With Wiredtree, much of the responsibility lies at the company. They install updates on their own and monitor the servers 24/7 to make sure they are up and running all the time.

I received a SMS two days ago at around midnight that notified me that the server was down. I quickly opened the Wiredtree Grove support page and wrote a support ticket about the incident. It took less than 10 minutes to get a response, and the server was up and running again in less than 50 minutes.

The next day the same thing happened. This time it took less than 30 minutes to fix the issue. Wiredtree noticed that the server’s hard drive was failing and suggested to me that it needed to be replaced.

I agreed and the company’s support staff managed to backup, replace and restore everything in less than an hour on the third day.

Why am I writing this down here? Mainly for users who are researching Wiredtree, and users who are looking for a great web hosting company that is offering great support.

I have been with the company for several years, and up until now their support ticket response time was always at around ten minutes or less. That’s email support by the way. You can also use the toll free number to contact the support team in case of emergency.

Support is one of the things that is nearly invisible to you most of the time. It only becomes important when you need it. I have been with other companies that had response times of hours or even days. Imagine your server going down and you are unable to reach support for a day.

Where are your websites hosted? And how is that web hoster’s support?

I do not want to reveal the url of the website, or its niche. What I can do however is list some of the factors that made me make the investment.

The site had a track record of earnings for over a year. It also showed stable rankings, and an upwards trend when it came to the earnings. It was well established in the search engines, had some top rankings there for quite some time. Plus, it was more or less a passive kind of site which meant that I did not have to put a lot of time into it to keep the earnings on this level.

The site in the last three months before purchase made an average of roughly $2,000 per month, with an upwards trend in July where it made more than $2400 until July 22. Earnings before that were not that good, ranging in the $100 to $800 region. The big increase in earnings could be attributed to the broker taking over. Optimizations were done and this resulted in the earnings increase.

Another interesting fact was that there were still around $3000 in unpaid funds (July and before) in the account which I would get with the purchase. This basically meant that I paid $20k for the site.

My biggest concern at this point was that the site’s earnings would dip. Thankfully though it turned out that they stabilized in the $3000+ region. The site in July made $3500, in August $3200. September is not looking as good, but that can be attributed to the back to school, September 11 week where the site made only one sale instead of 10. It sites at $1500 currently, and I expect it to hit about $2300 at the end of the month.

This means that I got $8.2k in earnings from the site in less than two months. This leaves $14.8 that I have to earn to turn even. Everything afterwards is a profit. And please remember that I still have the site, which with solid earnings of around $3000 per month is worth more than the $23k that I paid for it. I’d estimate that I’d currently get about $36k for it, if I keep it for another ten or so month’s even more due to the longer period of stable earnings.

I’m not writing this article to brag about the investment. I just want to use it to show everyone that web investments can be very, very profitable.

A broken link in this context means a link to a page that does not exist (anymore) on the website. The website usually responds with a 404 error page in this case.

Every link is a vote for that website and every webmaster should make sure that all the links pointing to the website are put to good use. Bad links can hurt a website’s rankings and reputation.

This article is a basic how to that will explain the following concepts:

• Direct webmasters to locations where they can see broken links pointing to their websites
• Explain how broken links can be turned into working links using htaccess

How to display all broken links that point to a website

The answer in this case is Google Webmaster Tools. Webmasters need a Google account and a verified site to see the broken links that point to their domains and websites. The data is populated over time and it is a good idea to visit the section regularly to react whenever new broken links pop up.

Do the following after you have logged into Google Webmaster Tools. Access the registered domain, click on Diagnostics in the left sidebar and then on Crawl Errors. Crawl errors displays all kind of errors and restrictions, the data that is important when it comes to broken links is under the Not Found tab. If you see no crawl errors there congratulations, everyone else might want to read on.

The not found links are links on the domain the webmaster selected in Google Webmaster Tools. Each row displays the link url that websites link to, the detail (error code), number of pages that use that link and the date it was last checked by Google.

Redirect broken links with htaccess.

Please note that this article is not about explaining what htacess does. Before you start you should ensure that your web server supports htaccess. If you are unsure ask your web hoster or server administrator.

