I am desperately trying to get an answer to my dilemma. (Help! I am losing hair scratching my head!) I've re-printed the question at the bottom of this post.
1. Is my question stupid because it is so obvious? (I won't be insulted to be told it is. Then tell me where to go...to get the answer that is.)
2. Is it a question that doesn't make sense?
3. Is it the great mystery of the century and no one yet knows the answer? hmmm....
4. 24 hours is not long enough to get an answer?
After 30+ years of working, my girlfriend and I and find ourselves unemployed (from the corporate world) too early. We are trying to make a go of our home-based business to carry us into retirement. However, due to money constraints we have to do everything ourselves, including site design, SEO, etc. I thought we had a pretty good handle on the Web site and SEO, but recently realized that something was wrong with our forwarded URL. This was confirmed when I tried an on-line tool to test the site and found 2 completely different responses using the forwarded www URL and the cable hosted URL. The one response I did get to a post on another forum did confirm the issue, but without explanation or direction.
Here is the last post I made on this forum:
I currently host my home-based business web site on the local cable company's server (Shaw Cable Company) and have URL forwarding from www.mydomainname.com. The URL displayed is [exmaple...] and not www.mydomainname.com/index.htm.
I have been told this is not the best way to achieve the best ranking with Search Engines.
Can someone explain the difference between [example.com...] and www.mydomainname.com/index.htm and the effect on SEO? Alternatively what should I be looking for?
Thanks. Really! I'd really be appreciative.
Nuff whinning...
B.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 8:21 pm (utc) on May 13, 2004]
[edit reason] leave the specifics out please. [/edit]
If i were going to buy something and saw that it was hosted on a place like shaw, earthlink, tripod or whatever, I would immediately perceive it as a "fly by night" operation - I suppose it would matter if it was an ecommerce site or an info site.
If you have a fan page for Britney Spears, it wouldn't make a difference, but if you were trying to sell me a $2000 widget, well, I would probably go with your competitor.
Anyhow, decent hosting is cheap - is your business worth $60 - $100 per year? If so, you should have a real webserver.
--
As far as indexing goes - basically you are going to put your shaw account in the SERPs - so if shaw cuts of this service or decides one day that all web hosting urls need to be sent to www1.shaw.ca/users/ws/yourdomain/ - you've just lost all of your deeplinks, and indexed pages.
1) If you ever switch your ISP, then you have to move your site to a new place and you will lost any links that are pointing directly to your ISP based hosting.
2) It simply doesn't look professional. If your going to start a business, then spend the money. Domain names can be registered for under $10 US these days and you can get hosting for under $10 a month.
3) Generally speaking, people use URL forwarding in an effort to look more professional, thus, when advertising their site, they give out the forwarding address (www.mydomain.com). When getting other sites to link to you, they generally get them to link to the www.domain.com URL and NOT the actual URL. This is a BIG error because incoming links mean A LOT in terms of search engine rankings these days. If you don't have any sites linking to you, you aren't gonna rank.
There are other reasons, but those are the biggies.
Spend the $ and get a domain name and a host.
Just my .02 :)
I'm not even close to being competent to answer your question but I do have a suggestions.
In Google, enter the following search:
"domain forwarding" site:www.webmasterworld.com.
Google is often better at finding stuff in this forum than the forum search itself is.
Good luck,
rharri
The $0.02 worth, the welcome to Webmaster world, the edit and all the rest of the comments are much appreciated. I am a wee bit closer to enlightenment now.
Good point about the Shaw cutting/changing services. Here in Western Canada the cable company was originally Rogers. When they divvied up the country a few years ago and Shaw took Western Canada the change from Rogers e-mail to Shaw was a real pain.
As it is our site IS “fly by night” since we’ve been trying to keep costs down. However, “real webserver” hosting of $60-$100 per year is reasonable. As I understand it, what you are saying is that there is a difference between simple web site hosting and domain name hosting? Am I correct?
Where do the site files go? When I find the “real webserver” are the files uploaded to their server, or is there something like URL forwarding in effect and I can keep the files wherever I want?
Last question, how do I find a “real webserver” and what do I look for in their service offering? (Is it okay to ask this question here? Should we do this off line? …still learning).
I really do appreciate you all taking the time to answer me.
B.
I know it can sound confusing at first but it's pretty simple. Heck, if you don't already have a domain name registered, most hosting companies will do it for you and set up everything on their end. Then all you have to do is upload your files and you are done.
In general I would recommend avoiding any services that offer "free web hosting with domain name registration", or really, really cheap hosting - these services often cut off access to the search engine spiders to save money - if a spider can't reach your site, your site can't be in the search engines, simple as that.
For instance, last fall one of the biggest domain name registrars -"ranked #1 among all registrars in net new domain name registrations for the years 2002 and 2003" which also happens to offer cheap domain hosting - decided to block googlebot from all of their webservers.
Suddenly thousands of sites disappeared from the index
Not very good for their customers. I happened to have about 11 sites hosted with them at the time - and I had to pull them all and move them to a new webhost.
Caveat emptor.
