LinkMoney.org

Alexa is owned by Amazon and they use a rating system that estimates all website traffic.  When a site is brand spanking new it starts out with an Alexa rank of several million.  In this ranking system the smaller the number that your website receives is better.

Your site will not start to show up in the Alexa charts until your site is in the top 100,000.  To tell the truth I never worried much about it and I never have worried much about the Google Page Rank score either.  In GPR your site is rated as a number from 0 to 9, or possibly 10 not sure about that.

Now lately I have had two different companies contact me out of the blue to ask for my advertising rate for inclusion of either banner ads or a simple anchor text ad.  This is about the only time that the Alexa score really counts because advertisers that are in the know do look at the Alexa number to decide whether or not to spend part of their marketing budget with you or say John Chow.  I do have a feeling that my ad rate is slightly below John Chow’s but I want to change that.

So here’s the deal.  On the next post after this one I am going to start a contest that will run until the end of the year.  My goal is to see my Alexa ranking drop to below 100,000 and so I not only will have bragging rights but that my daily chart will look real cool in the sidebar, and hopefully the advertisers will be enticed to spend a buck or two with me.

Here is where you readers come in.  I will have multiple ways that you can enter the contest.  There will be three good prizes.  “Good Prizes!” All entrants will have an equal chance in the final drawing and you will be able to increase your chances through performing multiple tasks to help this site get some recognition.  More about all of this and I will have full details in the next post.

The following are some things that I have been doing on my own to help this site and you will no doubt want to do some of these for your own site, and I encourage it.  Some of these things will be used as entrant’s requirements to enter the forthcoming contest here on Linkmoney.org.

Here is what I have been doing lately in the case of trying to improve Alexa score.
First of all it is not an exact science but if you ever intend to sell paid advertisements it is reported that advertisers look at this score as part of their evaluation of your website. Needles to say a lower Alexa score is better.

Alexa tells us that the score is developed from an average of your past three month’s traffic stream. However what some people do not realize is that it is not a fair and accurate measurement because the only traffic that counts in Alexa’s eyes is from browsers that have the Alexa toolbar installed on them.

So a deep meaning website that might be chock full of good socially beneficial content, but might be more apt to be visited by readers that do not have the toolbar installed, do not get the votes. Primarily the sites that gain the most benefit from this system would be the make money online, or Blogs about blogging, domaining, coding, and so on. In other words the majority of visitors would be propeller heads and might more likely be apt to have the Alexa toolbar installed.

So what I recommend is that everyone go to Alexa right now and install the toolbar in your browser, and then for what it is worth and I do believe it counts, set your own website up to be your computer start up homepage. That way every time you turn your computer on or page out and revisit your own site is a vote.   (In the past two days I have seen my own score drop 6,000 points and I believe it is only from performing this feature.)

Another thing I do is to grab the Alexa sidebar widget that shows your Alexa score and the number of back links that Alexa has discovered for your site. (See mine down at the lower right hand side.)  So, just slide a text box widget over to your sidebar, and insert the code and you are good to go. I also add a text title that tells the reader to “Click for Alexa Vote” (or something like it.) That way even if a reader does not have the Alexa toolbar, and they click on the widget banner, then that is a vote for your site also.

One other thing that I have just started to do is to use the Alexa site voting feature, and I give an Alexa five star rating to friends and they return the favor. So anyone that will go to Alexa and give this site a five star rating will be immediately entered into the forthcoming contest, “and” I also will return the favor, just let me know when you have posted the five star rating for Linkmoney.org.

I have not found anyone that is willing to say for sure that it helps in the overall Alexa scoring, but the way I look at it is that I suspect it does, and if not it can’t hurt anything. So it is election season, let’s all vote each other a nice easy government job. LOL

Cheers.
Rich Hill

Ps: This site uses the CommentLUV widget and also the Top Commentator widget.  So the top commentators will receive a do follow backlink.  Do not spam it or you will be deleted obliterated, and an Exocet missile will home in on your signal generating device.  Please leave as many nice comments as you want at any time, not just for a contest event.

Happy Halloween.

Hey domainers! Here’s the question, how do you keep track of your domain names?

