dot info domain into Ozzie engines!

[skarraman]

hello guys

have spent the past few months working on a very localized project based around the town in which I live. We were stoked to successfully obtain ballina.info in the initial release of the INFO tld, especially considering the limitations registering your town
name in the Australian domain space.

the obvious problem that I can see now is that a lot of search engines large and small filter out for Australian domains which means that plenty of great web sites are being ignored by fact of their domain.

any suggestions [apart from changing domains] on how to get around this would be fantastic.

Dave:cheers:

[Kal]

Originally posted by skarraman
the obvious problem that I can see now is that a lot of search engines large and small filter out for Australian domains which means that plenty of great web sites are being ignored by fact of their domain. Hey Dave, can you expand on this point a bit? Are you saying that you have evidence that search engines treat www.ballina.info differently to www.site.info?

[Chris_D]

Dave,

Some search engines only look at the TLD extension to see what country a site is from - eg they only look for a .au extension for Australia.

Good search engines also look at the IP address to see where it is physically located (ie hosted).

Your site is hosted in Australia - New South Wales - Sydney - Telstra Internet (by the IP)

A really Good search engine might also check the regional DMOZ data to see where the site is placed regionally.

You've got DMOZ pretty well covered!!!!

: )

In your case www.google.com.au correctly finds www.ballina.net as #1 on a search for Ballina if you check the box for 'Australian sites only' - so you're fine as far as I can see !!

Best regards

Chris

[Chris_D]

And Happy Australia Day to you all!!

[skarraman]

Must apologize to everybody for starting a thread and disappearing. The Australia Day long weekend celebrations caught up with me :o:

I was aware that sites not hosted in Australia and with TLD extensions were not ranking as well and the crux of the question should of been what else can I do.

Unfortunately the site is not hosted in Australia as I am getting an unbelievable deal which is saving some major dollars at the moment. Clients of mine with Australian domains are ranking very well in Google Australia even though they are hosted on these overseas web servers. I guess this highlights even more the importance of Australian domains.

The overseas web hosting combined with a top level domain is leaving the site virtually invisible at Google Australia. A perfect example of this Kal is our number one ranking at Google.com for the phrase Ballina real estate, however at Google Australia we are nowhere to be found [remembering Chris that it is ballina.info not ballina.net].
:D

I wouldn't say that the site is being penalized any more than any other .info extension, just trying to explore what else I can try doing over and above hosting and domain name.

Dave

[Dez]

*.info is a "global" domain, and assuming that your use of a .info domain means that you're not necessarily a commercial site, then you should quickly grab the ballina.org.au as it's currently available ( www.melbit.com ):

http://www.melbourneit.com.au/cc/register/checkavailability/?name=ballina&domaintype=AU&validateThisOperation=checkdomain

I can tell you that I for one do 100% filter for *.au domians for http://WebSearch.COM.AU

There is a lot of talk about using a range of 3rd party information to discern the physical location of a given site, such as GeoIP data, DMOZ, and such.

The fact is that on the whole, such data is usually invalid, irrelivant, or inaccurate, i.e.:

a) lots of AU sites now get sucked into hosting in the USA because they can't get the same pricing locally in AU ( who can beat USD$4.99 per month )

there's a good reason this happens, and it's basically the fact that the USA controlls almost as a monopoly, the cost of data to nonUSA regions, add to that the fact that the telecoms costs in AU are higher than almost anywhere else in the world, and you quickly find reasons to not host in AU.

hence GeoIP data is going to be not only irrelivant, but wrong.

b) DMOZ - although on the whole this is trustworthy data, it's all to easy through human error or deliberate effort, to have sites in the wrong "place", so using DMOZ for anthing more than a great place to "seed" a search engine crawl is not really something that many search engines are going to do.

Before you jump up and down, go develop a mechanism to disprove it and show me a working site where you have it running, then we can debate the merits in detail.

c) limiting to *.au for Australia web sites is currently the only way, without doing a Yahoo ( which they themselves gave up as it proved impossible to scale and or afford ) which is "employ a zillion humans to manually review and edit site data" - even LookSmart gave that up long ago, and they had money to burn ( till MSN told them to go jump ).

d) have a machanism where site submissions can self-nominate their location etc.

This is unworkable, 1% of 1% of the SEO's might behave and do the right thing, but the rest will abuse it and just fill an engine with junk, and I can assure you that even a system designed to only accept *.au tld's gets abused and spam'ed and it hell to keep crap out of.


Web page spam is just like Email spam, there's money to be made from "beating the system" and hence all "systems" are going to have hundreds of thousands of smart, resourceful people trying to beat them all the time, to make a fast buck.


Now before you get on your respective high hourses about me sounding like I've indulged in SEO bashing, I'm not.

SEO's on the whole are good, decent folk and they have home loans, families, and cars to pay off and need to get food on the table like the rest of us.

But for every good honest bone fide SEO I've met, there's 1,000 I've had email from asking "how can I get better rankings with your engine, how do I beat it?" etc.

I have data where in one 24 hour period, I have had one person in the UK attempt to spam millions of doorway pages for the same crap site through http://WebSearch.COM.AU's now off line site submission page.

Hence it's off like till I sort out a better interface that is "harder" to abuse.


I did some research into this whole problem of junk submissions, and out of 1.8 million unique submissions I tested with an email to the contact address provided at the time of submission ( one of the terms of accepting $free submissions to my engine ), I got less than ten legit bone fide responces!!

TEN out of 1.8 MILLION SUBMISSIONS !!

