administrator).

I will post some more web hosting security issues later on, but I suppose those are the most fundamental issues which lead to about 90% of all hacker attacks. There are others which are hidden deep in the Apache code, and some more PHP functions that can be twisted in the wrong way to enable hacker access. I will list them in separate post.

If you want to add something else please feel free to post comments.

Venetsian Web Hosting Web Hosting, web security

As you may already know I‘m a big fan of the Domain Aftermarket and during the last few years I‘ve collected pretty good domain portfolio. Unfortunately not all domains are as good as they should be and this case is one of them.

Nearly six months ago I‘ve purchased the domain "usemortgages dot com" and I‘ve immediately developed DB Directory with some mortgage related stuff on it. A month later I‘ve noticed that all search engines are still trying to crawl non-existed/out-dated folders and they don‘t want to collect the new information. Google had very low crawling activity (within 1% of the total number content pages) and my site was not indexed on it (not showing any search results). I thought this was due to the large number of 404‘s (page not found) that was generated from the content switching, but this was not the case.

Eventually after more than 5 months of waiting I finally gave up and considered the domain as "blacklisted domain". This maent that I spent all that time for nothing

I‘m posting this not to scare you but to make you do your homework before purchasing or bidding on any aftermarket domain because you might stumble to such problem. The best possible way is to try to google it and if you find results from that domain then its not banned. Unfortunately this doesn‘t work with domains that did not have any content, but if they didn‘t have any content then most probably they were not banned. You can check if they had content from the archive.org internet archive as they contain pretty much good information on all domains.

Venetsian SEO domain aftermarket

As you might know, I‘m currently developing my own Blog Network of MFA (dollar-a-day) websites. For my current run, I‘m filling up my web hosting space at GoDaddy with Directories and WordPress Blogs. Yes this time I‘m using WordPress because my SEO Website CMS somehow doesn’t work with the Godaddy accounts since they have some special permissions on htaccess and its rewrite rules. I‘ll try to fix it but currently I don‘t have the time to bother with this and I‘m using WordPress instead.

What I didn‘t know when I used GoDaddy‘s default wordpress installer was that when it installs it it sets up by default “Search Engine Privacy” settings. Those settings forbid Search Engines to index your website and therefore no matter how much efforts you have it won‘t get you indexed. Actually if you knew about this option, its so easy to switch the button and actually disable it and enable search engines to visit your website and actually get indexed, but in most of the cases people don‘t know about it or others (like me for example) don‘t look for it since we all know that the default settings for search engine privacy is disabled on new wordpress installations. That‘s the reason I really got pissed off because GoDaddy decided to change those for you and if you were not careful and did not have the knowledge how to work with search engines you might wonder why your website never got in the Search Engines and you don‘t get any visitors to your new website

I remember that I stumbled on few threads in the Digital Point Forum from people complaining that their wordpress blogs at GoDaddy have PR (Page Rank) but no pages in the Search Engine Index. This exact problem is caused by the search engine privacy option in WordPress because the links that you have towards your blog are giving your PR, but since they can not index it that‘s why the search engine don‘t show any listings.

I guess I got stuck with about 15 web blogs on my GoDaddy Account and they all did not get indexed and I was checking all day to see what happened, but nothing. That‘s why I got really curious and saw that setting. I guess that solved the issue, but this post is supposed to be as a warning to other GoDaddy clients to know what to do with their default wordpress installations if they want to harness the search engine traffic.

My affected blogs were those:

LIST VISIBLE TO REGISTERED USERS ONLY!

Venetsian Web Hosting godaddy, SEO web hosting

It is really sad to know that the online market was finally hit by the US crisis. It seems that most online shoppers are getting really careful with their purchases which can be noted by the increased search volumes for cheaper online goods, but in the same time increasing the average advertising costs which lower the average Cost Per Conversion price for merchants. In the same time the advertiser budget is getting smaller and smaller since everybody tries to tie up loose ends and therefore we get lower average CPC values.

This is actually not new, but now we can feel its climax as AdSense revenue is lowered to about half and even less than what we used to get year ago while traffic increased with the same percentage. The average CPC is now about a quarter of what it used to be and is getting lower with every month. This is really unfortunate and its effect is shown in Affiliate Marketers as well (note that in order to give affiliate percentage the price is a bit higher then the cheapest market prices which turns people to smaller cheaper merchants who advertise themselves using cheaper advertising options such as Search Engine Optimization. We can clearly see that nowadays the online market is a bit more professional and small AdSense Publishers are suffering.

The really bad part is that there is no light at the end of the tunnel as more and more companies cut resources. We hear all day of large market losses and employment crisis. I just hope that the government will do something quicky and gets us out of this miserable situation.

