YBO Interactive Blog

After too many emails and phone calls to SPRY support, that ended up nowhere, it was time to move on. I’ve decided to look for new hosting, but the thought about migration scared the shit out of me…

And last night it finally happened: Gemalaya has moved to godaddy!

The process wasn’t easy, but thanks to a good plan, and Gil’s help, everything is up and running.

The best way to handle such a migration is to build your site on the new server, and update your local hosts file to think that www.gemalaya.com is on the new IP although your DNS server thinks different. This lets you test the site, mysql connections, backups, billing integration, cron jobs, google base connections, redirect rules, sitemap auto generation, salesForce and many other things that needs to be tested on an e-commerce site. Once everything works, clear your hosts file, update DNS and hold tight.

Fortunately, all our emails are already on Google Apps, so we could skip the most annoying part of such a migration. If yo’re thinking about moving anywhere, this a great chance to move your email to Google Apps and when this is done, move the rest of the site.

The new vps account we got is rocket fast, network looks great, and the 2 phone calls I made to godaddy support where asnwered right away without waiting online forever and then get a voice mail auto response (like happened more than once with SPRY).

This morning, another beautiful Pink Tourmaline was sold on Gemalaya, this time on the new server. I’m almost sure that the gems look more pretty on the new site, but maybe its just me

You all probably know by now that choosing a domain name with your keywords can help your SEO. When doing that, it is very important to verify how the new domain name sounds. 200ok has a very funny list of bad domain names, some of them are pretty famous sites.

few of my favorite examples are:

Experts Exchange - www.expertsexchange.com/

IP computer software - www.ipanywhere.com/

The First Cumming Methodist Church Web - www.cummingfirst.com/

and the best is

Speed of Art - www.speedofart.com/

I was playing with Google’s Keyword Tool quite a lot lately, and found something really strange.

There are a few keywords that seem to have exactly 1,000,000 searches per month. The thing is, it just doesn’t make sense that both “optimization“, “internet marketing” and also “seo” are searched exactly the same number of times.

Look at the results below:

These are the results for “Internet Marketing”

These are the results for “seo”

And that’s for “optimization”

Does this make any sense at all?

Is Google playing games without telling us about it?

Did you find more million searches keywords like these?

How much does it cost to bring a story to Digg front page? There is a guy offering this service for $500. Isn’t that a great price for 30K visitors?

Invesp has an interview with a Digg top user that tells a little about the way it works.

This guy charges anywhere between $300 - $500 depending on the quality of article, and $700 for for a submission and promotion, irrespective of whether the article is good or not.

He was asked if he feels like he is cheating the Digg community.

His answer was very straightforward:

Yes! I would feel guilty if I was the only one but find me one Digg user from the entire community who doesn’t cheat the system… I do what everybody else does. It is obvious that good content does not make it by itself on Digg.

At least on this interview he was honest!

update: For those who misunderstand my thoughts, I don’t think that cheating the Digg audience is a good idea. All I’m saying is that the Digg system turns into a sophisticated marketing machine and is less credible than it ever was.