ICANN Sends out warning to registrars with Lot of spam

Recently ICANN sent out warning to Domain registrars who handle lot of spam domains. Worst spam offenders are found out by a survey and they are sent out notices to stop spam in their registration or face ban.

Announcement here

“ICANN has sent enforcement notices and notices of concern to certain registrars, including those reported this week as being the registrars for the majority of websites advertised in spam emails.
Earlier this week, an investigation by KnujOn, widely reported online, publicly identified 10 registrars as being the companies used to register the majority of domain names that have since appeared in spam email messages.
More than half of those registrars named had already been contacted by ICANN prior to publication of KnujOn’s report, and the remainder have since been notified following an analysis of other sources of data, including ICANN’s internal database.
With tens of millions of domain names in existence, and tens of thousands changing hands each day, ICANN relies upon the wider Internet community to report and review what it believes to be inaccurate registration data for individual domains. To this end, a dedicated online system called the Whois Data Problem Report System (“WDPRS”) was developed in 2002 to receive and track such complaints.
“ICANN sends, on average, over 75 enforcement notices per month following complaints from the community. We also conduct compliance audits to determine whether accredited registrars and registries are adhering to their contractual obligations,” explained Stacy Burnette, Director of Compliance at ICANN.** “Infringing domain names are locked and websites removed every week through this system.”
Although the majority of registrars offer excellent services and contribute to the highly competitive market for domains, ICANN’s compliance department has developed an escalation process to protect registrants and give registrars an opportunity to cure cited violations before ICANN commences the breach process.
However, while registrars are responsible for investigating claims of Whois inaccuracy, it is not fair to assume a registrar that sponsors spam-generating domain names is affiliated with the spam activity. A distinction must be made between registrars and an end user who chooses to use a particular domain name for illegitimate purposes.
“But if those registrars, including those publicly cited, do not investigate and correct alleged inaccuracies reported to ICANN, our escalation procedure can ultimately result in ICANN terminating their accreditation and preventing them from registering domain names,” Ms Burnette said. “

Theplanet datacenter restored in batches

We reported here about the planet datacenter catching fire which resulted in about 9000 active servers going offline. It seems now they restored power and all the servers are back online. Official blog updates here service-update.theplanet.com

Power in H1 Phase 1 has been restored. We are starting to turn customer servers on in batches.

Percentage of share for top 500 websites over other sites in internet

I see some people discuss on the market share between the top 500 websites in internet with all other remaining millions of websites. So where do we get a credible data to understand this, Alexa has a list of top 500 websites. But if you see the history of alexa their results are easily skewable since their results come from millions of ALexa toolbar users around the world. How can toolbar data be accurate so who are all the millions of Alexa toolbar users do the represent the real internet users?
In my Opinion No, Alexa users are mostly site owners, webmasters, techies etc. Mostly its a webmaster baised traffic its never a reliable one to gauge the real traffic to a website. Though too much baised still Alexa is a good place to start. Some the sites that are listed in Alexa top 500 websites are the best in internet. So I wouldn’t complain too much on alexa.

If you do a Google search for http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=top+internet+websites
top websites you will come across a bunch of good lists which will give the top sites in internet. But its very difficult to understand and analyze what type of traffic a real site gets unless those sites care to share their log data which I feel is never possible

Search Engine Genie

MSN Crawler improved crawling activity on our website – MSN search engine crawler

Recently MSN Live Search crawler bot is hitting us hard its most probably because we are working hard on unique contents on our site, as well as the tools, blogs etc. We are getting lot of new natural backlinks and this could be an important reason we are seeing increased crawler activity from all the crawlers.
Also our SEO forum has started to pick up we have seen some new posters become regular in our forum they have posted some interesting postings. Also we have started 5 new blogs A web design blog, PPC blog, Link building blog, Programming blog, personal company blog etc.
Also we have a new search engine experts directory where listing your site is for totally free even you can include your phone numbers and email IDs. Only adding active URLs are chargeable its just launched with about 60 profiles are existing search engine experts.
Our Chief technical Officer who goes by the name Tara has started a blog on our own and she will be sharing her personal thoughts from tomorrow,
Also we are launching our newsletter from this month and we are accepting subscriptions from tomorrow, there are ton of new things coming to our website. This is just an effort to catch up to our competitors.

Keep visiting our site to see great new innovative things coming up,
Good day

Search Engine Genie Blog Team,

Adding Multilanguage on your website – Is it duplicate Content,

Adding multiple languages is a common and effective business practice. Lots of websites do this to make sure they cover the Majority of the crowd who dont speak English Language. In US a recent census says 15% of the people are Hispanics that is almost 50 million people.
It is not possible to ignore those people when it comes to doing busines. Most of the Hispanics dont speak good English and this shows the importance to have a website in both spanish in English.

Same way in European union not all countries speak English targeting the regional language is a very important factor to reach the local business. Having a website in various languages are becoming mandatory these days so how does the search engines treat when they see the same information in different languages. From our experience search engines see only the contents and different language contents are unique to themselves.

Spammers from Japan – website spammers from japan hitting us hard

Recently we have seen a surge in comment spamming and contact form spamming from Japanese guys. We get at least 10 to 15 contacts a day from Japan trying to spam our contact form. We always wondered what they get from it. When we see a contact spam we immediately delete it without notice so what are they looking for.

