What You Need to Know About IP Addresses
By John Buchanan (c) 2007
If you are new to the internet, often times things can seem quite overwhelming. People throw around terms like IP addresses, name servers, hostíng, ftp, etc.
In this article we are going to cover IP Addresses. You'll learn exactly what they are and how they apply to search engine optimization (SEO).
IP Address stands for Internet Protocol Address and is currently made up of four "octets" or numbers separated by a period. Each octet can be a number from 0 to 255 .
Some examples of valid IP addresses are - 1.123.150.243, 35.35.36.10, 240.216.1.80
There is also a new standard for IP addresses that is slowly being launched called IPV6 (IP version 6). IPV6 numbers look quite different from our current IP addresses.
An example of an IPV6 IP address is -
2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334
You will notice each is much longer with MANY more possible variations. The new IP system is designed to give us enough IP addresses so that we will not run out of unique IP addresses any time in the foreseeable future.
So why do we need IP addresses? Quite simply, an IP address is like your physical home address. It designates a specific computer that is connected to the internet. Every computer connected to the internet has an IP address. This is necessary for it to send and receive information.
When you type in a website name, for example mine, http://www.sesecrets.com, that name is translated into an IP address that is then used to "find" my site. In the current set of IP addresses, going from left to right, the first "octet" is the most broad, with each successive octet getting more and more granular or specific.
To explain that a bit better.
134 - is VERY broad
134.125 - is still quite broad, but getting more specific
134.125.244 - is getting more specific and probably refers to a specific web host
134.125.244.1 - is as specific as you can get and refers to a specific computer
You will often hear of different classes such as class A, class B and class C talked about when dealing with IP addresses. Below I've given some examples of what people are referring to when talking about classes.
Class A
134.###.###.###
240.###.###.###
22.###.###.###
Class B
134.254.###.###
36.36.###.###
36.37.###.###
Class C
254.210.135.###
36.36.1.###
36.36.2.###
It's often easiest to think of IP addresses as physical addresses, with the Class A octet being similar to country, Class B, being a city in that country, Class C being a street in that city, and the last octet being a specific house on that street.
So, by looking above you should be able to see that when someone talks about a Class A IP address they are referring to the first "octet" and when they say that two IP addresses are on different Class A subnets, it simply means the first set of numbers are different.
So for example
255.123.124.255
34.123.124.255
are on different Class A's. While the rest of the IP addresses are the same, because they are on different Class As, they are VERY far apart (remember, Class A is the most broad).
The same goes for Class B. Class B refers to the second octet of numbers. When someone says that two IP addresses are on different Class B's, it simply means that the the second octet's of each IP is different. The IPs may be on the same Class A or it may be different, but the second Octet of numbers is different. To better explain...look below.
255.123.124.255
255.34.124.255
34.34.124.255
In the above example, the first two IP addresses are on the same Class A, but different Class B's. The third IP address, has the same Class B number (34), but because the first Octet is different, it is also on a different Class B ( as with physical addresses, two countries can have the same city names, but they are still different cities).
For class C we are looking at the third octet.
255.123.124.255
255.123.34.255
34.42.124.255
Again, the first two above are on different Class C's, while the third has the same class C number as the first, but it's first and second octets are different, so it's also on a different Class C.
I hope the above makes sense to you. I've tried to give plenty of examples to make it clear no matter what your tech background is.
The good news is, that you hardly ever have to mess with IP addresses. When you get a web hostíng account for your domain name, your host will assign your domain name and IP address. You often don't even HAVE to know it. Generally your host will set all this up for you without you having to understand any of it. From that point on, when someone types in your domain name, that name will then be converted to your assigned IP address and voila...your visitor winds up at your site.
About The Author
John Buchanan is a veteran search engine optimization specialist with over 9 years experience. For more information, visit his site at SESecrets.com or his newest site SEOVideoanalysis.com where he will provide you with a professional SEO Video Website Analysis of your site.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Friday, May 18, 2007
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - A Few Good Linking Strategies
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - A Few Good Linking Strategies
So you know that link farms don’t work and in fact can get you penalized in the SERPs. But you also know that you need to have links if you want to build your position in the SERPs. Link farms may get you lots of links fast, but the links aren’t relevant – and relevant links will ultimately do far more for you than large quantities of junk links.
