New Orleans Internet Marketing

In the past I’ve done a few posts about PageRank that may help newcomers understand the difference between “actual” PageRank and “Toolbar” PageRank, along with some of the anomalies you will see if you look at the Google Toolbar for a long time (no, not visions of Mary either, just the little green bar).

One of the things I discussed in my post “Anomalies with Google’s ‘Toolbar PageRank,’” was the fact the sometimes search results will look strange when there is a site with low “toolbar PageRank” ranking high for competitive keywords. This is sometimes due to the possibility that Google has penalized the website’s “toolbar” PR for selling links.

This appears to be what happened to Blog Catalog today. Blog Catalog used to have a PR 6 or 7 homepage, and many interior category pages that were PR5, but if you check today, you will see that they’ve been bumped down to a PR4. Is Blog Catalog really selling links? You be the judge – have a look at the top right of the “Health” section page (click here).

Will this affect BlogCatalog’s search engine rankings? Probably not.

Although it has been argued both ways, I am of the opinion that it WILL affect the “link juice” that gets passed down to all of the blogs listed in their directory.

WebhostingTalk.com members vote LiquidWeb, Best Managed Dedicated Server Company (see poll)

If you’ve ever spent any time researching web hosting, at some point you probably ended up on WebHostingTalk.com, one of the largest forums on the web for hosting related discussions. If you venture there at any point in time during a weekday you might find 1500 or so users online reading and posting to the forums. The dedicated server forum in particular, can provide a wealth of knowledge due to the fact that many industry experts routinely answer questions there for newcomers.

It’s been over a year now since I signed up with LiquidWeb for a managed, dedicated server, and I knew it was a great service for me, but since I frequently recommend them to others I wanted to get a feel for what the web hosting community thought as well. Because who knows? Times change and so do companies. I decided to take a poll of WebHostingTalk.com members in the dedicate forum area to see who today’s leader is. Click below to see the poll results:

Best Managed Dedicated Server Companies: Poll

At the point I last looked at it, LiquidWeb was clearly in the lead, even ahead of well-known industry giant Rackspace. In fact, the only company that was even approaching their votes was a company called Softlayer that was put in the poll by mistake (they don’t offer managed dedicated services).

The poll requirements asked that people who vote had used the company for at least 3 months prior to voting, so if they are accurate, I think this serves as a good customer approval rating for LiquidWeb. The only thing I don’t like about these polls are that they are un-scientific – limited in generalizeability due to the fact that the forum software’s polling features are so limited. Another thing to consider is the fact that few so-called “experts” out there would actually use managed services. The real hosting gurus manage their own server if they have the time.

I’ve long known about email marketing and Aweber’s Autoresponders, but until recently, I didn’t have any ideas on how I could integrate one into any of my own personal websites to make them more profitable for me.

Email newsletters are great for reminding customers and potential customers about your products and services. If the newsletters give something away – like high quality free information, discounts on products, or news about something the consumer cares about, they will generally stay subscribed. And when they keep getting that reminder from you, they’re a lot more likely to turn to you when it comes time for them to make another purchase. They also do great at generating conversions from potential customers who were reluctant to buy when they first found your website.

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I’m posting this because I Googled it to death this past weekend trying to find the code for it, and it was nowhere to be found. I’m positive I’ve used it before in the past too, but the code was not in any of my old projects either. After hours of googling for what I knew was a simple mod rewrite for .htaccess, I submitted to defeat and asked (more like begged) an expert on the subject. Here was the problem:

301 Redirect every URL from www.domain1.com to the coresponding URL (keeping the trailing file path intact) on www.domain2.com, when both domains are being pulled from the same directory on the same server, and respecting URL canonicalization issues (www vs. non-www).

This should be a readily available mod rewrite written about on SEO blogs worldwide right? Wrong.

I offered to pay my expert for the consult, but he refused, probably laughing at the trivial request I submitted. So here it is – hopefully good ole Google will pick up this post so the next guy coming along will find this, no problem:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain2\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain2.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Cut, paste into .htaccess file, use notepad, must have Apache server with mod rewrite enabled, works like a charm :) It worked the first time in fact, not like when I do a mod_rewrite and have to test it out 20 times to get it right!