Moving a website and keeping links IN

[Cantab]

I need to move my website to a new ISP, with webhosting options (in order that the site can be more interactive). But my good Google ratings depend a lot on the links IN to my site. Any ideas about how to transfer these links, or how to find out who is linked in and contact them?

[Julianna]

That's a tricky topic.

From what I can see, it seems that you'll be making a move from a domain name which existed with your internet-access service-provider to your own domain. Is that true?

If so (and if you can afford this option), you may want to consider paying for the website with your existing host, and setting up a set of redirect instructions or changing every html page to be a redirect page. Unfortunately, this does not resolve the issue of links. It can also become quite pricey!

To find out who links to you, try the link search option at Google (it's the last one on that page). I've found that it's not 100% reliable though. If you are able to access the raw log files for your site, you could take a look at them to see which sites are linking to yours. You could also get a free counter like StatCounter to add to your existing site. Counters like that will give you the page from which someone has been referred.

Does that help? Let me know if you have any questions.

[Landseer]

www.stonesculpture.gothere.uk.com

Looks a lot like a subdomain setup, the main domain shows:

Enjoy FREE UK Internet Access! * Why pay a monthly or annual subscription fee for Internet service when you can use ours completely free of charge! As a valued customer, you will be provided with a whole host of free and useful services to help make your online experience with us more enjoyable.
==========


This is the problem when people set up web sites on free servers ala geocities, angelfire etc- you get entrenched in search engines at that URL and it takes a long time to change all those.
If you have your own domain name you can park it ANYWHERE and no matter where you move it to it won't make any difference.

As your host is a free service, don't count on them bothering to even reply to your inquiry let alone help with redirects.
Why not put an automatic redirect page of your own up pointing to a new domain? It won't catch all but will help.

Google has a help/faq page that explains much of what you need to know about ratings, links and how to search WHO is linked to your web site:

http://www.google.com/about.html

One way is copy paste this search term with the "link:" prefix in the search box:

link:http://www.stonesculpture.gothere.uk.com

OR the same method a different way:

To obtain a comprehensive list of the links that point to your page, perform a Google search on your URL. On the results page, select the "Find web pages that contain the term" link, and Google will provide you with webpages that mention your address.

Using both, Google shows only FOUR sites linked to your site at all:

Results 1 - 4 of about 5 linking to http://www.stonesculpture.gothere.uk.com. (0.24 seconds)

http://3ada.com/categ-Visual_Arts-211_111.html
http://aboutstone.org/stonehoo/Information_and_Resources/
http://limerex.com/rating/art/united_kingdom/
http://tatet.com/en/reg-Sculptors-237-1083.html


Doing this on my own web site as a test it shows 43 links to it, some are internal links of subpages:

Results 1 - 31 of about 43 linking to http://www.lostnewyorkcity.com



My URL changed, so how can I get Google to index my new site?

http://www.google.com/support/bin/an...9071&topic=363


You can buy a domain name as cheap as about $6.95 a year, I use godaddy.com and for my host I use http://www.hostingit365.com/hosting/ and their plans start at $4.95/mo



20 MySQL Databases

[Cantab]

Wow! Thanks! I'll go through these ideas over the next couple of days.
The reason I raised the issue is that I have good Google ratings on a number of key words, and a recent analysis of my website by an internet company stated that there were 217 links in! So, I have been labouring under the impression that this number of links in must have a significant impact on the Google ratings.

[Landseer]

Originally Posted by Cantab

Wow! Thanks! I'll go through these ideas over the next couple of days.
The reason I raised the issue is that I have good Google ratings on a number of key words, and a recent analysis of my website by an internet company stated that there were 217 links in! So, I have been labouring under the impression that this number of links in must have a significant impact on the Google ratings.

Ok, I have a couple of questions now I guess:

1) How long has your web site been up at it's present URL?
2) What "internet company" told you there are 217 links in, and did your transaction with them involve any fees or something?

The "ratings" thing is pretty shady sounding to me, even Google does not disclose how their software does this and their FAQ file disputes many of the old wive's tales about ratings, keywords, multiple submissions, competitors supposedly being able to UNindex your site etc.
There are many scams out there that you pay fees to them to "increase" your search engine ratings!

According to Google's own search which I did two different ways- your site URL that you have here http://www.stonesculpture.gothere.uk.com has only FOUR links to it, and I posted the list of the four it shows, that's not anywhere near the 217 that "internet company" claimed.

MY site is 152 megs, which has over 1,000 photos and about 600 html pages, subpages, a message board and more, including meta tags, keywords embedded etc has been on the net for 9 years, about 7 on it's own domain name and it only shows 43 hard links to it- about a dozen of those are the site's own internal links. My traffic logs show an average of 100 unique visits a day, and now over 2 gigs worth of bandwidth a month and increasing every month- December was 2.64 gigs. ALL of my Ebay pages link to it and photos, and all of those are indexed by Google.

