Check your pagerank folks…google has updated its rankings. Proud to say that almost all of our sites have gone up and are now achieving an average of PR4.
Let me know if you need me to check your PageRank
We’re speeding things up!Domain Name Wire recently posted several shortcut techniques to using some of the most popular DomainTools services. The post was timely, we at DomainTools have taken great measures and made significant strides to improve speed and performance of the site itself for our customers around the world.
The single greatest improvement was the implementation of a CDN (content delivery network). We tested the performance of several CDN’s and we found Akami offered the best results. They have the largest international distributed network that helps us extend the performance benefits to our entire worldwide customer base. We completed changes to the DomainTools site to fully utilize Akami’s CDN and rolled out the changes a few weeks ago.
DomainTools also started using the Google Javascript CDN for common Ajax libraries. There is a rapidly-growing number of sites using the Google CDN for JS libraries. By using this with DomainTools, we increase the chance that our customers already have a cached copy of the libraries on their computer. This has helped boost page load and responsiveness on the DomainTools site.
Our international customers will likely notice the greatest increase in speed. However, even from my house located less than five miles from the DomainTools data center in Washington State, the number of hops were cut in half and the speed tripled. I was going through 17 hops to California, then up to Canada and back to Washington, a circuitous route that averaged six seconds – now, it’s closer to two seconds. On average, the site load improved over 200%.
See below for a sample of the performance improvements listed in seconds, “Pre” or “Post” site enhancements.
As if that wasn’t’ enough, the development and engineering team has been tirelessly optimizing the internal code base, server infrastructure and network topology. These changes, and many others we have in the works, will continue to improve the response times on DomainTools. We have even extended the changes to the Aftermarket.com live auction platform. It’s part of our ongoing commitment to enhance the service and performance of DomainTools for all our customers – domestic and international.
Every few days we seem to publish some “big” dollar domain sales from NameJet.com, but usually don’t find them on Snapnames.com
Today is an exception, as a very good domain, in a high paying category, CheckMyCredit.com sold for $23,000. .
Since were on the subject of SnapNames.com here are so other notable sales from the last week:
bookmakers.net $5,300
alena.com $2,688
noprescriptionneeded.com $1,953
20000.com $1,269
freegaytube.com $1,008
Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer formally introduced Bing.com Microsoft new search platform today at the All Things Digital conference hosted by The Wall Street Journal.
According to the Journal, the search engine “is different from its predecessor and rivals’ search engines, with search results displayed on the left hand side of the Web page. It also allows users to access a range of categories of search, which Microsoft hopes will give consumers more search options. Microsoft has targeted four distinct categories of search: shopping, local, travel and health. Each search will prompt a more detailed range of search options.”
As for their choice of name for the search engine Ballmer was quoted as say “We Needed A Name That Says This Is All About Search” and apparently Microsoft thought that Bing.com says search.
For me I still think of cherries.
Time Warner announced today official plans to spin off AOL.com around the end of this year.
Time Warner’s board is expected to meet today and approve the plan.
Once completed, the deal would once again make AOL an independent, publicly traded company.
AOL bought Time Warner in 2001 for $147 billion dollars which has largely been regarded as one of the worst convinced mergers of all time.
After the merger Time Warner was renamed for a short period as AOL-Time Warner.
Time Warner owns 95 percent of AOL, Google owns 5%.
Time Warner plans to purchase Google’s stake then separate AOL.
We all seem to rely on web ranking services, in valuing domains we are looking to acquire and one of the tools many domainers use, including myself, is Alexa.org
Alexa.org basically uses the information from those who have downloaded its toolbar (and specifically allowed Alexa to use the info) as a sample of Internet usage and than ranks sites by estimated traffic based off those users. I have been a user of the Alexa toolbar for many years and allow my info to go back to Alexa.
We know that the Alexa rankings, like the Nielsen ratings are to TV, are based on a sampling of users.
Over the last month I have been working from Costa Rica and I noticed something quite interesting.
If you pull up a full Alexa stats page on a site, Alexa not only gives you a three month average rank, but also a rank for the domain by country, for the most popular countries in which the domain is viewed.
According to Alexa.org, which ranks TheDomains.com as 56,395 (3 month average), thedomains.com is ranked as the 1,898 most popular site in Costa Rica.
Costa Rica is largely a Spanish speaking country, and frankly although I would like to think that everyone in the world reads this blog, we know that there is no way this blog has that type of saturation in Costa Rica.
By comparison, TheDomains.com is ranked 20,380 in the US (thanks everyone) and 13,599 in Austria (danke) and 22,788 in Canada (i love hockey).
Another site I visit everyday is domaining.com which has an Alexa rank of 63,395 and is currently the 4,943 most popular site in Costa Rica.
Contrast this to blogs I only read once a week like Elliotsblog.com (sorry Elliot), which has almost an identical 3 month Alexa ranking of 57,492, but does not have an Alexa ranking in Costa Rica nor does domainnamenews.com, which also has a similar Alexa ranking of 59,280, but has no Alexa rank in Costa Rica.
Bottom line, is how accurate is Alexa?
How much weight do they give to each registered user, if just one lonely user in Costa Rica can move the numbers so dramatically in just 30 days.
(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com
Upcoming Domain Industry Events, Conferences & Auctions
Yahoo’s CEO, Carol Bartz said Wednesday she would be open to striking a search deal with Microsoft if they offered “boatloads of money.”
“If there’s boatloads of money and the right technology involved, we’d do a deal, sure,” Ms. Bartz said at the All Things Digital conference. “It’s that simple.”
Ms. Bartz also said Yahoo was interested in acquiring social-networking and video start-ups, noting that video advertising has grown sharply in recent years. She added Yahoo, which has cut thousands of jobs in the past year, doesn’t plan further layoffs.
Exactly how much is a boatload of money?
I guess it depends on the size of the boat.