So how do you get these relevant links? There are a number of articles here on SEO Chat that cover link building and link trading. And if you want a good general approach, you’d be wise to follow the advice of Larisa Thomason, Senior Web Analyst for NetMechanic. It’s every bit as relevant now as when she first gave it in 2002. She emphasized four points:
Stay with your theme. Make sure that all of the links that appear on your site are relevant to your site’s topic.
Hang out with the popular crowd. Search engines look at the relative importance of your links, not just their number. According to Thomason, “It’s far better to have 100 good inbound links from popular pages than 1000 links from a link farm stuffed with spam sites.”
Avoid automated link generators. This doesn’t mean you can’t trade links with other sites, but if you do, don’t send automated emails. Do your research on the other site – and make sure anyone who sends you an email for a link exchange has done their homework about yours.
Put links in context. This helps the search engine algorithms work in your favor. As Thomason explains, “Links that are included in page content and contain the page's keywords are more valuable than links exiled to a site’s ‘Related Links’ page.”
If you’re looking to grow your web site’s popularity, don’t do it with link farms. All you’ll harvest is search engine penalties and annoyed visitors. Keep it real, and keep it relevant. Remember, most things of value – including a good web site – take time to grow.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/3/
So you know that link farms don’t work and in fact can get you penalized in the SERPs. But you also know that you need to have links if you want to build your position in the SERPs. Link farms may get you lots of links fast, but the links aren’t relevant – and relevant links will ultimately do far more for you than large quantities of junk links.
So how do you get these relevant links? There are a number of articles here on SEO Chat that cover link building and link trading. And if you want a good general approach, you’d be wise to follow the advice of Larisa Thomason, Senior Web Analyst for NetMechanic. It’s every bit as relevant now as when she first gave it in 2002. She emphasized four points:
Stay with your theme. Make sure that all of the links that appear on your site are relevant to your site’s topic.
Hang out with the popular crowd. Search engines look at the relative importance of your links, not just their number. According to Thomason, “It’s far better to have 100 good inbound links from popular pages than 1000 links from a link farm stuffed with spam sites.”
Avoid automated link generators. This doesn’t mean you can’t trade links with other sites, but if you do, don’t send automated emails. Do your research on the other site – and make sure anyone who sends you an email for a link exchange has done their homework about yours.
Put links in context. This helps the search engine algorithms work in your favor. As Thomason explains, “Links that are included in page content and contain the page's keywords are more valuable than links exiled to a site’s ‘Related Links’ page.”
If you’re looking to grow your web site’s popularity, don’t do it with link farms. All you’ll harvest is search engine penalties and annoyed visitors. Keep it real, and keep it relevant. Remember, most things of value – including a good web site – take time to grow.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/3/
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - Link Directories vs. Natural Linking vs. Link Farms
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - Link Directories vs. Natural Linking vs. Link Farms
Is there an obvious way to tell the difference between a link directory and a link farm? And how do you avoid link farms? The question has particular relevance since it can be easy to fall into a link farm unintentionally. Alice Seba on Internet Based Moms mentioned a link program her friend Tara was once involved in. While she’d never participated in that kind of program herself, she “still didn’t realize it was a link farm. It was just a group of moms in business trying to find a way to help promote each other.”
The key, as with so much of SEO, is relevance. Say you’re a Star Trek fan, and you have a web site devoted to that interest. You can legitimately link to other fan sites, stores that sell Star Trek memorabilia, professional or personal sites for the actors in the series, and so on. These would all naturally be of interest to anyone visiting your web site. (Sorry, links to toupee sites would probably be stretching it, even for the Shatner fans).
What does not work is signing up with a company that promises you hundreds of inbound links if you promise to add the same number of outbound links. That’s a link farm. The links you get will probably not be relevant. So if you get an email that appears to have been automatically generated, and is requesting a reciprocal link exchange, be very suspicious. If you check out their site and it doesn’t seem to be remotely relevant to yours, run the other way. In particular, if they’re asking you for a link on your links page, and you don’t have a links page, you can bet this is an automatic solicitation, and they didn’t do their homework.
Now as it is, there are some who would argue that link directories are becoming obsolete. Some of our own writers, in fact, think they’re on their last legs. Many SEOs seem to think that at least DMOZ is still worth it, though, and that there are a few good directories still out there.
Incidentally, if you check your back links one day and find that a link farm is linking to you, don’t panic. Google won’t kill you for it. The search engine assumes that you can’t control who links to you. On the other hand, it also assumes that you control what sites you link to, so don’t link to link farms or other “bad neighborhoods.” (And it doesn’t do any harm to check the sites you link to every so often just to make sure they’re still there – and still relevant to your site).
