New whois/seo lookup tool

Yesterday we added a new module to the webdigity webmaster community, which can be very usefull to site owners, and to people who intend to buy domains and web sites.

The whois lookup tool retrieves various whois and SEO information regarding the domains you want, and some of them are :

• Web site title/description/response codes
• Seo information like pagerank, alexa traffic rank, technorati rank, indexed pages, link popularity
• DNS servers
• Information regarding the ip that hosts the site if any (ownership – location info)
• Whois record from domain’s registar

This tool started as a little extra to the community, but I think it deserves some attention as it provides more information that any other simillar tool. To use it you just have to visit http://www.webdigity.com/ws/ or simply add the TLD that you are interested in the end of that url, eg http://www.webdigity.com/ws/google.com.

The tool is caching the data for faster response, but please be patient when you query a domain for first time, as a single lookup requires 10 requests, so it may take some time.

Statistics junkie….

Nice title huh? This post is inspired by this conversation in the webdigity forum, which talks about the “addiction” to the web.

It appears that there are many people that are actually addicted to the internet, most of them using porn or gambling sites, while others – people like you and me – are addicted to other web sites – maybe the page you use to see your statistics or your adsense earnings?

I wanted to write about this, as this phenomenon is like a common secret among webmasters. How many times you check your stats every day? How many times you check your adsense or adwords account every day?

Most of us do those operations more that is actually needed, because we are totally mental ill or just too excited. I even have a friend – we wont say names here 🙂 – who has all the statistics pages that he uses in the hot bookmarks on his browser….

There is even an extension for firefox which displays your adsense earnings live 🙂 It is obvious that there is no need for checking your stats every single hour, but as most of us keep on refreshing the page, can somebody explain why is this happening?

You are your front page

Before some months I realized that a forum site can’t really be a success if it consists only of forums. I mean that internet is full of forums, and no matter how nice is yours, you must also have something else to compete with the others.

So webdigity even that it was – and still is – a unique webmaster community,  had to expand, and have more feautures besides the modifications that I made to the forum.

With this in mind the webdigity transformed into a more complete community, not just a forum, and this happened by adding some new modules to the site, the tag browsing, the web design gallery, a tutorial database and a directory for webmasters where the members can also vote for their favorite sites.

Those new modules made in the last months, but still they haven’t really “advertised” properly. I mean the site was still a forum with some extra stuff. Today I realized that if you look a site with the eyes of a first time visitor, the site is whatever this guy/gal understands in 5 seconds.

What does this mean? Well if you look at this page, what you will see? A forum maybe? Correct, but this forum has also those cool modules that I tolled you about before. If you look the links in the page – after staying for at least 20 seconds in the site – maybe you will “discover” some of these modules….

Now look at the new home page of webdigity. Does it looks like a forum? Maybe it does, but I am sure that a first time visitor will now know that webdigity is more than a forum, as the several modules of the site a clear and visible. I can’t share any results from this, as I have just uploaded it to the site, but I think it will work better.

My personal lesson from this, is that it doesn’t matter how cool your site/product is, but mostly how you market it 🙂

Please let me know of your ideas about this in the comment section or here.

Some news from Adversal

Today I got an email from my favorite pop up advertising network, Adversal saying this :

Hello Nick,In an effort to increase the efficiency of our network for both our

advertisers and publishers, we have decided to move away from the

US/non-US structure and instead expand our scale to five

countries/regions as apposed to just two.  In doing so, we are also

moving away from a flat rate model to an individual and customizable scale.

The new custom pay rates assigned to your account are based on the contents of your website(s) as well as the performance, volume, and country origin of your traffic.  To view your new rates, login to your account and click the 'Rates' link on the right hand side of the page. These rates will be effective today.  There are also some new Q&A's that you may be interested in looking at on the FAQ regarding the custom scales.

If you should have any questions, just let me know.

The first thing I noticed is that Adversal has a new Publisher page, which now displays the pageviews from different countries/regions, and the ammount of money earned for them by day. Of course the US traffic is the best, but I think with this adjustment on the program, the rates for the non – us traffic will become better.

Public relations and the web business

I just found a cool blog post from Daniel Fischer regarding the public relations and the web site marketing.

What Daniel very correctly sais is that you have to – at least try – to contact with other webmasters of your niche and ask them for links or help regarding your site.

This thing is not working so well – I mean that you wont get so many links this way – but even the small number of links that you’ll get can help with traffic and SEO, plus those people may stay in touch with you or your site.

Daniel points google to help you find sites of your niche, but I’ll also point to stumbleupon which has a tag browsing feauture. This way you can enter the tag that best describes your site, and find top rated sites in your niche.

The results are very good, as this way you can both socialize your business and get some inbound links to your site.

The truth in blogging

…

PRWeb discontinues free press release distribution services

As mentioned here and here, PRWeb will stop offering free press release distribution services.

I saw their new plans, and I can say that they are not bad. Now the only good free way to distribute press releases is by uning prleap….

Link trading scams

As pagerank has become the number one target for webmasters – with no real reason, but that’s another story – a big market has been created, and as we can see, now there are hundrends of link services. Some of them offer you automated tools for link exchanges, while others provide marketplaces that both publishers and adertisers can easilly sell or buy links.

My personal opinion is that this thing sucks. I mean that there is no need to have so many link exchanges, and in anyway if you have a good web site that offers usefull information to its visitors, your link popularity can grow alone, without your help.

A good friend of mine, Olaf recently got a membership to linkmarket to promote his brand new directory (directory sites must have a high pagerank to be attractive, so in the beggining you have to raise it no matter what) As Olaf writed to his blog :

A few weeks ago the number of daily new link requests went down to zero. I visited the website to check what’s happened and got the information that my account is suspended and I need to contact the support. I wrote an e-mail to their support department and never got an answer until now. The fee for the premium membership was almost 25 USD, a lot of money for 2 weeks using their service…

 It appears that Olaf just found another scam on the web, so beware this company. They are not serious enough to do business with.

Looking for advertising networks that really pay?

One of the main concerns of every webmaster is if the programs that they use to monetize their sites do pay, or if they are scams. In my experience I had faced companies that didn’t pay or ban you when you are about to get a check (eg. yesAdvertising) or others who stole clicks from you (eg. Clicksor)

Anyway, these days in webdigity we  populated a list of programs that really pay. Please feel free to add there the companies that paid you.

Bellow I will list the programs that paid me – not the rest that our members posted – so here we are :

• Google adsense
• Adbrite
• Searchfeed
• Adversal
• Azoogleads
• Right Media
• Kontera

Webdigity adds trackback functionality

Today I am very proud because I finally managed to add a real trackback functionallity to the webdigity webmaster forum, which will let other people trackback forum threads from their blogs.

The module needs some additional work, as it seems that it wont work for every single trackback, but I will fix that later this week when I’ll have more spare time.