Do you conduct a proper research before you buy a domain name from a domain registrar?

If not, you should.

Here is why:

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) on 28 October 2008 sent a letter to EstDomains Inc saying it terminated its registrar accreditation agreement.

The action is swift too, it says the termination will be effective within 15 calendar days i.e.… on 12 November 2008.

The official letter notifying EstDomains:

http://www.icann.org/correspondence/burnette-to-tsastsin-28oct08-en.pdf

NOTE: ICANN is a non-profit corporation that was created on September 18, 1998 in order to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations, notably the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority IANA.

(The latest news is that the notice of termination is under review and is stayed.)

http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-2-29oct08-en.htm

According to ICANN, EstDomains has approximately 281,000 domains under its management. I hope you understand – the owners of these domains must be really worried.

Of course one can transfer a domain to another registrar, but the process is not very easy especially for dynamic database driven sites (example blogs, ecommerce sites etc).

Think of the unnecessary hassle they must have gone through.

So before buying a domain look for the following in the domain registrar’s website:

1. ICANN Accreditation: See that they have ICANN Accreditation. It will be in the form of a logo, link or text. If not they CANNOT register a domain for you. If they are still doing it, they are basically domain resellers and purchase domain on behalf of a registrar. Unfortunately since these companies get a commission, you will have to pay a higher amount for the same product. My advice is to stick with the original registrar and not buy a domain from a reseller.

2. 24/7 Customer Support: Make sure that your domain registrar has a 24/7 customer support phone line, a contact us page and other forms of contacting them. It’s important because business online is 24 hours a day and if need be you should be able to contact them in the middle of night.

One easy way to know about the quality of their customer support is to write them a mail and see how long they take to respond back.

3. SSL Certificate: They must be able to provide SSL Certificates. Also known as secure sockets layer (SSL) – they are required for e-commerce sites. If in future you feel the need to add credit card processing application in your website, the SSL certificate will be an absolute essential.

The SSL protocol is the Web standard for encrypting communications between users and SSL sites. Data sent via an SSL connection is protected by encryption. This is a method that prevents tampering with any transmitted data. SSL provides businesses and consumers with the confidence that private data sent to a Web site, such as credit card numbers, are kept confidential.

SSL websites have https rather than http and their browser displays a little gold padlock at the bottom.

Again, you may not need SSL while booking a domain, but you may always need it in the future.

4. Privacy Protection: While purchasing a domain you need to provide your name, address and phone number. Please note that you are required to provide your real name, address and contact number while registering. This is required by law. If in future it is found that you provided false information, legal action may be taken against you.

Anyone who wants to know the owner of a domain can do a whois search and know about their name, phone and address. However, if you don’t want your name to be displayed, you can always buy a privacy protection. This way your contact details will not be displayed in whois search and you will still hold the domain.

5. Domain Transfer: A domain registrar should allow easy domain transfer. Say after a year of service you are not comfortable with your registrar, you should be able to transfer your domain to another registrar without any hassles.

6. Domain Parking: It’s important from branding point of view. Let’s suppose you own seo.net. You work hard and make it a huge brand. Someone buys seo.com. What happens? People who will not remember .net may type in .com and land straight in your competitor’s website. Unfortunately this is still happening. To prevent this domain parking is done.

You can buy seo.com and point it to seo.net or vice versa. Domain parking is a great tool, it helps traffic stealing.

Try these:

http://www.Google.net/ – Goes to http://www.google.com/

http://www.Yahoo.net/ – Page not found, but you are still in Yahoo!

http://www.Live.net/ – Goes to http://www.live.com/

7. Good Reputation: Finally the domain registrar should have a good reputation in the online community. To know their reputation you can search forums, social networking sites, do a search in search engines with their names + the strings “good or bad”. For example if you want to search for abc.com domain registrar, you can search for “abc.com good or bad?” I am sure you will get some interesting results. Don’t bother if a few people are not satisfied, but if a lot of people are not happy from their service, then its better to avoid such registrars.

You can also search Google News with their names to know the latest about them.

Have I missed something? Are you a EstDomains customer? If yes what are you doing with your domains?

Recommended Reading:
 
1. InterNIC – FAQs on the Domain Names, Registrars, and Registration
2. Domain Name Registration FAQ

It’s official. Google Analytics will now show data of Google AdSense.

Here is the link to the official announcement in the Google AdSense Blog.

This is good news and will benefit all AdSense publishers. It was long anticipated as was reported many times in blogs and portals.

The AdSense report is under Content section of Google Analytics.

Once you are there you will be able to see interesting graphical representation of your adsense performance.

The adsense overview will show 10 important statistics

• total revenue,
• revenue made for 1000 visitors,
• total ads clicked,
• number of ads clicked per 100 visits,
• adsense click though rate (CTR),
• eCPM – estimated cost per 1000 page impressions,
• total times the ads were displayed,
• ad impressions per visitor,
• total pageviews, and
• pageviews per visitor.