The log's search engine referrals shows in part:

Google
896 pages
68%

Google (Images)
147 pages
11.1 %

Yahoo
139 pages
10.5 %

My internal logs for external links shows:

Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)
Total: 338 different pages-url

It says "links" but these are actually how many clicked thru on visible url, for example, the top line in that log is this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_East_Side
65 Pages
10.9 %

There is only ONE Wikipedia page at that url, so only one url is shown, the 65 "links" would be 65 different click-thru's from that page which could be one person clicking 65 times, 65 different people or anything in between.

Down near the botton shows someone reading their yahoo.com email at this url had opened an email from me with a link in it to my site, this was counted in my logs as two "links" when in fact it is one person reading their email who clicked on my url in the signature:

http://us.f531.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter 2 pages 0%


So obviously there is something not right with the 217 v/s 4 for a small site that hasn't been up 9 years, and I believe what was meant is there were 217 click thru's which could mean 217 people clicked on the FOUR hard links to your site google shows.

If you go to archive.org and plug in your url,

Searched for http://www.stonesculpture.gothere.uk.com

it only shows ONE page has been indexed and archived in the last TEN years by them:

Search Results for Jan 01, 1996 - Jan 28, 2006
1 pages Mar 29, 2005 *

Plugging in my url shows a different story, it shows it has been indexed and archived there since 2002, 47 times:

2002 2003 2004 2005
6 pages 18 pages 14 pages 9 pages

"pages" indicates website- the sites' entire contents, including images are archived as a "page"
My site was on the net for 5 years before archive.org picked it up and indexed it, so I wouldn't expect a new domain or site to do much better.

Going to the very first "page" there from 2002 I can see my older layout, the indexing is not perfect so some content is missing:

http://web.archive.org/web/200208022...wyorkcity.com/

[sculptor]

try
http://wholinkstome.com

they list the links
with links to the linkers
and some tips

advice: don't let a perceived handhold on this friable cliff face stop you from reaching for another

sculptor

[Landseer]

I looked sculptor, if you don't mind, and no offense to you intended at all - I'm a big skeptic in general, so I like to check these kinds of things out in every way I can and from every angle.
The first thing I look at is WHY are they ofering this for free, what do they get from it and how do they get revenue. If you find those answers quickly, more questions usually become a lot clearer.

It shows my site as having this, some are unavailable right now:

• Yahoo! has found 602 links to this site.
• MSN Search has found 297 links to this site

But my SERVER logs do not show anything like these numbers for actual ACCESSES to my site.



For our friend who started the question it shows:

• Yahoo! has found 181 links to this site.
• MSN Search has found 19 links to this site.

Remember, these search engines pretty much duplicate each other to a large degree, so the MSN and Yahoo links almost certainly are the same ones found in Google and should not be added TO Google.

Frankly I don't buy any of these numbers because my own logs and my individually checking google etc doesn't show anywhere near those numbers.
My host once explained the "hits" v/s "Page views" numbers in the logs, he said ignore the "hits" because every page, image, logo, thumb, file that is loaded on your site is counted as a "hit"- to use "Page views" as a more accurate number.
My site shows a lot of "hits" because I use a lot of thumbs, so everytime one index page loads it's 50 thumbs, and it's 51 "hits" but only one "page view"


What I DID find, and I suspect it has to do still with what they are calling "links", if you click thru the search and you get to the REAL results on Yahoo for example, you will find the form prefilled in for you from that wholinkstome site, on yahoo it shows this just as it does for google:

link:http://www.stonesculpture.gothere.uk.com/

BUT, when you actually look at the results page on Yahoo directly it shows this:

Results 1 - 19 of about 187
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included
---


Some of the search results when you click on the include ALL results are a real puzzle like these examples which seem to have nothing at all to do with our friend's site or sculpture, yet are included in the results as linking to his site:

Las vegas web opportunities. Children. Tatet
Web dedicated to the Hotel Alcázar of Reina, Hotel of 4 stars, located in the city of Carmona, to only 29 km of Seville, Spain
tatet.de/en/search-las_vegas_web_opportunities-143.html -

Web development dubai. E-commerce. Tatet
Il Portale dell Informazione Nazionale con collegamenti a tutti i media del mondo, motori di ricerca e tante produzioni e approfondimenti per dare voce a chi spesso viene soffocato dal potere e dall arroganza di pochi eletti. Una voce libera sul ...
tatet.de/en/search-web_development_dubai-152.html

Low cost web hosting. Armani. Tatet
Web dedicated to the Hotel Alcázar of Reina, Hotel of 4 stars, located in the city of Carmona, to only 29 km of Seville, Spain
tatet.de/en/search-low_cost_web_hosting-175.html
---

For my site it shows this:

Results 1 - 20 of about 630

As you go thru the results pages it suddenly becomes this:

Results 261 - 280 of about 1,150

But only 283 results are shown and then this:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.