The .htaccess is usually located in the root directory of the website. It is possible that other htaccess files exist in subdirectories. It is basically a text file with directives for the web server.

The basic command to redirect link is

Redirect permanent localurl newurl

or

Redirect 301 localurl newurl

All that needs to be done is to basically add the urls from the not found section of Google Webmaster tools in the localurl section and the newurl that the link should now point to in the newurl section.

Please note that the localurl begins with a / and not with http://www.yourdomain.com/. A valid redirection of a link pointing to http://www.yourdomain.com/brokenpage.html would look like the following:

Redirect 301 /brokenpage.html http://www.yourdomain.com/validpage.html

This tells the search engines that the location of brokenpage.html has been permanently changed to validpage.html. The 301 redirect ensures that the linking power is attributed to validpage.html now.

We need to address a special case, pages with blank spaces. The localurl needs to be enclosed in “” if it contains a space. A broken link to http://www.example.com/broken directory/ needs to be redirected this way:

Redirect 301 "/broken directory/" http://www.yourdomain.com/validdirectory/

There is another question that needs to be answered: How do you decided where to link to? The best practice is to link to the right page on the website if the link has been misspelled. This should also be done if it is possible to guess where the link should be leading to. But there are cases where a link points to a no longer existing page.

You can either redirect to the homepage of the site, a special “broken link” page that explains why the visitor landed on that page or the closest alternative.

How do you handle broken links on your domains and websites?

According to an article at The Register the culprit was the wp-config.php file. This file stores the database login information that are needed to connect to the database powering the blog. Many users seemed to have configured the configuration file so that other Network Solution customers had access to it.

I used this example to show that WordPress webmasters need to be extremely careful when it comes to securing their blog. This little guide will give some tips about passwords and the login process that can help the webmaster secure the blog further.

Every WordPress user has certain rights on the blog and a username and password. It is generally recommended to select a secure password which consists of at least 12 characters comprised of upper and lower case chars, numbers and at least one special character. Examples of secure passwords are j5w3f_45f!rRd3A and Pec,33.!4eas3ffF.

These passwords are hard to memorize and it is a good idea to use a password manager like Last Pass to store them for you. Last Pass can not only store them but also automatically log you in.

The first step to a secure WordPress blog is to select a secure password. Another option is to use an editor account for writing articles and an administrator account for administrative tasks. The first user that is generated during WordPress installation is always an administrator.

The login process is another element of the WordPress site that needs better security. Every attacker knows that the login for most Worpdress blogs is handled at example.com/wp-login.php/ and they write their attack scripts accordingly.

Stealth Login is a WordPress plugin that can protect the blog by renaming the login paths and enabling a stealth mode that is preventing users from accessing wp-login directly.

It is possible to use any phrase for the login path, the extension suggests login by default which can be changed for extra security. A webmaster could then log into the blog by opening example.com/login/ in the web browser.

This prevents brute force attacks and is usually considered a good security addition. Stealth Login can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin repository or installed directly from the Plugins section of the blog.

The Wordtracker SEO Blogger add-on for the Firefox web browser brings the keyword research capabilities to a Firefox sidebar. Webmasters can display or hide the sidebar with a single click on the Wordtracker button that is being added to the Firefox status bar after installing the add-on.

The sidebar is divided into two sections. The first offers a search form where the keyword that the user wants to research can be entered. A list of matches will then be displayed in that section detailing the keyword and the number of searches according to Wordtracker. Each keyword has an Add link next to it which can be used to add that keyword to the second section of the sidebar.

Added keywords are displayed there including their usage on the current website. This can be interesting for users who write articles in their web browsers. It is also helpful to analyze a page on a website to get a count on the keywords that are used on that website.

SEO Blogger is an interesting Firefox add-on for webmasters who regularly do keyword research at the Wordtracker website. The keywords are limited to the first 30 results which means that it might take a few searches before all possible keyword combinations are discovered.

Webmasters belonging to the first or second group usually lose money day in day out while the third group is the only one to maximize ad revenue. This may be an oversimplification but it usually is true. Why is that you may ask.