Venetsian AdSense adsense earnings drop

Nowadays quality link building is the most important thing for webmasters. Everyone know that getting more links is the only way to get good Search Engine Rankings, and the better/higher link juice value a link has, the better ranking you will get from that link. Unfortunately for most of us, large link building schemes don’t work any more as they are quickly found if not managed properly. You must understand that the search engines can easily see if you receive a sudden/massive link growth and if those links are with unique content or duplicate around various websites, therefore forming a large link exchange network. That is why professional webmasters and online marketers such as ourselves, need a better tool – a free php link exchange software – that enables us to exchange links only with high quality websites and in the same time work under the Google’s radar.

I’ve decided to build this tool, but before I do so I must be able to completely understand all webmaster link quality specification and build the perfect link juice calculator.

Total Website Value

This is the primary factor if a website is high quality or not. If one website has a lot of links, is aged, linked from the DMOZ and other respectable places, then its most probably authority and therefore values the highest. The total value of the linking website can be calculated by:

1. 40% Global Link Popularity of Site – the more links the better
2. 10% Age of Site – the older the better
3. 10% Google SERP for particular keywords – the best links are from competing websites, the better they rank for our keywords the higher value our link will have
4. 20% Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – This is the hardest thing to find out, so its intentionally left blank for now until I figure out a good way to crawl large number of websites in a particular niche.
5. 10% Amount of Indexable Text Content – nowadays really important as the larger quantity of visible HTML text on a page the higher value it holds.
6. 5% Website Traffic Stats — currently based on Alexa/Compete Stats – the more traffic the better value.
7. 5% DMOZ Listings — The more listings the better. DMOZ lists only good quality websites (even thou so slowly)

Total Linking Page Value

That is the second most important part for good Link Juice value. This estimates based on this particular linking page’s value from the overall Website /Domain value.

1. 30% Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure – good quality page should have high number of links to it on the website.
2. 20% Age of Document – newly created pages pass less link value.
3. 40% Quality of the Document Content – the more words and combination the better. Should have good amount of text per external link. The more text the better – assuming that blog review post is the highest quality link.

Total Link Value

Now this is the final portion on what you get from a link. Note that this is even smaller portion of the previous two based on the number of links on that particular page from the overall linking page value.

1. 60% Topical Relationship of Linking Page – Topical relationship is most of the time indication of authority.
2. 5% Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – Currently NOT available as it is extremely complicated to calculate
3. 5% Age of Link – It seems that 3-4 months is a minimum target for Google, and the longer after that the better.
4. 20% Text Surrounding the Link – very important in order to be assumed as good quality link.
5. 10% Google PageRank – Yes I know its outdated but it is still important measurement.

Well, atleast that’s my first draft, I hope all of you help me improve it, but still keep in mind that we don’t have access to all the internet like Google and Yahoo in order to be able to consider all possible parameters therefore we must keep it considerably simpler and doable. I’m good PHP coder but still building Google 2.0 is a out of the question!

NOTE: I WILL HAVE A WORKING VERSION OF THE CALCULATOR WITHIN FEW DAYS!

I’m having some difficulties collecting all the data due to different reasons and it will take some time to have a working version! I will update this post as soon as I have some results.

Please post your feedback!!! I will try to build it in the calculator.

Venetsian Link Building link juice calculator

The last 10 years web hosting has changed quite a lot, especially after the emerging CMS (Content Management System) technologies as the popular Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and many others. These enabled Web Professionals to quickly build large websites and monitor whole networks. Unfortunately for us, Google and the other Search Engines found that and decided to punish us for Inter-Linking our websites in order to boost our own SERPs. They were able to identify the relationships between interlinking websites based on two primary things:

Domain Whois Information – if you have more than one website you will most definitely have your own name/address listed on the WHOIS and the engines can recognize your interlinking and devalue your interlinks. It also seems that if you play tricky and use the Domain Privacy option then you will be in much better positions, although there are some SEOs claiming that by hiding your WHOIS info you become shady website since most websites that hide their WHOIS are either Spammers or other illegal entities. What I can suggest is if you can get a Business WHOIS and therefore legitimize yourself.

Network IP Address Class – if interlinking websites are sitting in the same IP or even same Class C Network IP address space, then it is assumed that their owner is the same person, and therefore implies some form of stimulated interlinking. That’s the reasons many webmasters prefer to have multiple web hosting accounts in order to interlink their websites only with different class C networks. If you don’t know what Network Class means, I’ll try to explain it with the following example:

• All IPs are in the form of XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX (that’s IPv4) in which the last XXX is called the class range. In other words – 66.22.14.xxx is your class C network, where all the xxx can be a number from 1 to 254. In order for one IP to be considered different class C network IP it should
  hold different heading number for example – 66.22.15.xxx is in different class C network the the previous one.

Similar Interlinking Structure – is a new SEO factor which requires you to interlink in a creative way since most (large) search engines are now able to identify 2-way as well as 3-way links. This requires you to do very smart link building in order to maximize its effects. Note that if G gets you for forced link building even buying you can get temporary ban so don’t get paniked if your site sudently drops traffic and comes back again within a week or two.

