Sunday, January 23, 2011

EZPZ Hosting Deploys SpamExperts

EZPZ Hosting announced today it has deployed the SpamExperts Incoming Mail Filter to on all shared and reseller hosting accounts, automatically providing customers with enterprise-grade spam protection at no additional charge to them.

The hardware-based solution offers one of the industry’s most robust protections against spam, relying on public and internal anti-spam data sources to provide optimal protection. The Incoming Email Security Firewall combines more than 50 different filtering mechanisms that are continuously updated and configured to assure spam filtering is accurate and effective.

“For many of our customers, spam email creates more than just a nuisance—it also causes significant losses in productivity and can expose end users to a myriad of security threats, ranging from viruses to sophisticated phishing attacks. Unfortunately, the problem is not getting better, as many industry leaders had hoped,” said Daniel Knights, director of EZPZ Hosting. “By investing in this enterprise-grade, next-generation anti-spam technology for all of our shared and reseller hosting customers, we can deliver a tangible value-add that separates us from our competitors.”

According to SpamExperts, filtering is divided into two stages. Stage 1, the SMTP-stage, analyzes the behavior and reputation of the sending server. Around 95% of all spam can already be detected at this stage. In stage 2, the content-stage, the actual content of the message is checked and the remaining 5% of spam messages are detected. Together, a spam-score probability is calculated and based on this customizable score, messages will be accepted, rejected, or quarantined.

Last year, EZPZ Hosting introduced the industry’s first module to automate business management for reseller hosting customers, by enabling resellers to automatically provision and manage all new sub-reseller accounts through a single application. It was developed internally by EZPZ Hosting and provides an interface between WHMCS, a client management and billing system for hosting businesses, and WHMPHP, a master reseller hosting control panel.

In 2008, EZPZ Hosting received the Planet Positive certification. As part of the process, EZPZ Hosting measured the carbon footprint of its business, made a commitment to reduce it on an annual basis, and offset it by 110% into verified carbon projects.

To learn more about EZPZ Hosting, visit http://www.ezpzhosting.co.uk.

About EZPZ Hosting
Located in the United Kingdom, EZPZ is a leading Web hosting provider offering Shared, Reseller, Dedicated and Shoutcast hosting services. With 24/7/365 technical support and 5-minute response times for all tickets, EZPZ offers world-class service to individuals and businesses internationally. The company hosts more than 65,000 domain names across data centers in the United States and Europe.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The Importance of Link Building: What Is Link Popularity?

The Importance of Link Building: What Is Link Popularity?


Whenever there is talk of SEO, the term “link building” is thrown at you. It is considered to be an important part of search engine optimization. SEO professionals and webmasters use link building to enhance a website’s link popularity by improving natural search engine rankings.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN take into consideration the link popularity of a website as well as the quality of the links, when determining the website’s ranking for the keywords.

The link popularity and PageRank are determined by Google after taking into consideration several factors, such as the inbound links, the growth rate of such links and their quality.

All inbound links may not pass link popularity

Webmasters often outsource their link building and are happy to notice that a certain number of inbound links are making their way in. Here we are not talking of the demerits of outsourcing, but rather the importance to looking into who is linking to your web pages. There are several links that may not pass link popularity.

No Follow Pages: The no-follow link attribute was initially created by Google to tackle spam; although many of the major sites now are also no-follow. Taking a close look at all the inbound links will certainly reveal a majority of the inbound links to be no-follow.

There are a couple of ways to find out if a link contains a no-follow attribute:

■Checking the code – Go to the web page you want to check and from the browser, click on “View” and then “Page Source” to view the source code. Search for “nofollow” to see if the rel=nofollow attribute is in the code.

■Using a tool to look for nofollow – Another way of checking if a link is nofollow is to use a tool. You can install a browser extension to reveal these details. If you’re using Firefox, you will find extensions that will point to all nofollow links.

Pages Not Indexed: Many web pages are not indexed by the search engines. There could be various reasons for this:

■The pages may not yet be indexed by the search engines.


■The web pages are banned by the search engines.

■The web pages have a no-index META tag, which means the webmaster has specifically requested that the pages not be indexed.

Links from web pages that fall into any one of the above categories will not be considered for link popularity.