Most probably they are thinking that our contact form is a type of comment spamming weird guys. Some spam contacts we got,

HOME PAGE LOGIN FORM INFORMATION
Prospect_Name : Shigeru Kurisu
EMAIL_Address : kurisu03@carrot.ocn.ne.jp
Website_url :
Phone no :
Discovered seg from : Google
Comments :

HOME PAGE LOGIN FORM INFORMATION
Prospect_Name : Takatoshi Kaneko
EMAIL_Address : puyopuyo@mippi-mail.com
Website_url : an-idol-beautiful-woman.blogspot.com
Phone no : Discovered seg from : Google
Comments :

HOME PAGE LOGIN FORM INFORMATION
Prospect_Name : Kouya Kubota
EMAIL_Address : ocecib276khkm205@yahoo.co.jp
Website_url : snowboarderkk.blogspot.com
Phone no : Discovered seg from : Google Comments :

How much are websites worth – Tip of the day

Many always wondered what their hard designed and developed website is worth. Lots of sites provide ways to evaluate the value of a domain name. When it comes to search engine optimization and search engine marketing value of a domain name is based on

Backlinks: Links that are pointing to that website from external websites.

Quality backlinks: Backlinks mean one thing quality backlinks mean an other. A link from Yahoo homepage is a million times more valuable than a link from a Mom and pop site, Its important to research the quality of backlinks that are pointing to that site,

Dmoz listing: Dmoz is the world’s leading human edited directory a listing in Dmoz adds the value to a website since dmoz plays a very important role in search engine’s way of guaging the value of a website.

Links from high pagerank sites: If the site being sold has links from many high pagerank websites it will definitely boost the value of the domain

Pagerank of the site itself: Pagerank is google’s proprietary core algorithm of judging the value of websites. Even though pagerank doesn’t matter much anymore when it comes to selling sites a good pagerank website will go for a high price

Quality of information on website: A Spam directory is much less valuable than a site with quality pages and quality information, its important that the site has quality information.

Targeted industry: If its a quality site and targets industries like automobiles, real estate etc it is valued much higher.

Uniqueness of information : A site with lots of unique information is important duplicate sites are not gonna go for much money.

Existing traffic and projected traffic: This is last but not the least option when it comes to judging sites if a site is already getting 3000 uniques per day then it should be a very good site. Our site gets anywhere between an average of 2500 uniques to 4000 uniques per day. So you judge the price .

So judging by these points what’s your website worth care to share? Soon we are releasing a new SEO tool which will predict the price of a website based on the above criteria till that time you can use this tool. directory.sootle.com/website-worth

Promoting website for Social networking sites

I have got requests from clients to promote their sites in social networking sites like Myspace, Orkut, Facebook, Friendster etc. We stayed away from it because it looks like too much spam for me. Myspace , orkut, facebook are all sites for youngsters to meet their friends and relatives online. We cannot disturb them by promoting our material, Personally if I find someone trying to promote something to my myspace profile ill find all the best ways to get him banned from Myspace

If you really want to advertise for people in social networking sites go for the paid option myspace, orkut, facebook all have paid ads which will be shown to their visitors. I recommend going by that option

Personal blogs are the best one to promote in social networking sites. If you have friends in myspace you can add a link to your personal blog in your profile and this will definetely make your friends see your blog if they like your blog it will be bookmarked and they will visit your site regularly to read interesting information in it.

I recommend if you want to promote in myspace or facebook do for your blog .

milliondollarhomepage.com still going strong

milliondollarhomepage.com one of the greatest inventions on Modern .com era is still going strong after 5 years. Alex the founder of million dollar homepage has promised publishers of hosting the ads for upto 2010. Its going strong and should be long enough

Website penalized due to spamming, – website penalty due to potential spam,

A webmasterworld.com guy reports that his site got banned for using link spam tactics,

he says

“My website got penalized by google. (Congratulations to me 🙂 )Things started
from this JAN (wen Google scheduled to upgrade its PR algo? I am not sure if its
true.) Traffic dropped. So did the earnings. Many people felt changes in their
rankings as well as earnings in this particular month. On te other hand, others
felt more income and traffic (obviously)
Reason of Penalty: I was using my
own automatic Link partnering tool and in few instances posted the link
partnering email on Forums and Blogs too. (accidently)
Google detected this
as “SPAMMING” and the traffic that I am getting on this very website (from
Google only) has decreased drastically.
However, other Search Engines seem
to be BLIND to this “SPAMMING” (Yes! I agree that in some sense this is spamming
what I did). Rather MSN and Yahoo have started sending more traffic.
Though,
the website is a quality website (quality content and all). But my greed to get
more links has put this website down. I will have to relaunch it now.
Furthermore, I will start experimenting and will be enhancing my Link
Partnering tool algorithms to detect these irrelevant websites and filtering out
Blogs and Forums.
Moral of the story: 1 – Google has applied some SERIOUS
SPAM combacting algorithms. Its growing more and more conscious about SPAM. So be
careful. 2 – Other Search Engines are still a lot away from what Google is doing.
I salute Google for their dedication and taking SPAM websites seriously. 3 –
Don’t post your Website links on Comments section of Blogs or forums. (which I
did accidently) 4 – Look out for other ways of SPAMMING that Google has become
resistant to. Kindly post them here for further evaluation by WebmasterWorld
community. “

Please be careful with google they are pretty strong in detecting link spam,