Thats after around 1.3 million of them bounced due to invalid email addresses ( and yes, I filtered out the really crap ones like no.way.email.me@nowhere.com )

Get a feeling for the size of the problem?




Why don't you take out some offline advertising such as your niche market space to drive more users to your site?

Newspapaers, Travel and Trade magazines?

And get some PPC traffic with Altavista/FAST/Overture/Yahoo and co ( please try something other than Google - they don't need any more money! ).

Of course I would love to see you take some space on WebSearch.COM.AU * grin *

Counting on traffic from your $free listings from Search Engines is surely a lottery and if you get any traffic it's great, but banking on it is crazy.

The search engine game is changing, daily, and once micro-payments are easier to do, then search engine stuff will be just like phone calls and email, every entry will cost, every visit or click will cost, and you will need to have a business plan to back up that cost with revenue.

The days of having a web site for fun are rapidly dying and the internet as a whole is changing, morphing, into what the Rupert Murdochs of the Print world have done, large corproate drive will see, as it has on the whole so far, the internet change to a cheaper version of what the PayTV industry has tried to deliver.

I anticipate the days of old, with FIDO Net, ARPA Net, APANA Net, and many other private non-internet "internets" will be re-born, and start to do what open source has done to Microsoft, and re-claim what was the original goal. One can only hope.

Oh, if you're read this far - you deserve something for fun.

Visit http://WebSearch.COM.AU:8080

It's a test build of a global search INDEX I'm toying with, it has test data of around 10.7 million URL's so far, and should be growing at around 5 million URL's per day, so it's small, it's growing, and in 20 days I expect it to be around the 100 million mark, and in three months I anticipate having around 250 million URL's in the searchable data cluster and from there, well, let's get it to 100 million first shall we?

If you have big locks of URL's you want me to include in the Global or AU or NZ sites, contact me and I'll bulk load them, ideally in blocks of 1,000's but anything bigger than 10 URL's is welcome.

if you have a want to run your own search site or want search data feed, I'll welcome you with open arms.

Have some ideas on monetising 30,000+ daily site submission requests I'm getting, talk to me, I'd welcome ideas!

Woud love some feedback in my http://WebSearch.COM.AU thread of course!

Cheers,

Dez
http://WebSearch.COM.AU
Australian search Engine
I work for Bandwidth

[skarraman]

Just another quick query on all of this:

will it make any difference if the name servers are a .com.au even though the actual server is in the U.S.?

Dave

[Dez]

Originally posted by skarraman
Just another quick query on all of this:

will it make any difference if the name servers are a .com.au even though the actual server is in the U.S.?

Dave


Hi Dave,

no - if you have a *.au domain, it won't matter where it is geographically.

although I really don't like to see aussies hosting in the usa, I hate seeing AUD$ leaving Australia for the already bloated USA hosting market.

So no, it won't effect your site getting into WebSearch.COM.AU

It's only me personally that has the hangup about Aussies spending money with Yanks for hosting * grin * - but I have a whole truck load of issues - this is one of the minor ones.

cheers,

Dez

[skarraman]

I didn't quite explain the situation well enough. Here is the whois information that is relevant:

Domain Name:BALLINA.INFO
Name Server:NS1.EMEDIAWORX.COM.AU
Name Server:NS2.EMEDIAWORX.COM.AU

As you can see the name server is a .com.au, however the actual server location is in the U.S. [sorry Dez]. Sorry if these seem like dumb questions, just trying to get my head around things totally and am interested in all of the variables.

Dave

[Dez]

Originally posted by skarraman
I didn't quite explain the situation well enough. Here is the whois information that is relevant:

Domain Name:BALLINA.INFO
Name Server:NS1.EMEDIAWORX.COM.AU
Name Server:NS2.EMEDIAWORX.COM.AU

As you can see the name server is a .com.au, however the actual server location is in the U.S. [sorry Dez]. Sorry if these seem like dumb questions, just trying to get my head around things totally and am interested in all of the variables.

Dave



Hi again Dave,

sorry - I too misunderstood - I thought you had ment an Australian *.au domain name hosted [ web server that is ] in the USA - but what you have is a global domain hosted in the USA but using an australian name server.

Don't take it personally - but I hate to hear about aussies hosting in the USA, when there are more than 1,162 or so isp's and 683 or so web design / hosting firms that need support in Australia.

I can't help by the way but mention the best of them all is CradleTechnologies.COM * grin *.


So - as for being included in my Australian Search Engine - Well as I've said in a couple of my overviews here previously - WebSearch.COM.AU it only indexes *.au sites it crawls or gets from site submissions. Much in the same way that my New Zealand search engine WebSearch.CO.NZ only indexes *.nz sites it crawls ( they do of course share the same farm of web crawlers in a cluster )

So your ballina.info would not get into WebSearch.COM.AU sorry due to it's simple but effective policy to only include *.au domains and hence be able to gaurantee that you only get Australian web site results in the search results.

But good news - I've been keeping under wraps for while now, quite a while, but I might as well let you know here, now, that I've been putting the finishing touches on the engine to start a global crawl and index for ALL domain name spaces.

You can have a play with it in it's infancy where I have a tiny 12.7 million URL's loaded from test data for the final run of load testing etc.

http://WebSearch.COM.AU:8080

I'm currently going through the trauma of trying to name the darn thing, as years ago I missed out registering websearch.com by days, which I regret almost daily!

So the WebSearch Global will gladly index your ballina.info web site, initially with up to 9,999 pages for free ( I'm planning a paid site search to help pay the rent for sites that want 10,000 or more pages indexed).

The current plans are to index a few hundred million url's over the next three months and put the engine to test.

Cheers,

Dez