When I click on the include ALL results it becomes much clearer what they are doing- they are including ALL of the inter-page backlinks and MY subpages I have on my site, here is one of the results showing this:

Thaw's 1907 murder trial of Stanford White
The Mercer Arts Center, Broadway Central Hotel collapse New York City
www.lostnewyorkcity.com/buildingphotos/thaw.html
Plate 90-B
Photos of demolished tenements in New York City
www.lostnewyorkcity.com/buildingphotos/Plate-80-b.html

Another "link" #766 thru #780 or more are duplicates like this, which seems to be a blog of somekind, so someone may have mentioend my site but it's buried in there somewhere and this person is not a potential customer so I wouldn't call this a quality link by any means:


electric ladyland: 以心伝心
queens logic, franco observations, baseball blatherings, it's all here. Recent Posts. Recent Comments. Categories. baseball. food. franco. geek. japan. new york. politics/current events. tech. baseball. books currently reading. books recently read. helen j.
www.eladyland.net/electric_ladyland/2005/05/words_cannot_ex.html


My server logs don't show ANY hits from this electricladyland thing, so what use is this "link" to my site, really? I think what is more important and MUCH more accurate is your server logs- those show the REAL picture of your traffic, for links are useless unless they are actually USED to see your site, a link on a dead blog or message board is useless if no one uses the link, then it doesn't buy your groceries next week.

[sculptor]

Agreed Land.....and no offense taken, I actually appreciate accessing someone else's critical eye.

when I tried the linksearch to my site, I found several peculiar results which should have nothing to do with the subject matter of my site

some of these, I suspect are backling contamination from paid inclusions which would appear when searching for the keywords used for my site and indeed probably do not have a link to my sites on their sites

you're right to hold a certain scepticism close when accessing "free" information.

thanks for the efforts and informative discussion

rod

[Merlion]

Originally Posted by sculptor

try http://wholinkstome.com

Thanks. It is good. I got 52 links from Google, 56 from Yahoo, and 5 from MSN.

What is useful is not really the numbers, but the details on who links to my website. Some of these are not real links from another website. (For instance I have many links from somewhere in sculpture.net, and some are links from my own webpages.)

In my case, the 'real' links are in the websites of my personal art friends who agreed with me to mutually swap links. So this experience shows that mutual link swaping is beneficial.

[Landseer]

Originally Posted by Merlion

What is useful is not really the numbers, but the details on who links to my website. Some of these are not real links from another website. (For instance I have many links from somewhere in sculpture.net, and some are links from my own webpages.)

In my case, the 'real' links are in the websites of my personal art friends who agreed with me to mutually swap links. So this experience shows that mutual link swaping is beneficial.

Yes, and if for example you post on aagardening message board and you used a signature in your posts that included your url as many do- those search engines would pick that up and every one of your posts would be included in that "link" tally and counted as one "link" each. Of course those links are differently valued to you than a link on another sculptor's web site.

[Landseer]

I suspect you are right Rod, some of those inclusions could be paid ads injected.
See, I am a little familiar with the scams that have existed for along time whereby a site owner pays a fee to some company on the web who advertises they will increase your search engine ratings, submit your URL to 1,000 different search engines and on and on.

I'm sure you have see these and they always make huge claims as well as false ones about ratings which Google itself has disputed in their FAQ.
Then there's the claim that after you pay the fee they submit your url to some huge number of "search engines", I don't remember the number off hand that I have seen claimed, but it struck me as BS for the claimed number was something like 1,000 and I say there's no way there's that many legitimate used search engines out there.
Of course we know about Google, ALtavista, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves and AOL- they represent the top used.

Anyway, these shysters making the claims, you can be sure have a whole sales pitch going, including providing freebies like these link evaluators which are padded with ads and injected advertisers, and you know when a newbie puts up a new web site and a "web professional" shows them that their little geocities.com site about grandma's cooking has 12,000 people linking to it, that they are going to be REAL impressed- who wouldn't be?

Our respective sites are pretty narrowly focussed as to subject and content, they do not have a general broad audience appeal, they are focussed mainly on sculpture and that is a limited field, and not one prone to having a huge amount of traffic or links to, but one thing seems clear and that is I would probably go with the Google numbers.

In my case it was 43 links found by Google but less the 19 in there that are links from my subpages to my own site, that leaves 24 hard valid links from PERSISTANT sources like Wikipedia, historical, Greenwich Village newsletter, or other art/sculpture/history sites, NOT temporary sources which expire, delete or move frequently like blogs, message boards, guestbooks or inclusions in things like signatures in posts.
This number is also more in line with what my server access logs register.

In our friends case, Google found 4 such links and I am inclined to trust both site numbers (24 and 4) being hard p[ersistant links as far more valid than 600 and whatever it was... with obviously skewed ads and other suspect inclusions which we both noted.
24 and 4 also makes more sense since my site has been up for 9 years and is a narrow focus- NYC building demolition- something someone in Arizona probably could care less about, ditto for our friend's sculpture site and someone who is not into sculpture who could care less about sculpture sites.
He didn't mentioned how long his site has been up, but if we assume 2-3 or so years v/s my 9 then the numbers 24 and 4 are relative to the ages of the respective sites too.

[Cantab]

Thanks, all, for the discussion. Much appreciated, with lots here to follow up on. Anyone following the thread will no doubt have benefited from the work you have put into researching this.