| LED Digest 2364: Domain Extensions & Rankings |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom www.GetWebContent.com/LED : the LED's Key Sponsor The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 9, 2007 Issue no. 2364 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ==================== --== Rankings by Domain Extension? ==-- ~ Paul A Harris "Would search engines discriminate against a .biz?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Reasons NOT to Use Miva? ==-- ~ Brett Simpson "It's next to impossible to get decent reports out of it..." ~ Jon Langley "I use marketworks.com..." ~ Gillian Fernandez "...after a bit of searching I found bluepark.co.uk." ~ Nathan Holley "...serve up static duplicates of the shopping pages to crawlers..." --== Shared vs Dedicated IP Addresses ==-- ~ Barry S Mills "...if you have links from other sites on the same IP your links may be unfairly discounted." --== Copied Website ==-- ~ Allan Gardyne "It's a mild version of tarring and feathering." ~ Reg Charie "...send them a Digital Millennium 'Cease and Desist' message..." --== Managing Lists ==-- ~ Mary Lee "Your reputation has an effect on your business or lack thereof!" ~ Shel Horowitz "There are times when...the unsub procedure doesn't work." =========== NEW ================================== From: Paul A Harris Subject: Do Search Engines Exercise a Preference to Domain Extensions? I can understand that a .com could well have a higher ranking than a .co.uk but how does a .biz rank fare, as I have noticed that important key phrases are still available. Would search engines discriminate against a .biz? Paul A Harris Designaweb Web Design Services ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Brett Simpson Subject: Miva > I am wondering if there are any reasons we may not want > to go [with Miva Merchant 5]... are there limitations...? > We want to be sure this is the best solution for our > business before jumping in. - Gail Kearney, LED Digest 2363 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1764/55/ Hi Gail, This is sure to drum up some discussion! I can vouch for Miva, but I'm one version back with 4.x. There are some minor issues with the modules in 5.x, not all of them are completed, or developed that will run in 5.x that you can purchase in 4.x. I've got about 2-3 years in development and design of my own website / cart. You can see my cart / customizations at: http://www.thedreamtime.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc Miva can have a steep learning curve. I have a degree in computer science, so it doesn't slow me down (much), but there is a lot to learn, overall you will be rewarded though with a really functional back-end (admin), and also highly customizable shipping, billing/payment options with the modules. I've also looked at OpenSource solutions and tested a few, but nothing can come close to what is available now with Miva, I know others up here may have different opinions, but I'm speaking from experience. To have a look at the modules available I suggest you visit Miva Central: http://mivacentral.com/ You can search for / find anything you want in the way of modules, if you are looking to go with 5.x - just make sure the modules are compatible with that version. I highly recommend one module developer - Bill Weiland, of Emporium Plus, he has over 100 modules available and has been developing in Miva since day 1, his website is at: http://www.emporiumplus.com/ There is one area where Miva is lacking, and I don't see a solution anytime soon and that is in Admin back-end reports, sales reports, etc. It's next to impossible to get decent reports out of it, unless you spring for very expensive module to do it, about the best thing is Exporting Orders and dumping it into an Excel spreadsheet for analysis, other than that Miva is an excellent choice. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm also considering offering Miva customization / development services for others. Thank You, Brett Simpson http://www.thedreamtime.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Jon Langley Subject: Miva I recommended them the other day, but thought I would recommend them again. I use www.marketworks.com as an ecommerce package. In theory, all you have to do is to populate your inventory in the system, tick a few boxes for various options, and you can have a live site within minutes. They have a free trial (I think it is 2 weeks) so that you can get in there and test it out. They have feeds to various comparison sites so you can get yourself seen. There are various parts that are customizable. They provide a solution for 3M and Vodafone People go to the site place orders / pay and you ship the goods. You can set the emails to automatically go out. All you have to do is log in, print and pack. (Almost). My site below is with Marketworks and if you want to contact me, I can get an extension to your free trial. Jon Langley http://www.jons-all-sorts.co.uk -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Gillian Fernandez Subject: Miva Merchant Hi, I am not technical so not qualified to advise on Miva Merchant, but I can share my experience with cart software. I started my company selling luxury lingerie last year and because it was a "name" and supposedly good went with the basic system from Actinic. I very soon found it was even less than basic and really not want I wanted. So after a bit of searching I found http://www.bluepark.co.uk/ The system is absolutely great. Easy to use and very functional plus the support is second to none and the best thing about it is you do not need to be technical. Hope this helps Gill Fernandez www.ever-so-sexy.