In order to survive in this harsh SEO world, yes its getting harder and harder to trick the search engines as they keep updating and fixing all tricks we find to boost up our client’s websites. That requires the emerging of a new web hosting style called SEO Hosting where you have access to different class C networks and even use “false” WHOIS information in order to hide your interlinking efforts. The only bad thing is that it requires a fairly higher budget for seo web hosting as its considerably higher priced as it involves a complicated management software as well as dedicated IPs for each class C network which is not a easy thing to obtain (requires special IP justification documentation) for the web host. Fortunately for us there are few companies that do this considerably cheap (NOTE: It is cheap if you do business with your websites, otherwise its not really a good investment).

Before I make the full list of SEO web hosting companies, I’d like to give you an alternative solution which is quite harder in terms of management, but it most definitely worth it if you don’t want to spend a lot of money on your hosting bill. I prefer to use a bunch of Shared Web Hosting accounts and distribute all my websites on different servers (which in most cases means different Class C networks). For example you can use some $3.95 multiple domain hosting accounts to place some low to medium websites, and use a reliable vps server for your important websites. The trick here is that Shared Hostings are not reliable but cheap and allow multiple domains for the same IP which brings the total quite lower and gives you the opportunity to have multiple networks over the same accounts (NOTE: It requires some crafty networking in order to build 4D interlinked network, but it is doable). In the same time on a VPS hosting account we can have pretty good stability if your websites are not loading too much where you will need your own Dedicated Server/s, and you can allocate multiple class C IP networks on a single server — I’m currently using about 8 on my project server and currently hold around 35 different class C networks spread around different web hosts such as Maiahost, HostGator, SharkSpace, SiteGround, HostMonster, ThePlanet, GoDaddy, BlueHost and etc.

As I said that requires a lot of efforts in order to handle such a large network especially as you have to remember all the different logins in order to be able to access/update your hosting accounts.

The better option here is SEO Hosting as it enables you to use multiple class C networks under one account. Based on my own experience it seems that the seo hosting prices are not really small webmaster friendly which makes them quite expensive for small accounts — approximately 2-3 times more expensive than regular shared hosting plans. This changes with large accounts and brings it almost to the same as cheap regular hosting packages, but even I’m there yet. As I said previously it depends highly on your own website requirements and most of all budget. If you make good money and you’re planning to expand your network then it is a great investment to have your own professional SEO hosting.

Professional SEO web hosting usually offers all the benefits and stability that you don’t really get with shared hostings. In a previous post, I’ve talked about the different drawbacks in Shared Hosting plans such as high CPU load which lowers search engine crawl-ability (a really important longterm factor), and most of all offers spam clean IPs which is really important for large business utilizing a lot of emails in their business processes.

Based on my current hosting experience I’d rank the following seo web hosting companies as pretty much reliable. Note that no company can give you 100% uptime since all compauter hardware requires maintenance, not to mention daily server reboots (to clean up memory and etc), and weekly software updates (to prevent security faults).

1. TODO: build list of cheap SEO hosting companies.

Venetsian Web Hosting SEO web hosting, Web Hosting

After the 2007-2008’s global war on web directories, resulting in the google pagerank ban on most web directories on the internet, the DMOZ seemed to be the only Google accepted one. Being listed in it still shows great value for SEO as DMOZ’s database is imported to Google’s own database and is said to be holding one of the highest search ranking values atleast for Google. Also the same database is used by other Search Engines in the same way as Google does. Unfortunately there are only few that were able to get listed and most of them did it during the first years of the ODP. Unfortunately due to a huge variety of reasons the most important of which is the fact that it is Volunteer based and the problematic “Editor Approval” issue which forbids active webmasters to participate and rules out all the skill people leaving “new” internet users as the only type of editors. It seems that this strategy is causing severe problems for webmasters as it slows down the approval rates mostly because some of the DMOZ editors simply don’t care if they approve you or not. On top of it, since 2006 (yes quite a while back) DMOZ has experienced few severe website downtimes with gaps in month/s which resulted in major DMOZ editor fallout.

This should not be considered as news, but it seems their problems are never ending. Today, for the first time in year/s, I’ve tried to add my website, praying to the gods for a miracle, but unfortunately the DMOZ was dead. The only thing I got was a big error message:

During the last 10 years I was able to get only one listed there, and that’s from about 100 website applications. The funny thing is that I never got any response for denied applications which reminds me that I red in the Digital Point’s forums that DMOZ is deleting old applications if not processed over few months, which meant that they are deleting on blind, and there are not many editors participating in the first place. I also volunteered for editor as well, but guess what .. they didn’t approve me!

The only thing that puzzles me is why Google is not doing anything about it. After all a good financial injection will fix the whole DMOZ, but why bother spending few bucks (in Google budget terms) helping the Webmaster Society to get a good quality link and improve SERPs.

Your comments are welcome

Venetsian SEO