Recently domain age was added to the algorithm of Google and is one of the many factors they consider now to rank websites at the top of its search engine. But what is domain age?, why is important? How can be check? And how this factor can be improved? Those are common questions that I’ll try to address on the following post regarding domain age of a website.

Domain age is a quantifiable value assigned by search engines based on these three factors:

1. Registration date
2. Expiration date
3. Frequency of changes over time.

Google’s patent “Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data” filed on 03/31/2005 implies that Google does look into domain registration (1), renewal dates (2) and frequency of changes over time (3).

1. Registraton Date
   Well-established sites have old domain names, so by reverse logics, an old domain should mean that the site is well established. Well-establishes companies were among the first one to luck their domain names, while new domain means companies are relatively new or can be used for spam or other purposes. The longer the domain name has been around the better for search engines.
2. Expiraion Date
   Google and other search engines like to see domains that have been registered for extended periods of time as this shows a commitment to the domain name. It also is an indicator that this website is not a temporary spam site. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.
3. Frequency of changes over time.
   Old domains that have been registered for a long time ago not necessarily mean they have better information. Domain names registered long time ago that have been parked for a while could be considered much less important than new domains with high activity and updated information; that’s why Google consider the frequency of changes over time as one of the factors to weight your domain age.

How can my domain age be improved?

As opposite as many believe the domain age factor on your website could be improved and help you rank higher on search engines. As we have seen the domain age is mainly the combination of three factors, one of them fix and two of them variable. The date when you register your domain name cannot be modified of course, is like your date of birth, you cannot just simple get older even if you try very hard, but there are two variables that can be help you get a better domain age, one is extending the expiration date of your website, so the next time you register your domain don’t choose 1 year, but at least 5 or 10 if possible, that shows Google you are really commit to your business and perhaps you can get a better grade, the other variable that can be improved is to apply regular changes to your site, the more updated information you have available the better your domain age will be. So if the registration date of your site is a disadvantage make sure the information of your site is current and is being updated on a regular basis.

How can I check my domain age?

The simplest way is to go to any Whois service and review the date when the domain was registered, I personally like Whois or Network Solutions there are also some simpler pages where just give you this information on a clean and interface, such as domainage.us or SEOmoz and if you want to check domain age but also the domain age of your competition you can use this practical domain age checker tool where you can check several domains at once,  please keep in mind that all these sites just check how long your domain has been registered but it doesn’t give you a real interpretation of your domain age as Google understands it.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

Peer to Peer Lending - Lendingclub

Few days ago I discovered lendingclub.com, it is a really cool website where you can lend money directly to other people and keep the interest of your loans, is is called as well P2P Lending, Person to Person lending or Peer to Peer lending; in other words you can become your own mini bank. I opened an account as an investor, which is pretty easy, and after linking my bank account I was ready to lend at 9.68% interest rate.

The first thing you need to do is to select the candidate for your loan, all you need to do is go and browse the notes and apply the filters to screen your potential candidates. I personally liked these filters but you can customize it with your own ones:

• Interest rate
• Reviewed by lending club
• Months since last delinquency
• Max loan amount up to
• Credit score
• And revolving balance utilization

After configuring your preferences on each filter, click update results to pop up your selected candidates, read the details of the loan including the individual credit history on any one of them, finally, decide how much you want to lend them and click add to order.

Once the recipient got the loan you start to receive monthly payments plus interest until the whole debt is paid in full. The cool thing is that in average you can get a much better interest rate than a typical CD or money market account. Last year interest annualized return was 9,68%

I just liked this business model and I believe is a win-win situation for both investors and beneficiaries. Recently Behavioral economists from Columbia University’s Business School found that peer-to-peer investors appear to exhibit rational decision-making behavior, given certain risk and wealth factors, when they forego outside investment opportunities and replace them with peer-to-peer lending opportunities.

The published report is: Risk Aversion and Wealth: Evidence from Person-to-Person Lending Portfolios, and uses a sample of 2,168 investors participating on the LendingClub platform.

If you need to apply for a loan from the community all you have to do is apply here small loans or if you want to invest and help others consolidate their debts or benefit from loans with much better rates apply here online investing

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

Understanding backlinks… What is link popularity?, Why is Important?

Link popularity is the term used in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to describe the popularity of your site on the Internet, the more links your site has from other sites, the most popular is considered by search engines. This concept, first introduced by Google revolutionized the way websites are ranking on the web, this discovery was a huge success from Google which algorithm became so popular and precise than in a matter of years became the most popular search engine and one of the biggest companies in the world. Link popularity is often associated with PageRank which is a rating scale from Google where they qualify sites from 1 to 10 based on the probabilities of your site being found, off course Link Popularity is a big component of it, but not the only one.

Right now the content in your page and the link popularity are considered the main two factors search engines considered when they decide to place your site on top of the results, that’s why besides of having a great website it is important that you also have a pretty good amount of qualified backlinks to your site; content come first and I assure you backlinks will come after.

I already have a website, how do I check if other pages are linking back to me?

If you want to determine how many backlinks you page has, you can do so directly on the search engines, it is actually a simple process but is different depending the search engine you are using. I’ll concentrate in Google, Yahoo and Bing for being the most popular but virtually every search engine has similar tools.