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Nathan Holley Subject: SEO For Miva One concern with shopping cart programs like Miva is how dynamically generated pages are fetched and indexed. I have a couple specific recommendations on how to handle this, for more detailed help please ping me at the personal email above. Optimizing Miva Merchant - Firstly, research the module plug-ins that are availabe for Miva. There are literally hundreds of different options, and it pays to do some homework first. One of the best in my experience is Merchant Optimizer from the developers Phosphor. It's relatively expensive but feature-rich and fairly easy to work with: http://www.mivacentral.com/Merchant2/merchant... - Secondly (and most importantly) have a system at the outset. The optimal strategy for dynamic carts is to serve up static duplicates of the shopping pages to crawlers, and robots.txt the actual cart directory. Keeps the spiders from indexing those pages (which can cause lots of duplicate content headaches) and makes nice product pages for spider food. Generally, static html pages will always win over dynamic pages, and pages directly under the root domain stand the best chance of being indexed quickly and ranking well over time. Finally, check out Apple Pie shopping cart from Lee Roberts (I found out about this solution from some past issues of LED where Lee makes some great posts). Apple Pie is known for being very search engine friendly and may be one of the best SEO solutions, but I'm not sure how large it can scale: http://www.applepiecart.com/ Nathan Holley ============ Sponsor Message =========== GetWebContent.com has a few words just for you. Relevant words, search-engine optimized words. Words that will impress both your customers and visiting search engine bots. Exclusive words custom written to meet your specs. Many other writing services recycle web content, at http://GetWebContent.com/LED we create it. ============ Sponsor Message =========== -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Barry Mills Subject: Shared IPs > Three percent of Web sites use [dedicated IPs], and 90 > percent of Web sites in the top 50 results have them. > Counterintuitive, don't you think? - Quoted from Lisa Barone - http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2007... No, not really. Top ranking sites are likely to be bigger sites from bigger organisations, and if the survey concentrated on competitive sectors, top ranking sites are likely to have lots of traffic. Bigger & busier sites from more serious companies are more likely to have a dedicated IP for all kinds of reasons to do with handling traffic. It's possible they need dedicated servers (and therefore IPs) because they rank highly, rather than rank highly because they have dedicated IPs. I think there's a small risk that if you have links from other sites on the same IP your links may be unfairly discounted. But other than that, I don't believe the IP itself has any effect. What probably IS true in macro terms is that, on average, shared IP services are lower quality cheap hosting facilities, more prone to slow response times and downtime, and therefore likely to suffer because of those things - but it doesn't have to be that way and some shared IP hosting is fantastic. To me, it's counter-intuitive to think that a search engine would penalise all sites under one IP because of the activities of one. If this were the case, it would be simple to knock out any competitor hosting on shared IP by putting a deliberately spammy site on the same IP and linking to it. We host dozens of sites on single IP addresses and most have loads of top 10 (and top 1) search rankings, so I just don't buy this theory at all. Barry S Mills Netstep Corporate Communications http://www.netstep.co.uk -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Allan Gardyne Subject: Copied site Dan Eskelson offered some solid, sound advice for people who have suffered at the hands of web content thieves (LED Digest 2362 http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1763/55/ ) but I reckon I have a better idea. Writing threatening legal letters and submitting formal complaints to Google and the thief's web host are definitely useful, but it's ever so much more satisfying if you also publicly ridicule the thief. I've done this to thieves in both my newsletter and my affiliate forum. You need to make sure you can publish 100% indisputable proof - things like your name, your photo and your affiliate links found on the thief's site. Then, with any luck, your friends will rush to support you, sending the thief emails telling him what a rotten piece work he is and demanding that he remove the content from his site. If he (I don't think I've ever seen a female web content thief) has a blog, your friends may post angry comments on his blog, too. It's a mild version of tarring and feathering. One thief copied nearly all of AssociatePrograms.com - and then later claimed that he was planning to work in conjunction with me. Yeah, right. If the thief is merely confronted in a gentlemanly manner, with no punishment and no publicity, he's is free to move on to attack other unsuspecting websites. Shame the rotten scoundrels, I say. Let them know they're polluting the global village and we won't stand for it. Allan Gardyne http://www.associateprograms.