M7 Technologies

A buddy of mine wrote an automated link building and indexing tool that he calls Autopilot Linker. I’ve been a beta tester on it for a couple months and it works really well! Basically it uses your visitor’s IP address to build links and get your sites indexed faster.

I used it on some newer unindexed sites and it worked well for me. Basically I copy-pasted the little JavaScript code (just like installing adsense or analytics) into my site’s footer template and sent a little bit of traffic to each page using a twitter account. Each person who visited helped build links to those pages plus got them indexed faster! Once these pages were indexed and ranking for their terms, I added links to my more “white” sites. This is an amazing tool for building linking power for a site, since not only does it build links from high PR domains but it gets more pages on your sites indexed faster!

Anyway, I recommend checking it out. There are other tools like this, but his is quite inexpensive compared to them and a lot slicker and easier to use! Seriously, if you can copy-paste you can use this tool! Autopilot Linker

Tools link building, seo, Tools

Why host in a foreign country?

You’ve had great success with your site in English, and have developed foreign language versions - how do you go about getting more traffic to these sites? Local inbound links with anchor text in the right language, using the correct country’s top-level domain and verifying the locale within Google webmaster tools. The content should also come from a server located in that country. This can either be accomplished using a content proxy, or by hosting the sites with a foreign ISP.

Content proxies for foreign language SEO

Proxies are servers that accept connections from users, fetch content on their behalf, then relay the content back to the original requester. These proxies can also cache the results, so they offer a speed improvement for users. The content appears to be hosted on the foreign server, when in fact it is just holding a copy of the content. This is especially beneficial for dynamic database-driven sites - if you were to really host the foreign language version of your site, you might need to maintain copies of your database on remote machines. Not only that, but a proxy can run on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) machine with no problem, taking up fewer resources and costing less. Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd or squid can be used.

Hosting foreign language sites for SEO

If your site is mostly (or entirely) static HTML, images and CSS hosting a copy with a foreign ISP might be a better route. In this case, you have no database and are simply serving static files. Site with few scripts and no databases are perfect for foreign VPS hosting, again using Apache, Nginx or Lighttpd. Caching can be turned on to improve performance - although the actual content is hosted as a file on the server, the web server software can be configured to maintain a copy in memory, improving speed.

Performance considerations with foreign hosting

The “regular” tricks of the trade should be employed, especially since most VPS systems are not as powerful as a standalone server, and the networks in some countries are not as robust as North America. Using in-memory caching, HTTP keepalives, HTTP expiry (Apache’s mod_expires for example), bundling external JavaScript/CSS files and minimizing image use and size are all well-known techniques that will improve performance. The main goal should be to minimize the number of requests made to the server, as well as limiting the size of the requests. Often times latency is a bigger killer than bandwidth.

Looking for foreign hosting?

We provide monitored VPS hosting solutions in the following countries:

• USA
• UK
• Australia
• France
• Italy
• Germany
• Spain
• China

Please contact us for a foreign hosting quote. Also note that we provide foreign server setup and maintenance for other services including web proxies and backup servers.

Hosting foreign hosting, proxies, seo

Most people, SEOs especially will have heard of and understand what proxies are. For those of you who don’t know, proxies allow you to “tunnel” your browser’s traffic through another computer, making it seem like you are surfing the web from that location. There are specific services out there that make your traffic more anonymous by doing other things like blocking cookies, or even certain sites. Those web filters that keep our kids “safe” are a type of proxy (although most are easily bypassed.) Most proxies are owned by companies to which you pay a fee for their use, or you can search for “open proxy list” to find some. The downside to using these is mainly lack of control - you have no control over if the proxy is forwarding HTTP headers (making it known that you’re using a proxy), no control over DNS or who else is using the proxy. I’ll explain why these are important shortly.

If you’re optimizing for US-based or UK-based traffic it doesn’t make sense to check your SERP ranking from Canada. What if your site is in a foreign language such as Italian? It makes more sense to search from an IP that is geographically located in the area you’re trying to analyze. That’s where proxies come in. You simply have a web proxy set up in a data centre in the right country and you’ll instantly have a more accurate picture of where you rank in the SERPs. We can set proxies up in a variety of locations such as Canada, US, UK, or other European countries such as France and Germany.. These are dedicated servers with dedicated IP addresses, configured to not add HTTP headers that tell others you’re proxying. These servers are dedicated to you, and cannot be used by anyone else. If you’re interested in having us set up one or more proxies for you, please contact us.

If you run any kind of SEO tool, you’ll know proxies are a must. Those of us without Google API keys must rely on “scraper” type tools that do repeated searches. These tools are not scalable from one IP, meaning you hit a threshold and your tool stops working (I hate it when that happens.) If you proxy your requests through several different dedicated proxies, you can avoid this. And for those of you who use open proxy lists - they are unreliable, slow, insecure and remember that you have the list as well as thousands of others, including the search engine companies. Dedicated proxies are reliable, fast and they belong to you. You control who has access from where.

Developers can use dedicated proxies to test applications quite easily. This is especially important if your software does anything with IP geolocation data, such as taking users from the UK to a different domain. The only surefire way to test this is from a UK-based IP. Perhaps you’re in the process of upgrading your site and want to test it one the “live” domain name before making the DNS switch. You control the DNS resolution on your proxy, so you can make your site resolve to a different IP through the proxy. This allows you to flip back and forth between the old and new sites.

If you’re interested in having a dedicated proxy set up, please contact us for a quote. Hosted proxies run at $50/month for North America and most European countries and includes setup, monitoring and updates such as adding more users. If you have your own server already and just want us to configure the software and firewall it is a one-time cost of $100.

System Administration proxies, seo, web proxy