How do I check backlinks in Google?

If you want to check your backlinks on Google all you have to do is go to www.google.com and on the search field put: link:yourcompany.com it is not necessary to use www or http:// just make sure you don’t live any spaces after the “:” and the URL of your site.

How do I check backlinks in Bing?

If you want to check your backlinks in Bing all you have to do is go to www.bing.com and on the search fields put: inbody:yourcompany.com you can use www or http:// when you make your search, but keep in mind that all of them could give you very different results; yahoo consider links independent if they differ on the prefix “www’ or “http://”, the results are based on an “exact match” criteria, Google doesn’t have that problem and they assume that even if the prefix change the link points to the same website; you can also leave a blank space after “:” and the results won’t be affected, something that for Google is a problem.

How do I check backlinks in Yahoo?

Yahoo Site Explorer

If you want to check your backlins in Yahoo all you have to do is go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and on the field “explore url” put your url, once you get the results make sure you click on the “inlinks” button and not on the “pages” button, you can use www or http:// when you make your search, but keep in mind that all of them could give you very different results; yahoo consider links independent if they differ on the prefix “www’ or “http://”, the results are based on an “exact match” criteria, Google doesn’t have that problem and they assume that even if the prefix change the link points to the same website.

Now that you did your homework you may find weird results… for instance you may say that on the backlinks results you can see links from your own website… well this problem have several explanations which I’ll try to describe next.

Backlinks misinterpreted.
Why when I check backlinks on Google, Yahoo or Bing I see results from my own domain?

This could be due to several factors, the most common one is that when you or someone in your behalf created your website they used “absolute” and not “relative” links to build it. Absolute links are links that use a complete url on the address, absolute links always include the prefix “http://” so search engines interpreted this is as an external link even tough in reality is an internal link. The other possible explanation is that even though the link is pointing to a page on the same domain could be on a subdomain or could be part of a different database if you are using some king of CMS application. If that’s the case the only way to link from one part of the page to another is to use “absolute” links. The links that Google, Bing or Yahoo don’t considered external are the ones using “relative” links, those links never used prefix such as ‘http://” or “www” they just point to another directory within your own domain and always start with the name of the subdirectory or just the name of the file if it is on the same root.

Ghost Backlinks
Google, Bing and Yahoo list some pages that supposedly have referral links to my page, when I go to those pages to check where the link is coming I can’t find anything.

This problem has also several explanations, first at all the link could be on an image not on a text, so please make sure you revise all the images as well by rollover the with the mouse and review on the status bar at the bottom of your browser where the link of the image is pointing to. The second problem is that the link existed there for sometime but it is not there anymore, this could happened if for instance you are running an online campaign on an Ad Network; whenever your ad shows up this link is registered as a backlink for search engines even if it is not permanent; usually these ads rotate with other advertisers’ ads so if it happened that you went there to check the backlink where another ad was running you would probably missed it.

Beyond the basics of Backlinks

Now that you know how to check the backlinks to your page and how to interpret them, let’s move a little bit beyond that.

What is you want to check the backlinks of Google, Yahoo and Bing all at the same time?

Submit Express - Back Link Checker

Well, if you want to do that, there are some tools that can help you with the task, no need to go search engine by search engine and doing that manually. All you have to do is go to http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/ and put the url you want to check. The nice thing of this tool is that compares side to side the backlinks from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Alltheweb and Altavista and also display information about the link popularity of other popular sites so you can get an idea where you are in terms of link popularity on the online world. You can click on the results below each search engine and you will be taken to the search engine itself populated with the results, I have to clarify that this feature doesn’t work so well, in Bing and Yahoo it will show you the results of a regular search, but at lease you will get an idea in terms of quantity.

Backlink Watch

If you want to get more detailed information of from where your backlinks are coming I recommend going directly to the search engines as I explained previously or use tools similar to this one http://www.backlinkwatch.com which gives you a pretty decent list of sites pointing to you including the “anchor’ text being used by the link. The other nice information this tool gives you is the OBL (Outbound Links), which means total external links found on backlink giving webpage; keep in mind that if a site linking to you has so many outbound links to other pages it may look more than a link farm than a reputable website, in those cases those cases the links are less valuable and surely not desirable.

On coming blogs I’ll be discussing

1. What is the anchor text of a backlink and why is important?
2. Why is important the PageRank of websites linking to you?
3. How to properly build my link popularity, avoid websites with High OBL and low PageRank.
4. Advance tools to check backlinks

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

I recently purchased a Dell Computer Inspiron 1545 with Linux Ubuntu pre-installed, currently I’m having trouble connecting to the internet so I called Dell to solve the issue, I choose the option “by telephone” and I was directed to the page you can see below, when I called to that number surprisingly someone from 1-800 Flowers answered the phone… 1-877-293-1197,

Dell 1800 Flowers

giving my frustration I went back and choose the option “by chat” and surprisingly I got the page you can see below… it says that their records indicate that the computer was purchased out of United States, and I actually bough it in New York with a USA credit card…

Dell Overseas

Finally I tried to find the drivers by myself and check if that may solve the problem, I choose the model and reference number and gave me the options to download the drivers just for windows, not Linux Ubunto… is DELL KIDDING ME?