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Reg Charie Subject: Copied site Hi Frank, You have a couple of options. The first thing I would do is to contact the site in a casual email and ask that they remove your content. If they do not do so, send them a Digital Millennium "Cease and Desist" message informing them that they have 24/48 hours to remove the content or you will inform their hosting company that you will be initiating legal action against them and their client. Once a host receives such a message they do not hesitate to remove the site. The following is a C&D email that I sent to a site owner that was violating my copyright. While not exactly the same circumstances, (The site owner thought they could not pay for work done and still use my work), the same principal applies. -------------------------- Cease and Desist notification for XYZ Company 12/27/2006 11:35 PM Pacific Time. Registered Mail copy to follow with copy to (name of webhost). This is notification that DotCom-Productions owns the copyright to the materials listed below -- Numbers 1 through 17. As of this notice you will cease and desist infringing our copyright and remove the materials from your site (URL) within 48 hours or pay the amount due - $xxxx.xx The payment may be done through our retail agent 2CheckOut and can be accessed online at (URL of payment routine). Under copyright laws the infringer (XYZ Company) is liable for all profits derived from the infringements and an accounting is requested for all transactions derived for the website. We also claim the profits derived from said transactions as allowed by the DMCA provisions. DotCom-Productions will wave the accounting and claim on profits if the invoice is paid within 48 hours of receipt. The infringer may be liable for all attorney's fees. DotCom-Productions intends to send a notice of claims to the ISP that hosts the infringing website (URL of host) and demand that the ISP take down the infringing content if the problem is not resolved within the allotted time. Mr. Infringer, owner of XYZ Company (URL) is given 48 hours to pay the invoice or remove the offending content. Should the dispute not be resolved to our satisfaction in the allotted time, legal action will be taken. Pages in dispute: List of pages by title and URL. name, etc. -------------------------- Hope this helps. Reg Charie www.dotcom-productions.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Mary Lee Subject: Managing lists [Regarding managing subscribers and rude emails...] I recently had to change my email address I had for 5 years. I was subscribed to a LOT of newsletters. Those that made the change easy were kept, but those that forced me to unsub, then subscribe again were just dropped. That is just too time consuming when you are having to change an email address. There are also many newsletters out there that make you jump through hoops or whose system is very confusing. All of this made me realize that providing a way for people to edit their address and easily unsubscribe to my newsletter is very important to retention of my subscribers. There are many who should be reputable that I unsubscribed from and they still continue to send me messages! Is it possible your system isn't as easy to unsubscribe from as you might think? Is it possible that she unsubscribed and is still getting messages? The fact is, no matter how easy you make it for her, if she emails you a REMOVE ME request, it is your job to remove her. Crabby people are a way of life. As a business owner it is our job to try to make them happy, at least to a point. If you have tried to make them happy and they berate or curse you, then I feel it is within your rights to call them on their bad manners & if you wish refuse to deal with them. The Customer is Always Right does not mean the Customer always has the right to abuse you! There has to be a line, but make sure that line has been crossed before being rude. Your reputation has an effect on your business or lack thereof! Mary Lee Dinner and Murder Mystery Games http://www.dinnerandamurder.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Shel Horowitz Subject: Managing lists I've been waiting for someone to raise this -- guess it has to be me. There are times when people in good faith follow the unsub procedure and it doesn't work. I remember when my lists were on Topica or Yahoo there was some poor woman who tried for months to get off. She couldn't get off and I couldn't get her off, because according to the list database she was not a subscriber. I forget how we finally solved the problem. I think I told her to filter the newsletter address into the trash. Also, as a subscriber, I've unsubbed several times from certain lists, and if it doesn't work by about the third time -- and I think I'm pretty savvy about how to do this -- I ask the listowner to get me out. The admin time is pretty minimal, as I had a template document that I developed when people ask me to unsub and don't tell me which of my lists they're on. Shel Horowitz Ethics Blog: http://www.principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/ Books: http://www.frugalmarketing.com/shop.html ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by GetWebContent.com The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. 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