Around here it gets a little crazy at times. We intermittently go from writing, to checking stats, to email, to twitter, to news groups, to writing, to posting, to checking stats, to reading, to skypeing, to downloading, to pugins, to themes, to writing, and on and on… You do too, tell the truth.

Domaining Tools:
In between all of the above, every now and then a brainy idea pops up and we go looking at domain name availability on various subjects. Some of the tools that we keep in a bookmarked folder are NAME.com, pcnames.com, NameBoy.com, justdropped.com, wegotdomain.com, archive.org, and our favorite hosting company, BlueHost.

With all of those tools opened in tabs across the top of the screen one is able to jump from one possible resource to the other to try to snap up a real cool name.

Now none of this is a problem if you have a handful of domains to worry about, but what if you have many hundreds of them as we do, or even many thousands as some serious domaniers do? It gets confusing.

DataBase Management:
For instance I have a database with domain name ideas for future search that I just put fleeting thoughts in to, until such time as I get geared up to go domaining. Then there is another database with all of the domains owned, activated, where hosted, and where some are parked earning paltry sums of revenue sharing, and some are just plain dormant which sometimes leaves me wondering, what the hell was I thinking?

Sonoma Wine Country:
So my daughter is living in the Sonoma wine country and as I have a very popular New York State Wine website, she decided that she would like to set one up for Sonoma wine. Great !

So a couple of weeks ago I started to search for some cool names that might work good for a California wine website, found a half-dozen or so, and wrote them down in my notebook. I checked them on pcnames. All were available. Great !

Purchase Domains Today:
So today I went to NAME.com which is where I always purchase names in bulk. I have never found anyplace any cheaper. It is a little bother to point the DNS servers to your hosting companies, but it is not difficult and after a couple of days you can set up the website.

Well anyway, of the six names that I wanted to buy, every single one of them was now unavailable. some no-good-dirty-rotten-scoundrel had beaten me to them! Hmm does pcnames monitor searches?

So I said something like, shucks (ok not what I said,) and started looking for some possible alternatives. I found a couple that would work and went back to NAME.com and bought them. Then when I signed in and took a look at all of the names I own on NAME I was shocked to see that I was that no-good-dirty-rotten-scoundrel ! LOL !

I had indeed purchased all of those other names a couple of weeks ago and did not enter them into the database. I have absolutely no memory of doing so. Now I’m wondering how many more I own at a half dozen or so various registrars I have used.

How about you? Has anything like this ever happened to you? Do you have a “System” that you could share with us?

This has nothing to do with ICANN the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, but they certainly ought to be involved in a major policy change.

The domain of the very popular website MakeUseOf.com has been STOLEN! This was reported by Daniel Scocco during the night on his Blog DailyBlogTips.com.

The report says that MakeUseOf was being hosted on GoDaddy and that GD allowed the domain to be transfered away from the owner to somewhere in Dubai. GoDaddy no doubt will cover their ass by saying all security terms were met, but I say Bull Shit! Get better security terms!

How can this happen? MakeUseOf has over 20,000 subscribers, I being one, and we all enjoy the tips and free information given out contiuously be MakeUseOf.

This is a Nightmare, a Horror Story fitting for the Halloween season for sure, but sadly true and how will it be resolved?

What would you do if your baby was stolen and taken to a foreign country?

This industry needs better security methods similar to what the online banking industry uses such as, multiple security codes, a primary image associated with the account, two security questions, a mouse pointer select keyboard, and anything else that someone could come up with.

I did notice that one method being offered by some registrars is to limit activity to a specific IP address. That way transfers could only come from one specific computer. That seem like a good idea to me, what do you think?

For now you should make sure that you use DIFFERENT passwords for all of your domains, your administration panels, your hosting company accounts, and so on. Use multiple email addresses for different accounts.

What do you think? Can anyone come up with ideas on how to make this more secure. Lets talk about it. This HAS to be fixed.

Come on GoDaddy, fix this and return MakeUseOf to the rightful owner.

Rich Hill

UPDATE – UPDATE – UPDATE:

MakeUseOf has a temporary home on blogger until this gets fixed.  go there and give them your support.

http://makeuseof-temporary.blogspot.com/2008/11/make-use-ofs-temporary-home.html