Scenario 1: Default Ad Designs – Selecting default ad designs results in lower ad revenue, this is especially true for Google Adsense and other PPC advertising schemes. The colors of the ad unit are simply not optimized which has the result that the click through rate is lower than those of optimized ad units.

Alternative: The best colors either match the link color of the website or use the default link color of the web (#0000ff). There might be some other colors, for example red that yield good results as well.

Scenario 2: Default Ad Locations – Optimizing the design of the ad unit is only one side of the medal. A properly designed ad unit can be placed in the wrong location on a website leading to low click through rates. The same is true if the webmaster copies ad locations from other websites without testing. Yes, a floating ad unit next to the main content of the page produces a good click through rate but it might not be the best location.

Alternative: Placing ad units next to the main content will always result in a higher click through rate. It is however advised to test various positions to find the best working one for the website. Good positions to test are:

• Floating left of the content
• Above the content
• Above the title of the content

There can be drastic differences depending on the location selected.

How to test

Performing the tests is not that difficulty. Best option would be to alternate between the different ads at the same time. There are scripts that can rotate ads. If that is not possible it is best to run one ad unit for some days and switch to another one after that until all different ad designs and locations have been tested. If the advertiser offers channels be sure to create different reporting channels for each design and position to be able to compare the results.

Most companies want to compete for their business’s main keywords: Say an attorney from New York wants to compete for the terms attorney and lawyer. Those are general terms and while they will bring in lots of visitors to the first few sites in the search engines they have negative side effects that will impact the business. First, they are highly competitive. The lawyer from New York will compete with lawyers from all over the country and even from other English speaking countries. That’s a lot of competition for a term that will bring in mostly untargeted traffic.

What does untargeted traffic mean? It means that English speaking users are looking for the term lawyer or attorney. This could be users from Hawaii, Alaska or Australia which do not want to do business with an attorney from New York.

The alternatives are targeted long tail keywords. An attorney from New York might want to target keywords like New York Attorney, New York personal injury lawyer or accident attorney New York. Those are called long tail keywords. Each of the keywords listed above are examples of generating targeted keywords from general ones.

A person searching for New York personal injury lawyer will be more likely to hire the New York lawyer because that is what he was looking for. The traffic numbers will be lower than for the general keyword but they are matching the location and profession of the business with the location and needs of the client.

Will it be easier to rank high for accident attorney New York than to rank for accident attorney? Yes it will definitely be easier because a lawyer competing for the first term will only compete with lawyers from New York City whereas he would compete with all accident attorneys throughout the English speaking world for the general term.

Businesses who research targeted keywords will have to spend less money, will gain highly targeted visitors and see results faster than businesses who opt for the generic keywords. And that’s the reason why keyword research is essential for any online business.

This article is going to evaluate the important factors and takes a look at several other – lesser important – factors as well. A potential buyer needs some knowledge to be able to calculate a price for a website in the same manner that someone who has knowledge about cars will fair better when purchasing a car than someone who does not know anything about cars.

Technical knowledge, as in programming languages, is not that important when buying websites. They only have to be considered in some special cases, for instance when buying a web application. A buyer needs knowledge in SEO and website monetization among other things to evaluate a website.

SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, in a broader sense of the word. This includes analysing the traffic of the website and analysing the potential to increase that traffic. Main aspects of this analysis are the traffic sources and other factors like domain and website age or if the website is an authority in its niche.

The most important factor in this area is traffic. Buyers have to avoid several mistakes that are easily made when looking at traffic stats, they are:

• Measuring Traffic: Which tool / script has been used to measure the traffic ? If you look at the available scripts (some popular ones are Google Analytics, AWStats, Perfomancing and Webalizer) you will notice that each will come up with a completely different figure for Uniques, Pageviews and Hits even though they all analysed the same website.

  It is extremely important to know how a script measures traffic, the difference can be 100% and more depending on the tools used to measure traffic.

• Traffic Sources: The source of the traffic is of uttermost importance. The most valuable traffic is coming from search engines when monetization is concerned. Search Engine traffic is reliable and you can be sure that it will not drop to nothing in a matter of days unlike other traffic sources, say Stumbleupon or Social Media Site traffic.