Theres more.

You can know the referrals that are bringing you more dollars. With this information you can focus on getting more traffic from these referrals.

In addition to these you can know visitors from which cities are making more money for you, which hours of the day are the best performing hours, content/pages that are performing well or pages that aren’t performing well.

Knowing the countries that are sending you few visitors will also help. You can concentrate on writing content made especially for these countries.

There are more goodies to it than I can actually write. With the help of these matrices you can now take informed decisions, test well and make more money out of your adsense account.

Right now this feature is not available all publishers, but gradually everyone will be invited.

I am excited like you guys and looking forward for the invitation.

Are you invited?

Recommended Reading:
 
1. Make a date with data in Google Analytics

I wonder why hackers hack – wasting their time, resource and energy in getting inbound links from irrelevant sites, mostly wordpress blogs. I don’t know if they have any other motive.

Whatever!!! If any hacker is reading this please understand that in the long run you guys are doing more harm than good. Here are a few reasons why you SHOULD NOT hack:

• Inbound links from irrelevant site won’t help your site get better ranks in search engines.
• In the long run all bogus links will be removed and you will get back to square one.
• The time you are wasting can be utilized for writing good content, natural link building, social networking, pay per click advertising etc.
• Don’t try to fool big search engines especially Google. If they catch, your site may get banned forever – you don’t want it, do you? They can do reverse IP tracking and can actually ban ALL the sites you own. You will loose ranking for your good sites too!
• Don’t try to fool people – they are smarter than you are. And believe me there are many who will not take a second to report abuse to your web hosting company and search engines. As you may be well aware that hacking is an offence, your web hosting company may ban your sites. Again all your sites will be down for a lot of days, until you get another host. And its easy for a new host to know why your sites got banned so,
• Unfortunately or fortunately you will have to get a new domain and start all over again.
• Usually after failing in one or two attempts, you will get frustrated, leave your black hat SEO techniques and get into the real world of “hard work” SEO.
• Ultimately you will regret your decision of being a spammer and wasting some precious years of your life.
• The time you wasted on hacking actually made the world of SEO even more competitive and so you may have to work even harder than what you had to years ago.
• Hackers cannot sleep well because in the back of their minds they carry the burden of doing all the wrong and harming innocent webmasters. Health issues – if you can’t sleep well your health is getting affected.
• Last but not the least if you are too naughty with your techniques – you may even land up in jail.

This is getting longer than I expected. But I am sure if you are a hacker and have read till here, you will be a bit more scared hacking!

So please don’t do it – for yourself, for all the hard working people like us and lastly for the great world wide web which is mostly ruled by good people.

Is there any other point I have missed out on why people should not hack?

Recommended Reading:

1. Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section
2. Computer Crimes: Hacking Never Pays

You worked really hard to make sure that you get quality inbound links to your site… and you got them. A few years down the line you felt a need to change the look of your site. You did that, and possibly changes to some navigational structure. Knowingly or unknowingly you changed name or deleted a few pages. Whack – the inbound links to those pages are now showing a 404 error – i.e. page not found.

People coming to these pages get irritated or get confused and worst of all, the link juice you got from other websites vanished too! (Search engines don’t give any credit to inbound links that point to a non-existent page.) Heck due to this your rankings have also suffered.

Good News!

Now there is a way to find the sources linking to your sites’ not found pages. If you know the website that’s linking to your non-existent page, you can take some action like mail them and ask them to link to the right page or do something to make sure that visitors do not land into an ugly looking 404 page. What’s more you can even make sure that the search engines give your site the credit for inbound links.

Google webmaster blog recently announced that you can find the sources that link to your 404 error page.

You will need a Google Webmaster account and your site should be registered.

If you don’t have a Google Webmaster account, click here to register.

Those who have can login and then go to:
 
Diagnostics >> Web crawl

Under, “Errors for URLs in Sitemaps”, click on “Not found”.

Now you should see all the sources that have linked to your 404 pages.

The “Linked From” column contains the links of all sites linking to not found pages. You can download the data CSV file if you want.

Now that you know the source, you can mail them and request them to change the link to point to the correct page,

OR

You can do something so that your 404 page looks attractive and has all relevant links.

This way neither the visitors, nor the search engines will get angry.

The best way is to create a custom 404 page if your web-server supports it. Google can help you here.

There is a JavaScript code that Google generates for 404 pages. To get it login to your Google webmaster account then go to:

Dashboard > Tools > Enhance 404 pages

This should help you to generate the JavaScript code. Just copy and paste this into your custom 404 page code.

I am sure these tips will help you to improve your sites’ inbound link quality and help you to improve rankings too.

Recommended Reading:
 
1. Free Links To Your Site - Matt Cutts offering some more information on improving inbound link quality to 404 error pages.

2. Custom 404 pages - Google help page on Custom 404 pages.

3. Make your 404 pages more useful - More info on how to generate the JavaScript code to put in your custom 404 page.