Tracking Codes: Tracking codes are used by webmasters to find the number of impressions and clicks generated by their ads. These tracking mechanisms use redirects and redirects do not pass link popularity.

Only pages with natural-looking inbound links are rewarded

Over the years, search engines have covered many of the loopholes and developed highly accurate systems to ensure only websites that stick to the rules are given high rankings.

Here are some factors that lead to natural-looking inbound links:

Growth rate of inbound links – Search engines are vary of websites that experience a surge of inbound links for a short time with a heavy reduction or no incoming links later. In the eyes of search engines, genuine websites are consistent in their link-building efforts, and if a website receives a huge amount of links initially, the pace is expected to remain on the same level. Growth rate of inbound links is very important and affects the page rank.

Inbound links pointing to different pages – It is not enough to point inbound links to the main landing page of a website. For search engines, an authority website is one with inbound links pointing to all the pages of the website along with appropriate anchor text that looks natural.

Proper link building plays an important role in priority placement of a website on Google and other major search engines. Higher visibility on the search engines means increased traffic and increased popularity of a website, which in turn leads to the fulfillment of the goals of the webmaster concerned.

Assessing Web Hosting Companies For Small To Medium Scale Businesses!

As your business grows in size, the need for higher levels of competency increases! The success of a business depends on ensuring that every aspect is reviewed with utmost care, including its online presence – and web hosting plays a crucial part.

There is certainly no dearth of hosting providers - they are a dime a dozen. But are they all suitable for you? Will they fulfill your business needs and ensure that nothing goes wrong from their side?

What are the basic expectations from a business web hosting provider?

While the more common needs of customer response time, 100% uptime, high bandwidth, security etc. remain constant, there are a few things that need to be looked at in more detail. A business is a business and has to be treated with the respect it deserves, and it all starts with finding the most suitable web hosting company.

How Is Their Customer Support?

It goes without saying that this has to top the priority list for a business. While reading about the web hosting provider, going through reviews and finding out from people is a good way, and may be enough for a personal website or even a small business that is just starting out, a bigger business can certainly do with delving deeper.

i.Customers and support Staff – One of the first things too look at is their support staff that take care of customer service. How many customers does the web hosting company have and are there enough support staff to handle them? Imagine a hosting company that has 1 customer support staff for every 10,000 customers. You don’t even have to blink an eye before deciding that their support must be terrible. Find one with a reasonable employee to customer ratio.

ii.In-house customer support or outsourced? – It helps to have in-house support staff, as outsourcing may result in issues from time to time.

iii.Methods of Communication – What are the different ways their customers can get in touch with them? A good web hosting should have a variety of communication channels open, such as email, telephonic and live chat support. One of the best things would be to have 24/7 live chat, where issues can be resolved instantly. A forum would be a great bonus, where you can get a clear picture of the web host’s strengths and weaknesses based on the discussions.


It is not enough to check the methods of communication. It is important to find out if these methods are monitored as expected. This can be done by sending/asking some questions related to their hosting and see their response time as well as the quality of their responses. Do they keep you on hold for ages on the telephone? Their live chat is closed at night? Does the support staff of your web hosting provider actually know what they are talking about?

How Stable Are They?

Find out how long the web hosting company has been in business. A longer period is an indication of the company’s stability. If a web hosting company has been around for about five years or more, and is still in business, they would have proved themselves to their customers. It is pretty obvious that they are not fly-by-night operators and are trustworthy. You can assess their stability by also looking into the number of customers they have.

However, just because a hosting company is huge and has a high number of customers, does not make them the best in the business! Look at the number of customers for the last few years! Has the size of the customer base been decreasing or increasing. An increase in customers also brings to fore the capacity of the company to remain on top and cater to the changing hosting needs. The stability and growth of a web hosting business is directly related to their increasing customer base.

Do They Have Their Own Datacenters?

Although, this is not a criterion that has to be fulfilled at any cost; if there is a choice between a small business web hosting provider with their own data center and one without, it is advisable to choose the former. The data center should use the latest technology, be well equipped with uninterrupted power supply, high connectivity and high level of security.

Despite doing all this homework and taking precautions, it is difficult to conclude that a specific web host is the best. There may be some which fulfill some of your requirements and others that take care of the rest; however, the one you choose will obviously have to be a web hosting company that comes closest to handling most of your business needs at a price that is affordable to your business.

