2009

It hasn’t been more than a few weeks since our last mention in business week, but it seems we’ve made it on there again! I actually completely missed it and want to thank blackhawk5193 and chickenmeister from our webmaster forum for pointing out the article. T35 Hosting is prominently mentioned in the “best tech tools” section of the list. Although the article itself is short, it does mention our unlimited space and bandwidth which is something no competitor has been able to match for over a decade! I also want to point out that we are the only web hosting company (free or otherwise) mentioned in the entire best web freebies listing.

You can check it out for yourself by following the following link and clicking the 4th icon on the bottom left (the pink keyboard).

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/11/1121_freestuff/index_01.htm

For those of you attending HostingCon in Washginton D.C. this year, I will be there for all three days and will be presenting on the morning of the first day.

For those interested in going, please let me know – I was issued a discount code for being a presenter. I’m looking forward to connecting with all the other industry experts out there so if anyone is going please let me know! For those that can’t attend, I’ll be posting the slides to my presentation right after the event.

Earlier in this week I was invited by G Allan Roberts to do a phone interview about t35, web hosting, entrepreneurship, and internet marketing. The entire interview is almost an hour, but some of it is definitely worth listening to. I’m including the file in the mp3 format for those that want to check it out.

Some of the highlights include:
– Information about the founding of T35 Hosting
– The ups and downs throughout the last decade
– Reasoning behind unlimited space/bandwidth
– Future trends in the industry

Post some feedback and let me know what you think!

Even with all our recent tweaks, t35 doesn’t seem to be doing too well in terms of SEO. After a recent seo analysis, it was brought to my attention that it might be impacted by the anchor text of the sites that link to us. In particular, about 99% of our anchor text is ‘free web hosting’, including all of the 6,000,000+ member pages on which we have a footer text link on.

Apparently, Google might consider this somewhat of a ‘google bomb’ where someone tries to manipulate the ranking of a site with millions of links with the same keyword. So for our latest SEO tweak/test I decided we are going to try to vary these a little bit.

The game plan is to dynamically rotate the 6,000,000 back links we have from member pages so they contain different anchor text each time the page loads. So in effect, we went from 100% weight on “free web hosting” to 15% “Free PHP Hosting”, 25% “Free Website”, 25% “Free Web Hosting”, 10% “Free Hosting”, 10% “T35 Hosting”. It’s difficult to tell if this will boost our overall ranking or just hurt “free web hosting” while improving the others. At the same time, I’m somewhat scared to lose our top 10 “free web hosting” listing on yahoo. This should be very interesting, and I’ll keep you guys updated as soon as I see any ranking changes.

On a similar (SEO) note, our brand new directory site seems to have dropped off from google a few weeks ago. The only major tweak we made recently was going from domain.com/category/ to domain.com/category.html. I asked on several forums but couldn’t get a definitive answer as to which is better for SEO. I’m going to try changing it back and see if it helps. I’ll keep you guys posted!