  A rule of thumb is the higher the search engine traffic the better. Everything else is not reliable and can be easily manipulated.

• Age:Domain age and website age are two important factors. They are not the same. The age of the domain has nothing to do with the age of the website. A website could have been created recently on a domain that was registered ten years ago.

  Some scammers like to purchase dropped aged domains with Pagerank and sell those domains for a hefty sum to unknowing buyers. The domains will most likely lose the Pagerank during the next Pagerank Update. The statistics of a website and external websites, like archive.org, can help to determine the age of a website.

• Keywords and authority: While this is not the most important aspect it is still nice to know. The traffic that comes from the search engines is the most reliable and most important factor. Knowing from which keywords that traffic comes can be important when evaluating growth potential.

Monetization:

Analysis of the current monetization techniques on the website and the potential of the website to increase the revenue. A solid overview of the different monetization strategies, advertisers and practical experience is absolutely recommended. Most websites sell for6-24 times the monthly revenue depending on the time the website has earned that amount, the type of website and the sources of the revenue.

I think we can all agree that private ad sales are probably not a very reliable revenue source. I would divide revenue sources therefor in reliable and unreliable ones.

• Reliable Revenue Sources: The reliable revenue sources are those that depend on traffic mainly. So basically every CPC and CPM based ad on the website is reliable. It is highly unlikely that the revenue from these sources will change in a short period of time. I’m not saying it cannot happen because some factors do play a role here. If the seller was using shady tactics to generate the revenue, e.g. placing ads in a way that was against the TOS of the advertising provider, then the reliable source could yield to provide revenue at all.

  One also has to take the traffic sources into consideration. CPM ads benefit from social media traffic in a greater way than CPC ads do. Running a Stumbleupon campaign can drive lots of traffic to a website that generates CPM revenue.

• Unreliable Revenue Sources: Everything that is not providing regular monthly payments or is independent of traffic levels. This includes Pay Per Post, selling Text Links, private ad sales and even to a lesser extent affiliate programs. All of those can be gone in a second.

  It does not have to be that way necessarily but it can happen. Affiliate sales could be a reliable revenue source if the seller can provide solid stats for a long time period and has not generated them by buying traffic. All those unreliable revenue sources have two things in common: They can bring in revenue but they do not have to. Even if the seller made x Dollars per month from paid postings or selling text link ads it does not mean that this will continue.

Revenue that is generated from Adsense or CPM networks is also a good indicator of the traffic a website receives. It’s possible to compare figures with related websites of the same niche for instance.

It is important to know if the domain or account had been banned previously by advertising companies. If you see optimization potential in a domain because it is not running Adsense and increase your bid because of that then you better be sure that you can run Adsense on that domain. I always ask the seller to clarify this, why he is not using Adsense on the website.

Other:

Everything else that is important to find a value for a website. This does include the niche of the website. A buyer who does not know anything about Photoshop would be hard pressed to run a Photoshop blog. He would rely on professional writers to write content for the website which would reduce the monetary gain from the website.

This also includes costs for servers, websites, administrators, legal fees and everything else that might be necessary to run a website.

Most sellers do not post information about the monthly costs of a website openly and only respond in private to such questions. A website that is earning $1000 per month could be a nice catch but would it be still a bargain if you knew that you had to pay $200, $500 or $800 per month to generate that $1000 ?

Time is another important factor. How much time is needed to run the website. That’s an important question. The best websites are sit and earn websites, those sites that you setup and do not need to administrate or create content for afterwards other than checking the earnings from time to time.

Time is money in this case. Would you rather earn $4000 per month from eight blogs that require eight hours of daily work or the same amount from eight websites that require eight hours of work per month ?

I was not really sure where to add Pagerank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank. I do not think that they are completely useless like some other bloggers but they should not be overrated either. It’s easy to achieve a Pagerank of up to 5 in a couple of months depending on the updates of the Google Datacenters. Higher Pageranks are harder to come by and this can be an indication of authority site. It means something if a website has had a Pagerank of 7 for more than two years for instance.

I usually do not care about Pagerank between 1-5 and start my research on websites with Pagerank 6+. Alexa and Compete are only guidelines. A website with a Compete Rank of 0 or an Alexa Rank of nine-million could be an indication of a scam if the seller claims the site is receiving 20K users per day.

