If you've been reading this blog, you'll know that I've been monitoring the Alexa rank for various of my sites.
What I've just discovered is that you have to be very careful abou how you interpret the rank.
I have a domain that I haven't used for years, RobotAssassin. It was set up when some friends and I planned to build battling robots. The domain redirects to the webspace of my ISP account, without any domain masking. So when you visit the site, the browser address bar shows "http://www.cafetorium.eclipse.co.uk/robot/".
If I view this site in IE, with the Alexa toolbar, it gives a rank of 41,015. I was astounded - it's a site I haven't touched for years. How could it be so high?
The answer is that Alexa only seems to log stats for top-level domains, so it's actually "www.eclipse.co.uk" (the ISP) that has that rank.
So beware if you check your Alexa rank. It might not be as high as you think unless you have a genuine top-level domain, and that it's not redirected to a sub-domain.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Expiring domains
A few years ago I registered a domain. I didn't do much with it, and it expired a few weeks ago. When I logged on to check the status of my other domains, I found that I still had the option to renew the expired domain, but it would cost a staggering £80 because it is overdue.
So I let it expire. The rules are that once 30 days after the expiry date have passed (which is in 3 days time), the domain goes back in the pot of available domains and anyone else can register it.
So, if I'm quick, I could re-register it for a two-year period for just £5.90.
I'm not that bothered about getting it back, but if I find it's available, I'll go for it. But I'm not paying £80 for a domain.
So I let it expire. The rules are that once 30 days after the expiry date have passed (which is in 3 days time), the domain goes back in the pot of available domains and anyone else can register it.
So, if I'm quick, I could re-register it for a two-year period for just £5.90.
I'm not that bothered about getting it back, but if I find it's available, I'll go for it. But I'm not paying £80 for a domain.
First product online soon
The first of my software products, Email Link Mangler, will be going up on a website this week.
It's a small program that scrambles email address links on web pages to hide them from the spammers' Address Harvesters, or SpamBots.
It's a small, easy to use program that hopefully will help to reduce the amount of spam that people get.
I'm just writing a completely new website from which to sell it - a software store, so it's a bit more than a simple sales page.
However, I'll probably go down the single sales page route as well, and promote that separately. That's probably a quicker way of getting my product online as it happens.
If you're wondering why I take so long to get all this done, it's because I have a day-job and a family. I don't get a huge amount of free time to devote to my online business.
It's a small program that scrambles email address links on web pages to hide them from the spammers' Address Harvesters, or SpamBots.
It's a small, easy to use program that hopefully will help to reduce the amount of spam that people get.
I'm just writing a completely new website from which to sell it - a software store, so it's a bit more than a simple sales page.
However, I'll probably go down the single sales page route as well, and promote that separately. That's probably a quicker way of getting my product online as it happens.
If you're wondering why I take so long to get all this done, it's because I have a day-job and a family. I don't get a huge amount of free time to devote to my online business.
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