We are proud to introduce a new feature to all our web hosting plans – multiple domain support. Yes, you can host a collection of your domains under a single plan, including the Basic Hosting plan!

This new feature reinforces our commitment to affordable hosting solutions tailored to your hosting needs and is now available to both new and existing clients.

Contact us now to activate this new feature on your hosting account!

We are celebrating Doteasy’s 9th Anniversary this month. Nine years is a long time in this industry. So to celebrate this important milestone, we’re having the biggest and craziest domain special in the history of Doteasy.

This offer is limited to the first 10,000 new domain registrations, so hurry before it runs out!

All new domain registrations come with a free Basic Hosting account. Visit www.doteasypromo.com for more information on this promotion.

Thanks for nine wonderful years.

 As we step into our 9th year serving you, we would like to announce an exciting new change to the hosting plan that started it all – we are giving the $0 Hosting Plan a new name – Doteasy Basic Hosting.

The Doteasy Basic Hosting will continue all the great features of the $0 Hosting plan AND will continue to be FREE with any new domain registrations and domain renewals with Doteasy, as well as domains transferred to Doteasy.

This change will not affect you if:
• Your domain is registered with Doteasy (New Domain, Renewal or Transfer Registrar), or
• You have previously paid the US$35 Transfer Hosting Fee

This change will affect you if:
• You’re currently on our $0 Hosting plan and your domain is no longer registered/renewed with Doteasy, or
• You’re signing up for a new Transfer Hosting account

Previously, all non-Doteasy domain accounts are subject to a one-time US$35 Transfer Hosting Fee (or the US$35 Hosting Continuation Fee for all transferred-away hosting accounts). Now, with the Doteasy Basic Hosting plan, you can enjoy the same hosting services at a low fee of US$1.95/month (12-month billing term). No more Transfer Hosting Fee! All you pay is just the hosting plan fees!

Is there a way to waive the Basic Hosting fee?

Yes! All domains registered and/or renewed with Doteasy will receive the Basic Hosting services free of charge.

For new Transfer Hosting accounts, you can waive the US$1.95/month fee if you successfully transfer your domain to Doteasy (Transfer Registrar) within 30-days of your hosting application.
And for transferred-away hosting clients, all you need to do is renew your domain with Doteasy and your basic hosting services will be free again!

For more information on the free Basic Hosting plan, please visit http://doteasy.com/FreeBasicHosting/.

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a web site is on the Internet. It believes that the most important pages on the Internet are the pages with the most links leading to them. PageRank thinks of links as votes.

This makes sense, because people will link to relevant content, and pages with more links to them are usually better resources than pages that nobody links.

But PageRank doesn’t stop here. It also looks at the importance of the page that contains the link. Pages with higher PageRank have more weight in “voting". This also makes sense as pages that are important are probably better authorities in leading web surfers to better sources.

How important is PageRank?

PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages.

Note: Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google.

How is PageRank calculated?

PageRank is measured on a scale of zero to ten and are assigned to individual pages within a website, not the entire website. Very few pages have a PageRank of 10.

To read more on how PageRank is calculated: Web Workshop.

How can I increase my PageRank?

1. One-way inbound links from websites with topics that are related to your website’s topic will help you gain a higher page rank.
2. The number of links outbound from the website that links to you also determines the value of the link. For instance, a related website with 10 outbound links that links to you is much better than a related website with 100 outbound links that link to you.
3. The more pages that a site has, the more PageRank it has. Note, that the only pages that count are the ones that Google knows about. Good internal linking and navigation will help.

To read more on how to improve your PageRank: GoogleGuide.com.

How do I check my PageRank?

There are many PageRank checking tools you can use to check your PageRank. Here are a few you should consider:

Page Rank Checker

• checks PageRank of a page
• provides a PageRank button that can be placed onto a webpage

CheckPageRank.net

• checks PageRank of a page
• provides other information including PageRank validation, Google and Yahoo listed status, the domain age and history

FreePRChecker.com

• checks PageRank
• provides other information including PageRank button, PageRank validation, backlinks (including Alexa, Google, Yahoo), Google and Yahoo listed status, Alexa traffic status and graphs, host data center location, etc.
• it also extracts backlinks and check each backlink pagerank value. This great feature allows you to find out which website is linking to your web page and their respective pageranks

Remember, PageRank is only one factor. It is not uncommon for a PR6 site to rank above a PR8 site on search engines with the appropriate keywords and quality content.

Sitemaps, as the name implies, are a map of your website. There are two types of sitemaps:

• HTML – a web page you show the structure of your website. This type of sitemap is created for visitors to your website. (Example: Doteasy Site Map)
• XML – a file you list all URLs of your website. This type is called “Sitemap” and is created for search engine crawlers

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines about your website.

Search engine crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content
• Your site uses rich Ajax or Flash (not normally processed by search engines)
• Your site is new and has few links to it
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or not available through the browsable interface some areas of the website

In addition, Sitemap allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the website. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.

NOTE: Sitemap does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines nor does it influence the way that web pages are ranked in search results. By submitting Sitemaps to a search engine, a webmaster is only helping the engine’s crawlers do a better job of crawling their site.

Sitemap Generators

You can use a sitemap generator to create your sitemap. Google has a sitemap generator for creating a sitemap for a static web site.

Other sitemap generators and services:

• XML-Sitemaps.com
• SiteMapsPal.com
• SiteMapDoc.com

Manually Creating a Sitemap

You can also manually create a Sitemap based on the Sitemap protocol.

1. Create a text file and save it with a .xml extension (ie. sitemap.xml)

2. First lines of the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

3. Create an entry for each URL. The <loc> tag is required, the others are optional.

 <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
 </url>

4. Last line of the file:

  </urlset>

5. Upload the file to your server and then submit it to the search engines.

Element Definitions

Guidelines and Limitations

Keep in mind when creating your Sitemap file:

• Sitemap files have a limit of 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed.
• The Sitemap URL can contain only ASCII characters.
• Sitemaps can be compressed using gzip.
• A Sitemap can be contain a list of Sitemaps (a Sitemap index file serving as an entry point for no more than 50,000 Sitemaps)

Submitting Your Sitemap to Search Engines

There are different ways to submit your Sitemap to search engines:

1. Adding the following line to your robots.txt file

Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

The <sitemap_location> should be the complete URL to the Sitemap, such as http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

2. Submitting directly to a search engine (aka. pinged)

• Google – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=location
• Yahoo! – http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=location
• Ask.com – http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=location
• Live Search – http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=location

Replace location with the complete URL to your Sitemap, such as http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

For example, http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap= http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Additional References

• Google Webmaster Tools
• An Update on Sitemaps at Google
• Yahoo!
• Ask.com
• Live Search