Ever since we started down this road we’ve had nothing but problems. They don’t happen every month but when an email issue rears it’s ugly head it’s like a monster. Godzilla back again.

So here we are dealing with tech support and for reason not talking to yahoo. That’s probably wise in retrospect, this finger pointing business from one company to another never works. I have to take my hat off to hostgator. They’re technical support has been cool, digging through logs, looking to find specific emails that were delayed.

Turns out that Yahoo greylist just about everybody out there. Hostgator, for some reason, especially.

The reason that the forwarder was not working for Daniel is the way he was testing it. He sent an email to testing@xxxxxxx.com from the gmail address that he was forwarding to. When it came back to gmail, gmail erased it. The email never gets to the inbox because gmail sees it as invalid. Yahoo has been known to defer email from our servers so this could be why mail is taking longer for you. Is there a specific time that an email was supposed to be forwarded and wasn’t? We can look through the logs to see what happened to it.

Now it’s interesting what he has said about gmail erasing a message. I pulled my hair out on this yesterday as well. Sending forwarded email to gmail, say for instance, steve@isighttech.com forward to steve@gmail.com, will send this email straight to the Archive.

It’s there, it’s just not in the INBOX. If you download any of that email locally or you do a search through g you’ll find it. You have to go into settings and verify that email, steve@isighttech.com in this case, with gmail before you get it in your inbox.

Anyways, long email day. Bottom line, don’t use yahoo as a business email account. And if you testing emails to your gmail account do a search for it before concluding that it never came through.

If you’re having problems getting it to work then just have a check here: Wordpress 2.3 Compatibility.

You must go into the siloing source file and change out the database calls.

I have to give it to ppc-sites. They did a nice rendition based on the keywords I gave them. The content is not original. Of course not. But these are marketed as parked sites meaning your traffic should be coming through type-ins. Anything else is just a bonus.

I choose to go this route rather than developing content because GoDaddy was showing this domain as getting a trickle of type-in. I had the domain as part of it’s Cash Parking…but, well it did according to GoDaddy get a trickle, but now that I’ve had it and slapped Analytics on it I’m seeing nothing. Nada. No type-in traffic at all.

Maybe it’s just a down week.

Either way I’ve set it up here and now that I’ve linked to it I’ve crushed my “just type-in” experiment. Oh well. I’m sure now with my hundreds of pages content created my ppc-sites, I’m sure to get some organic. Maybe from MSN. We’ll see.

Update 03/08: Site is still in the tank. Only traffic is getting is from a link on a popular site. PLR’s don’t work. Experiment ended.

And that is exactly what we’d use it for. Thank you blipstar.

Store Locator for Current-USA

We eventually changed the site over to a WordPress site. Network Solutions does a horrible job hosting WordPress sites. As a matter of fact they are crazy strict with their servers and I’ll never host with them again. So the switch had to be done but I didn’t expect the suprising results.

I’d been trying to rank this site for some time. Right out of the box, no links to it. It was a keyword dense site.
Everything was above board. Copy was good, professionally written copy. Nothing overly done. I was running Adsense.

The site was up for six or 8 months on NetworkSolutions. I had garnered a few natural links (it was good content) and I had one paid link. Organic traffic was horrible. I just figured, “Man, I better get some more links!” So I putzed around with that for a while. Actually the term was so niche that my Adwords spend had gotten down to 2 cents a click. So I didn’t worry about it. I figured fine, move on. I’ll just pay for traffic.

When I switched host though, boom. Organic traffic. Nowehere in Google, all of a sudden number 11, number 5, number 21. I’m scratching my head. Did I de-link some stuff, did I…ah, what happened? And then oh..the server switch.

You probably are not hosting with Network Solutions. I don’t know anyone who does. If you are, get off. If you search engine marketing has stalled after 6-8 months then look toward the host. I’d suspected always that the host plays a part but once your up and running you think of a thousand other things other than the host. Changing host has become a new tool in my seo strategy.

The Reign of Related Content

News stories, information pages, search results, and almost any webpage you can think of are no longer going to be the expected “end point” of a user’s interaction with a site. With the giants like Google and Yahoo opening up a lot of their services via API, related content is going to make its way on to most websites this year. Traditionally thought of as mashups, integrating related from content is going to become so common in 2007 that the name will most likely be dropped, and lose its uniqueness.

Even on traditional news sites related (and often external) content will be pulled in, as sites give up the hope of being the “have all” for users, instead opting for the “can get to all.” We have seen this to some extent already, but I expect it to surge in 2007.

