WDTalk

Steve-Hostirian received an Honorable Mention for the Most Valuable Member of the Month (February 2010) by the web hosting forum, Hosting Discussion. This marks the second time Steve has been honored with this Award since last March. Steve has won their Most Valuable Member of the Month award seven times during that span.

Web hosting forums like Hosting Discussion are online communities devoted to sharing knowledgebase, where members openly discuss issues, requests and opportunities with other providers and prospects in a variety of topics such as promotion & marketing, business & legal issues, VPS plans, dedicated servers, colocation, domain names, website design, hardware & server configuration, software & control panels, billing & accounting, customer service & support and legal issues.

Hostirian participates in these forums to stay abreast of the industry, and to provide leadership by example in sharing the wealth of knowledge we’ve obtained over our years in helping businesses just like yours, with hosting solutions for small and medium sized businesses.

From Hosting Discussion

Honorable mention:
Our honorable mention this month goes to Steve from Hostirian.com. We are accustomed to seeing Steve finish the month in first place, but its not what makes him one of the strong contestants almost every month – it is his nature to help, assist and share insightful thoughts and ideas in a very warm style.

A couple of the threads Steve-Hostirian shared in February were:

• What is your value add?
• Writing tips for your site or blog

Steve-Hostirian was selected as the Most Valuable Member of the Month (January 2010) by the web hosting forum, Hosting Discussion. This marks the seventh time Steve has been honored with this Award since last March.

Web hosting forums like Hosting Discussion are online communities devoted to sharing knowledgebase, where members openly discuss issues, requests and opportunities with other providers and prospects in a variety of topics such as promotion & marketing, business & legal issues, VPS plans, dedicated servers, colocation, domain names, website design, hardware & server configuration, software & control panels, billing & accounting, customer service & support and legal issues.

Hostirian participates in these forums to stay abreast of the industry, and to provide leadership by example in sharing the wealth of knowledge we’ve obtained over our years in helping businesses just like yours, with hosting solutions for small and medium sized businesses.

  From Hosting Discussion

 ”But this month is special in more than one way. I decided to break all the rules (or modify them as I go) because I could not just single out one particular member deserving of the award. I was actually impressed with 3 members. Steve-Hostirian had a strong start to the year, finishing the month #1 and sharing some great insight knowledge on the way, which makes Steve our first winner!

Two other members didn’t finish the month in the top 10, but as I’ve been saying since the beginning – this contest is about quality, not quantity. I did have too much of a good time reading these members’ posts, and it would be a real shame if they went unnoticed. Hence, it is my utmost pleasure to announce two other most valuable members of January 2010: csn-uk and ITEHosting.

Check out this month’s winners posts and you will immediately see why their contributions are being honored.”

Some of the topics Steve-Hostirian addressed in January were:

• Being Unforgettable
• Value of Confidence and Competency
• Are the search engines doing enough to combat click fraud?

Typing “Link Wheel” as a search query - into Google returns 381,000 results. Search in web hosting forums for keywords “Link Wheel” and you’d get lots of varied opinions. So what is a linkwheel and how does it relate to SEO? And is it a whitehat or blackhat SEO tactic? Could it lead to search engine penalties?

White Hat?
To a lot of webmasters and SEO experts, link wheels are a valid SEO stategy (whitehat). Link wheels are essentially a wheel of linked websites (all yours), designed to improve the SERPS (search engine results pages) of your main site. I’ve drawn an example below of a (web host provider) link wheel.

In this example - multiple sites are developed with each linking back (one-way) to the main site, and linking to another related site (within the same niche).

Black Hat?
To take this even further, some SEO experts recommend  using IP addesses from different class C IP allocations for each site. My take on the IP’s? This seems to be a blackhat strategy to avoid Google penalties. Why? Because a lot of link wheels are composed of one-post blogs that offer little or no relevance to a search query. Their intent? To trick Google into seeing multiple links back to their main site. Many say this works, but only until you get caught, and then all that effort goes to waste.

Relevance is the key
I don’t think I’m all that different from most folks searching for information on the Internet. When I search for colocation, I expect to find sites with great content related to colocation. It’s frustrating to find sites with no real content, or simply links to other websites.  The same applies for Google. They have a ton of advertising dollars at risk, and have developed very sophisticated search algorithms to emphasize and reward relevance.

It’s March 1st – only nineteen days until the vernal equinox, the first day of Spring. And only 30 days away from April Fool’s Day.

What do the following articles have to do with either event?

I’m looking forward to this year’s hoaxes. Do you have anything planned for your own organizations?