Get Indexed Faster By Google And Know Which Pages Are Indexed!

As a webmaster, you know that your pages will show up in the search engine results only when they are indexed by the search engines. Getting them indexed is the only way for people browsing the internet to find you. The reason you should be paying attention to whether Google has indexed your pages is to also know if Google has penalized you, in which case, the pages will not show up in Google search.

How does Google index web pages? Does Google index all your website pages? How do you know how many pages of your website are indexed in Google?

These are very important questions that need to be answered if you want to ensure you have a highly trafficked website. Each and every page of your website is important.

There is a time difference between when you update your site and Google indexes it. The time it takes to get indexed depends on a variety of factors:

Structure of the Site

Pay attention to the subpages of your site to ensure easy accessibility by the search engine bots. Create a sitemap page that has links to all the other pages of the website and also place a link to it on the home page. Link to the deep pages of your website from the home page as this also helps in getting crawled faster. Although, there is a controversy on this point, and some say that the sitemap may not help with indexing, it is a good idea to create a sitemap, as it helps in many “other” ways too.

Build Incoming Links

Google gives importance to the number of incoming links, where they are coming from and the quality of the sites they are coming from, and getting links from the right sites helps with the Page Rank. The higher the Page Rank of your website, the faster Google bots will crawl your site and index it. It is also important to get links to the deeper pages of your website, and not just the home page. Every page on the website should be reachable from at least one text link.

Remove Session IDs

Google bots do not understand session Ids and consider them as different pages having the same content. Remove session IDs!

Use Robots.txt file

Use robots.txt file on your web server, as this file lets crawlers know the pages to be crawled and the pages that should not be. Be careful and make sure the Googlebot crawler itself is not blocked while doing this. You can use this file to ensure that the unimportant pages are not crawled.

Do Not Have Text Within Images

Google crawler does not recognize text within images. Include text instead of images if you wish the crawler to understand names, links, content or something important.

Use Static Pages

It helps to know that search engine spiders do not crawl dynamic pages as well as they do static pages. (Dynamic pages are pages where the url contains a “?” character).

Now, coming to the next point in our article, which is to find out how many pages are indexed by Google, there are several ways this can be done.

The easiest way of checking which pages are indexed is to type “site: your domain name.” All the pages that have been indexed will pop up in the search results. To ensure you get indexing information frequently and automatically, without having to check manually, you can use googlealert.com. It helps you see when pages of your site come up. Although, the email notification you receive may not always be on the same day the pages are indexed; it is still a great way to automate things.

Getting indexed in Google and other search engines like Yahoo is essential for the visibility of your website and all the pages within a website. Paying attention to these simple things can make a huge difference in the exposure your website gains and the resulting traffic that your site witnesses.
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Need Help Researching?

If you are still looking for advice, and need help finding the best web hosting solution for your site, we recommend taking advantage of our FREE web hosting guides. One of our most popular guides for beginners is our, "Web Hosting Lingo 101" article, this guide outlines and defines hard to understand hosting terminology. We would also suggest reading our, "Insider's Guide to Web Hosting" before choosing one of the best web hosting services listed above. One of our most recent web hosting guides discusses some great alternatives to Google web hosting, this article has received hundred of visitors and has helped lead many individuals to a new web host.

Many individuals come to our site looking to start a web hosting reseller business. If you are interested in reselling web site hosting space to others on the web you should most definitely read our free guides to web hosting reselling on the web. We have many resources that will help you to find the absolute best web hosting companies.You may also want to take a look at our reseller award winner page on the right sidebar. Our site is full of resources and tools that will help you match up with the perfect company. The best part about WebhostingLamp.com is that it is completely FREE!

What To Look For In a Web Host

There are many factors that need to be considered when searching for the best web hosting provider. First, does the host offer an affordable monthly rate? There are many great companies offering web hosting for only $3.95/month and we DO NOT recommend paying any more than that. Secondly, you should look for a reliable web host that offers stable servers and support the following types of sites: java, php, Ajax, ruby, html, and other web design platforms. We consider all of the top 10 best web hosting sites (listed above) to be great hosting solutions for anyone! We would like to encourage you to compare web hosts by taking advantage of our free web hosting reviews and guides for your research