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/2/
Is there an obvious way to tell the difference between a link directory and a link farm? And how do you avoid link farms? The question has particular relevance since it can be easy to fall into a link farm unintentionally. Alice Seba on Internet Based Moms mentioned a link program her friend Tara was once involved in. While she’d never participated in that kind of program herself, she “still didn’t realize it was a link farm. It was just a group of moms in business trying to find a way to help promote each other.”
The key, as with so much of SEO, is relevance. Say you’re a Star Trek fan, and you have a web site devoted to that interest. You can legitimately link to other fan sites, stores that sell Star Trek memorabilia, professional or personal sites for the actors in the series, and so on. These would all naturally be of interest to anyone visiting your web site. (Sorry, links to toupee sites would probably be stretching it, even for the Shatner fans).
What does not work is signing up with a company that promises you hundreds of inbound links if you promise to add the same number of outbound links. That’s a link farm. The links you get will probably not be relevant. So if you get an email that appears to have been automatically generated, and is requesting a reciprocal link exchange, be very suspicious. If you check out their site and it doesn’t seem to be remotely relevant to yours, run the other way. In particular, if they’re asking you for a link on your links page, and you don’t have a links page, you can bet this is an automatic solicitation, and they didn’t do their homework.
Now as it is, there are some who would argue that link directories are becoming obsolete. Some of our own writers, in fact, think they’re on their last legs. Many SEOs seem to think that at least DMOZ is still worth it, though, and that there are a few good directories still out there.
Incidentally, if you check your back links one day and find that a link farm is linking to you, don’t panic. Google won’t kill you for it. The search engine assumes that you can’t control who links to you. On the other hand, it also assumes that you control what sites you link to, so don’t link to link farms or other “bad neighborhoods.” (And it doesn’t do any harm to check the sites you link to every so often just to make sure they’re still there – and still relevant to your site).
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/2/
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - Some Background
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - Some Background
While most sources I’ve seen date link farms to Google’s arrival on the scene, Wikipedia puts their origins a bit earlier. They were supposedly used in 1999 by SEOs to take advantage of Inktomi’s algorithm, which depended on link popularity. Back in the day, Inktomi’s primary index included only 100 million listings. Pages that didn’t have a lot of links regularly fell out of the primary index; link farms were supposed to help stabilize listings for web sites that had few natural inbound links.
When Google came on the scene, the link farmers had to adjust their techniques some, because it didn’t weigh votes the same way. Not every vote was equal. Still, link farming continued to prosper for a while, and eventually became automated. Link-finding software emerged, designed to hunt down potential link partners, send template-based emails, and build directory-like web pages containing the links.
It should surprise no one that what one computer program can create, another can detect. Link farms leave distinct patterns. Search engine algorithms can be tuned to these patterns. Once a link farm is detected, it’s easy enough to remove it from the index. And more often than not, that’s exactly what search engines do nowadays.
There’s a very good reason for this. Take another look at the end of the last section, and how big a link farm can become. You’re talking about 100,000 sites, each with hundreds of pages made up of nothing but links. Usually, with a link farm, there is no real information about any of the sites; there may be a one sentence description, but it could just as easily include only the links without a description. The links may be in no particular order and show no sign that any of them are related to the site hosting them in any way.
If you ran a search engine, would you want that kind of thing cluttering up your index? Of course not. Your job is to serve your visitors with the most relevant results possible. Link farms don’t help that cause at all. They’re no longer necessary for helping web sites stay in primary indexes; indeed, they haven’t been needed for that purpose for years. Even as far back as 2002, Kimberly Krause Berg, writing for Search Engine Guide, pointed out that link farms were “illogical, especially if your website was trying to generate sales leads or sell products or services. The appearance of link farm pages made some web sites appear unprofessional.”
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/1/
While most sources I’ve seen date link farms to Google’s arrival on the scene, Wikipedia puts their origins a bit earlier. They were supposedly used in 1999 by SEOs to take advantage of Inktomi’s algorithm, which depended on link popularity. Back in the day, Inktomi’s primary index included only 100 million listings. Pages that didn’t have a lot of links regularly fell out of the primary index; link farms were supposed to help stabilize listings for web sites that had few natural inbound links.
