2000 visitors a day from Stumbleupon

I don’t know how many sites have similar experience but this is the first time for our site. Stumbleupon.com a famous site similar to Digg.com is becoming increasingly popular these days.

Weekend traffic is usually slow for our site but this weekend was too good. On Saturday we got around 2000 visitors just from stumbleupon.com to our sandbox checker tool http://www.searchenginegenie.com/sandbox-checker.htm . This is a new record for us from a single site to a single page. Usually our traffic averages around 4500 Unique visitors per day. Stumbleupon.com traffic is almost 1/2 of our average traffic in a single day. We love stumble upon now. We have an extensive list of FREE AD free seo tools http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm hope you too enjoy it.

Mcdar.net site suspended and the infamous datacenter watch tool gone

Mcdar.net was the first site to give Google datacenter comparision of results. We do have a similar tool like the way they had http://www.searchenginegenie.com/data/index.htm . For some reason mcdar.net tool is no longer available their site shows a suspension notice i am not sure what’s the reason whether its temporary or they are gone for ever.

Though they just left it unmaintained i am sure the site owner still runs the site active lets wait and see whether they will be back our not. Till that time use our tool and our tool is totally Ad free.

New SEO tool to be released by us coming week.

Already we have one of the best list of Free SEO tools in market. http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm . Now we are working on a new tool which will give predict the pagerank of a website based on their current pagerank plus user input values. Currently we don’t have any real pagerank prediction tools in Internet. All the tools now either check various datacenters and display’s the Pagerank or give some random values. But our tool will use partially use the Original Pagerank formula. Our programmers are doing their best to get user values and current pagerank to predict new pagerank.

Original pagerank formula:

:$PR(A)=\; 1\; –\; d\; +\; d\; \backslash left(\; \backslash frac\{PR(B)\}\{L(B)\}+\; \backslash frac\{PR(C)\}\{L(C)\}+\; \backslash frac\{PR(D)\}\{L(D)\}+\backslash ,\backslash cdots\; \backslash right)$

or (”N” = the number of documents in collection)

:$PR(A)=\; \{1\; –\; d\; \backslash over\; N\}\; +\; d\; \backslash left(\; \backslash frac\{PR(B)\}\{L(B)\}+\; \backslash frac\{PR(C)\}\{L(C)\}+\; \backslash frac\{PR(D)\}\{L(D)\}+\backslash ,\backslash cdots\; \backslash right)\; .$

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

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. “

Digg effect – Effect of ranking on digg homepage

Digg killed my friends server. Few day’s back one of my friend’s article featured of Digg homepage. Within few minutes his server can’t withstand the massive traffic and was down for 5 hours. Is Digg homepage ranking worth anyone else had that experience?

Please share it here

Chris.

MSN search Yahoo and Google Join Hands atleast for one good cause

MSN webmaster live search blog recently reported how search engines have joined hands on using robots exclusion protocol to not only block them but also allow how users will guide the crawlers. I am sure this is not new but there are some tags described here which are definitely found by Google but not commonly used by other search engine crawlers.

One tag that immediately comes to my mind if the NOODP tag. If this tag is used in meta tag it will tell the Search engine not to show title and description of a Dmoz listing. We at search engine genie use this tag and this was first introduced before around 30 months by Google. Good to know that MSN and Yahoo too understands this tag.

NOODP META Tag

Then we have the crawl Delay settings in robots.txt first introduced by Yahoo. When we set a crawl delay we tell the crawler to fetch the pages from the server at the specified interval of time.
According to MSN Live search blog Microsoft now uses crawl delay and you can set the crawl delay and expect Yahoo and MSN to follow it. Google still doesn’t want to use crawl delay. Its understandable on Google’s point of view since a crawl delay is something very disturbing for a site.

For detailed reading follow the link above to MSN Live search official blog

Is Microsoft indirectly going for a Proxy fight?

BLB&G LLB group is taking on Yahoo on behalf of some share holders for not accepting Microsoft bid. this page has some very useful information that’s just revealed.

On February 21, 2008, BLB&G, on behalf of Plaintiffs, filed a Class Action Complaint against Yahoo and its board of directors (the “Board”), alleging that they have acted to thwart a non-coercive takeover bid by Microsoft, which would provide a 62% premium over Yahoo’s pre-offer share price, and have instead approved improper defensive measures and pursued third party deals that would be destructive to shareholder value. Yahoo’s “Just Say No to Microsoft” approach is a result of resentment by the Board, and not any good faith focus on maximizing shareholder value. Microsoft attempted to initiate merger discussions in late 2006 and early 2007, but was rebuffed, supposedly so Yahoo’s management could implement existing strategic plans. None of those initiatives improved Yahoo’s performance. On February 1, 2008, over a year after its initial approach, Microsoft returned, offering to acquire Yahoo for $31 per share, representing a 62% premium above the $19.18 closing price of its stock on January 31, 2008.

Looks like the proxy fight is about to move forward more aggressively. Lets wait and see

SearchMarketing Expo Conference – recap and write up

Barry of Search Engine Roundtable has a very good writeup of the recently concluded Search marketing expo conference organized by the Search engine industry expert Danny Sullivan. Barry also blogs for Search engine land Danny’s official blog. Please read Barry’s write-ups here

My favourite is the tip provided Roger on finding edu domains for links

“Tips in Yahoo Link Commands:
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “bookmarks”
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “links”
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “favorite sites”
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “your product or service”
More examples:
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu sponsors
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu donors
linkdomain:example.com site:.org sponsors
linkdomain:example.com site:.org benefactors”

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.

.info domains banned in Google – Webmaster reports .info domains getting penalized

Some active members of webmaster world are discussing about a potential penalty to .info domain names. It seems for about 2 weeks Google has been experimenting with .info domain names by removing from search results for a certain period of time to check how much spam it stops in their results.

“This has happened to my .info domain since last night and I am really upset at it.
All my 300 keywords have stopped working in Google but my site still appearing in Google with site:www.example.info and www.example.info searches.
Yesterday I received 600 visitors from Google and today only 4.
My .info domain is one and half years old. Till, Today I regularly update it with unique content and don’t promote it much as I am already receiving number of visitors.. I never did spamming or adopted prohibited ways to promote the site.
I do Free directory submissions and very seldom links exchanges.
Can any expert tell me please what why it has happened to my site?
Is it a permanent problem or temporarily.?
I will be thankful for any help and guidance “

Did Google really ban .info domains i doubt it its very difficult for Google to ever attempt something like that. If you check the search for Global registry you can see afilias.info ranking in top 3 this is an indication that .info domain itself is not banned. May be because that domain extension is abused too much Google might have removed some domains.