Factors that do not play a role:

Some factors should not play a role when determining the value of a website. The amount of feed subscribers for example is a popular reason to demand a high price for a blog if the blog has many of them. The problem with feed subscribers however is that they subscribed to the blog for a reason; And that reason is normally because they like what the previous owner writes.

Now it may be that it is possible to switch from one author to another fluently without loosing to many subscribers but that is normally hard to accomplish. A coupon blog could be fine but one where someone writes reviews, gossip or daily life ? The consequence more often than not is a reduction in feed subscribers from the point on when the blog is sold and a new author takes over.

Design, graphics and the like are another factor that should not play a role normally. Some sellers claim they paid thousands of Dollars for the design. The important question however is how much you would be willing to pay for it. If you think that design is worth $100 instead of $2000 then say so and use that figure in your calculations. A good looking blog is nice but most visitors, especially those from search engines, visit a blog because they are looking for information, not because they are looking to find a blog with a great design.

Conclusion

I hope I brought up some valid points that help you determine the proper value of a website. You still need lots of knowledge in certain key areas to successfully appraise a website. One of the services that I’m offering is website evaluation. If you are interested in further information contact me.

Whenever I tried to change the DNS setttings I received the message: The Total DNS Control Manager for this domain is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later. which was worrying me. It took me two days to figure out why this was happening all the time. First I thought it was a problem at Godaddy and that waiting would solve it.

It did not change for two days and I decided to look at other possibilities. I realized quickly that it was related to cookies. I use a deny all cookies unless I have permitted them explicitly extension in Firefox. What I did not realize in the beginning was the fact that Godaddy redirected the request from their own domain to a secureserver.net domain. And cookies were not permitted for that second domain.

I quickly added that domain to the list of permitted websites and was able to edit the DNS entries in Total DNS Controls from then on again.

The usual process was to visit a directory, navigate to the category that you wanted to place your link in and click on a link on that page to submit your website. Some websites required you to create an account first, some to purchase the listing and others to put a reciprocal link on your website.

You had to enter lots of details about your website like site title, description, category and keywords but also personal information like email, username and password in a form and it really was a boring process that took really long for each directory even if you did make use of copy and paste.

Directory Submitter was advertised by Vic who is running his website Blogger Unleashed and I thought to give it a try. I thought it would be a fully automated software which it is not, more about this later.

The software costs about $70 and gives you the option to buy Keyword Elite and SEO Elite for 50% off after the purchase.

Once you start Directory Submitter you are prompted to create a first project. A project basically contains the information about one website that you want to submit to the directories.

You add all those information that directories request once. This includes personal information as well as Titles, Keywords and Descriptions. Yes that is right, you can add more than one in each field to add variety and avoid duplicate content.

Directory Submitter offers a list of about 2200 directories after updating the list of available directories online which consist of paid and free directories. There is unfortunately no information if a free directory requires a reciprocal link or not and no way to create those from within the software.

Several directories are not working anymore and it takes some time to kick those from the list.

The process to submit a site to a directory is still manual. The program comes with a browser that is used to navigate the websites and find the submit url link. The data is entered automatically most of the time except for the category and captcha. Directories that require a login before submission are taking the longest to submit to because you need to enter additional information and normally confirm your email.

Directory Submitter saves you the time to fill out those information manually but that’s pretty much it. I really had hopes that this software would automate the process a bit more. Don’t get me wrong you save time and the manual approach has some advantages like being able to edit the information that are automatically entered in the form for instance or picking the right category.

While you save time you will still be busy submitting your website(s) to those directories. My estimation is that it takes at least 5-6 hours to go through the list once even if you only select the free directories.

I did remove all the directories that would lead to a 404 from the list to speed up things the next time I would run a new project in the software.

It is possible to add new directories to the software which is definitely nice but also lots of work. I guess Directory Submitter is a nice software if you submit to directories regularly. It does save time and that’s the main advantage of the software. If you only submit to directories once or twice a year you might consider this carefully since a directory submission at some webmaster forums can be bought for roughly $10.