When Google came on the scene, the link farmers had to adjust their techniques some, because it didn’t weigh votes the same way. Not every vote was equal. Still, link farming continued to prosper for a while, and eventually became automated. Link-finding software emerged, designed to hunt down potential link partners, send template-based emails, and build directory-like web pages containing the links.
It should surprise no one that what one computer program can create, another can detect. Link farms leave distinct patterns. Search engine algorithms can be tuned to these patterns. Once a link farm is detected, it’s easy enough to remove it from the index. And more often than not, that’s exactly what search engines do nowadays.
There’s a very good reason for this. Take another look at the end of the last section, and how big a link farm can become. You’re talking about 100,000 sites, each with hundreds of pages made up of nothing but links. Usually, with a link farm, there is no real information about any of the sites; there may be a one sentence description, but it could just as easily include only the links without a description. The links may be in no particular order and show no sign that any of them are related to the site hosting them in any way.
If you ran a search engine, would you want that kind of thing cluttering up your index? Of course not. Your job is to serve your visitors with the most relevant results possible. Link farms don’t help that cause at all. They’re no longer necessary for helping web sites stay in primary indexes; indeed, they haven’t been needed for that purpose for years. Even as far back as 2002, Kimberly Krause Berg, writing for Search Engine Guide, pointed out that link farms were “illogical, especially if your website was trying to generate sales leads or sell products or services. The appearance of link farm pages made some web sites appear unprofessional.”
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/1/
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - 1
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - 1
The SEO field is new, constantly growing, and often in flux. As a side effect, it gets a constant stream of new people who aren’t familiar with the correct practices and pitfalls of the profession. That means some of the same questions get asked repeatedly; it almost seems like they come in cycles, especially on SEO forums. One of these questions is about link farming.
It’s no surprise that the topic of link farming brings up so many questions or causes such confusion. It’s very easy to confuse link farming with link directories. One of these gets penalized in the search engines (especially Google) while the other one doesn’t. At first glance, however, the two practices may look the same. So how do you tell the difference?
A link farm is a group of web pages that all link to every other page in the group. It’s designed to raise the rankings of all the sites in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is different from a link directory in that it isn’t just one site doing it; all of the sites are involved. They all have their own link pages that link to every other site.
I didn’t fully understand how link farms work until fathom, one of the more active members of our SEO Chat forum, recently gave a “dumb down” explanation in a thread asking whether link farming was really spam. As he puts it, “A link farm is basically no different than the phenomena known as a chain mail scheme but rather than money changing hands - links are.”
In fathom’s example, three people started a link farm; each one added a new page to their sites that contains a link to all three sites. Then a fourth person joins the farm and adds an identical page of links to her site; all four web sites now contain pages with links to all four sites.
This starts small and might even be undetectable by the search engines at first. But it can grow to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. By the time you get a link farm that big you have hundreds of pages in each web site that are all carbon copies of each other, and all pointing to all of those carbon copies. In short, it’s a mess.
The SEO field is new, constantly growing, and often in flux. As a side effect, it gets a constant stream of new people who aren’t familiar with the correct practices and pitfalls of the profession. That means some of the same questions get asked repeatedly; it almost seems like they come in cycles, especially on SEO forums. One of these questions is about link farming.
It’s no surprise that the topic of link farming brings up so many questions or causes such confusion. It’s very easy to confuse link farming with link directories. One of these gets penalized in the search engines (especially Google) while the other one doesn’t. At first glance, however, the two practices may look the same. So how do you tell the difference?
A link farm is a group of web pages that all link to every other page in the group. It’s designed to raise the rankings of all the sites in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is different from a link directory in that it isn’t just one site doing it; all of the sites are involved. They all have their own link pages that link to every other site.
I didn’t fully understand how link farms work until fathom, one of the more active members of our SEO Chat forum, recently gave a “dumb down” explanation in a thread asking whether link farming was really spam. As he puts it, “A link farm is basically no different than the phenomena known as a chain mail scheme but rather than money changing hands - links are.”
In fathom’s example, three people started a link farm; each one added a new page to their sites that contains a link to all three sites. Then a fourth person joins the farm and adds an identical page of links to her site; all four web sites now contain pages with links to all four sites.
This starts small and might even be undetectable by the search engines at first. But it can grow to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. By the time you get a link farm that big you have hundreds of pages in each web site that are all carbon copies of each other, and all pointing to all of those carbon copies. In short, it’s a mess.
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