Mailbag Friday 12-2-11

Hello good people!

It’s Friday and that means it’s time to open up the mailbag and answer some of your questions from throughout the week. It also means that the weekend is here! Hope you’ve got good plans for your weekend, I know I do!

Before we get into this week’s questions, I want to give you a quick earnings update. I remarked yesterday that it looked like the holiday shopping spurt had ended as I had only brought in about $52 in adsense for the day before. I’m happy to say I was wrong! Yesterday’s numbers were strong again, with $99 in Adsense income and $23 in amazon commissions off of $328 in purchases.

That’s a total of $122 which is definitely back to pre-panda levels. I’ll try to get my roundup of last months total numbers posted tomorrow or the next day so you can see how November stacked up. It was much better than October, that’s for sure! Now on to this week’s questions…

Question 1

Kevin asks…”Just read your article on the danger of using free Google tools if you have a large portfolio of sites. That prompted me to ask you this…….I have about 30 sites, and have been using Google Analytics, Gmail etc…..Can I still protect myself by removing the sites from analytics or is it too late once they’ve made the connection. So far, no penalties or deindexing, but I’d like to avoid the risk as I continue to grow….”

Great question Kevin! It’s never too late. I wouldn’t worry about using gmail, but I’d remove Google analytics as soon as possible. Google “making the connection” is really only part of the danger (and the least dangerous part because they have your Adsense ID number so they can already connect the dots and find all your sites if they want).

The real danger from analytics is that they’ll use the data to determine bounce rates for your sites and penalize you. Remove analytics and they can no longer determine your websites bounce rate. So you can feel safe on that point.

Question 2

Kyle asks…”3 days ago I finally got my first VPS through Servint, as you recommended but I’m having trouble figuring it all out. I bought a domain name through Servint domains to serve as my hosting domain and set up ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com on 2 of my IPs and tried to create my first site using a domain I purchased from NameCheap a while back and put those 2 in as the DNS. I created a new cPanel account for the site and uploaded my HTML/CSS files but I’m getting nothing. I can see the site if I click on the IP address listed in the “View Accounts” section in my WHM, but I get a “cannot connect to server” message when I try to navigate directly to the site…”

Great question Kyle and congratulations on taking the VPS plunge! It can be a little daunting at first, it was for me too.

The first thing that pops into my head is dns propagation. It can take 24 hours after you point a new domain name at your web server before the dns propagates across the entire Internet and your site shows up online. That’s true for all webhosts. It might just be that you need to wait 24 hours. (sometimes you can speed this up by clearing your computers browser cache and restarting your computer).

That would explain why you can view the site using the IP address but not the domain name itself.

But it might also be that you’re just doing something wrong somewhere else. Servint has some tutorials on their support site that you might look at, and a web forum where people have posted questions and answers, but your best bet is to send Servint a support ticket. Tech support can get you sorted out soon (unless you get Edwardo as your technician! If so, ask for someone else!).

Thanks again everyone for the questions, keep them coming and…

Keep on building!

-John
The Marketing Fool!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

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