Journalists and Reporters Must Blog

We are already seeing this to a large extent, as writing for traditional media such as newspapers is no longer enough. Both reporters and journalists will be expected (both by employers and readers) to get more personal by beginning blogs that give their personal thoughts and reflections on stories, rather than simply reporting. In addition, they will be expected to post news tidbits on their blogs that may not be developed enough to make it as a full-blown story in traditional media.

Less Complicated Interface Design

As a corollary of the first prediction, newly designed sites in 2007 will focus less on heavily-structured, onsite navigation, instead opting for simpler, more general navigation. Rather than trying to force the user into wading through sections, categories, and subcategories via site-wide navigation, designers will focus more on “in-content” navigation, trying to enhance the user’s movement throughout the site. Many navigational links will be presented only on (and most likely within) related stories. For example, on a sports site, football would be the only sitewide navigational link available (in terms of football). Navigation to things like team profiles, etc. will be found inside of related stories rather than in some sort of buried, sitewide navigational link (ahem, take note ESPN, ahem).

Those are the three things I think will have the biggest impact on the web in 2007, and will be most noticeable to the everyday web user. For a more thorough, technical analysis of 2007 predictions see this article on Read/Write Web.

I can’t tell you how invaluable their chat service has been. I don’t usually go for chat/customer service, as most of the time it’s a pretty cruddy app and the person on the other end usually is at the water cooler, but HostMySite is on it. They do a great job. I can’t tell you how they’ve eased the last customer transition. If you’re a business that runs a number of clients, and those clients inevitably come to you with hosting questions don’t hesitate with HostMySite. There a good partner to have and understand the host-agency-client relationship.

Whether you love or hate Microsoft, I think almost everyone can agree that this redesign is a huge improvement. It draws on many of the newer, “Web 2.0″ design elements: lots of whitespace, bright colors used to draw the eye to important elements, and subtle gradients abound. In addition, Microsoft uses the increasingly popular overlay technique (one version of which can be seen in our portfolio) to aid in navigation. Clicking on any of the links at the top right of Microsoft’s page will allow you to look through options and select the right one without ever leaving the page, rather than having to click, and click, and click to get there.

Recently Microsoft has seemed like a totally transformed company. Pairing with a Linux distributor, releasing a web browser that is light years better than any they released previously (IE 7), and even embracing open source are just a few of the things that seem to point to Microsoft’s new attitude. All I can say is, it’s about time.

The Renaissance is great. Best thing about it is the location to the Convention Center. You can walk back to the hotel, get a coffee, and be back before the person, who is rambling on during their power point presentation, finishes. It is a bit pricey. Even at Brett’s rate I still had to pay premium on Friday night and then again on Monday when I came in early. Some buddies stayed at other locations and really didn’t seem to miss a beat. One thing about not having your hotel right next door is that you actually stay at the convention center and probably get a little more for your money. Being so close allowed me to nap a little too often.

This is my fourth Pubcon and things have grown exponentionally over the years. This year was packed. Yahoo and those guys didn’t throw a public party because of all the folks. Figure they thought the tab was going to be too high. There were private parties, which added a bit to my sort of declining feeling about the whole experience. It’s starting to fragment off into who’s who and “who you know” and “rockstar this” and “rockstar that”. Nothing against the rockstars, most of them are completely down to earth and are just getting pushed up to the mantle as this thing grows and grows. But none the less one feels a bit isolated for the core which was easily accessible in the earlier PubCons. I wish Brett would limit the size or give preferential treatment to webmasters who have signed on as paid members of his forum and have been around for a year or more. (This idea is attributed to Tim Macdonald from The Found Agency)

One takeaway I’ll share with you is from Alex Bennett from Beyond Ink. She shared, in her Tools from the Trade Session, some neat little plugins from RankQuest.com and http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus .

The RankQuest Tool is a tool bar which allows you to see things about the page without having to jump back and forth between a number of sites. It will do Validations, Text to Link Ratio, Keyword Density, Alexa Stuff, Search Engine Saturation, etc, etc. All based on competitive analysis. It’s pretty handy. Also comes with a link checker to help you snuff out old links that have become abandon.

The Quirk Biz tool is pretty cool as well. It slides right down into the bottom right of your window. Gives you Page Rank, Alexa, Highlights NoFollow Links, and a whole score of other intelligent analysis tools.

If you want the real lowdown as far as the session are concerned then you have to head over to SeoRoundtable.