20 replies to this topic

[OldWelshGuy]

Thomas, Stick to your guns. many people who specialise in one form or another of design seem to think tthey understand SEO. Fact is that SEO is a damn tough thing to understand. Ther is no set plan to work to, no 1,2,3 of how to rank well, and often sites will make you think 'how the hell?'

Actinic is a very SEO'able product, I have a clinet who ranks top 3 for the money phrases in the <ahem> 'marital aids' market, and they use actinic. The bulk of actinic developers dont understand SEO at all. They cram multiple products on a single page and expect that page to rank and convert for all the product keyword variants available. Well that is not going to happen.

[clubmilwaukee]

Just to let everyone know, DNS updates don't take 48 hours anymore. The whole structure of top level DNS updates and the DNS cache structure was recently updated. As an example, I registered a new domain the other day, and it was live 5 minutes later.

Edit: The full rollout doesn't go live until 9/8, but many TLDs are already on the new schedule. I think verisign is doing the "smaller" TLDs already, along with .org - .com is still sporadic; sometimes the update is rapid, sometimes not. Seems like they enable it sometimes and disable it other times. Testing?

[Randy]

The rapid deployment of DNS is going to be nice for some CM, but the problem is still going to be how quickly the ISP's update their internal records. Rapid DNS will work great for brand new domain names, since there would have been no previous entry in the ISP's cache and a realtime lookup is required. However if a domain has already been active it's going to require ISPs/DNS caches to be flushed and updated with greater frequency.

Hopefully they'll do that. But it does require bandwidth and processing power. I rather doubt they'll ever do away with the caching model and do realtime lookups.

FWIW, this is one of the reasons my little network here is set to use the DNS service on one of my own servers, bypassing my ISP's cache completely. When the domain isn't on my server I've already escaped from the ISP's cache, so then I get sent on to one of the real DNS servers.

It's a kluge, but it works for me!

[kology]

Here's a story from the horror files. Believe me it's true it happened to one of my clients and they wanted to fix it.


In May of 2003 they launched a new version of their site with a new hosting provider. They were in dispute with their old host and didn't tell them that they were moving and thought that if they didn't pay their bills, the host would simply take them off line.


Well, the DNS propagated perfectly and with a day by checking form servers around the world the new DNS entry had taken effect.

Yet, about 3-4 months later, they get an e-mail through one of the sites contact application which clearly showed that it came from the old site as well the question was about outdated information.

A quick check by accessing the old site by accessing the old IP addressed showed it was still up and running. And log files showed there was still some regular traffic to the site. Not a lot, but enough with varied IP addresses that showed smaller ISP still hadn't updated their local DNS.

Now if the hosting company had taken down the site, the user would have either gotten a 404 error or if the their ISP had the local DNS server programmed to either update more frequently or to do a DNS look-up when a 404 error is obtained then all would have been fine.

Is their a moral, the old host when asked to take the site off line said no, not until you pay us the money you owe us. Talk about a role reversals. I'm used to hosts taken sites down when you don't pay, not keeping them up.

[profitability]

Speaking from a hosts perspective:

- Reduce your TTL to 30 minutes
- Plan the switch for EOB on Friday or a non peak period
- Create the DNS records in advance if possible (or switch your DNS to the new provider and point back to the existing provider if for example you have a static IP)
- Notify your existing host 48 to 72 hours after your transfer to remove the DNS entries from their name servers. Do not wait 30 days to do so! In some instances the host will redirect requests to your new IP address but don't count on it. If you run into a cache issue that is dragging on beyond the normal TTL - you can contact that provider and ask them to check the name server in question.

Rapid DNS updates will help with transfers but DNS is a distributed environment and not every provider configures their name servers properly or the same way. A great tool to use is www.dnsreport.com.

Regards,

Aaron Larkins
Profitability.net

[Scottie]

Welcome to the forum, Aaron! Good info.