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April 22, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- According to users of the Webhosting Talk (webhostingtalk.com) message board, San Diego-based Web hosting provider Aplus.net may be using the Web sites of its customers, without their knowledge, to promote its own ranking within search engine algorithms.
Contributors to a Webhosting Talk thread claimed the company was "cloaking" customer sites to increase its own search engine rankings, displaying optimized pages to search engine spiders and unmodified pages to real users.
In a question posted to the Google Answers site last week, a Web site operator asked why their site's listing in Google search results included "Web Hosting | Dedicated Servers | DomainNames by Aplus.net," a phrase that did not appear on the site.
In a lengthy reply, another user suggested that Aplus.net might be inserting code, containing links to the Aplus.net home page, into users' sites. When visited by search engine crawlers, the links to Aplus.net can help significantly boost search engine rankings. The Google algorithm is known to value external links to a Web site as a strong indicator of overall popularity, and favors this factor in determining page rank.
Aplus.net did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Aplus.net's Google rankings would certainly seem to support the claims. According to Google, 17,300 pages link to Aplus.net, compared to 2,070 that link to Interland.com and 1,040 to cihost.com, the Web sites of comparably-sized Web hosting providers. A sample search of the term "web hosting" on Google turned up a thirteenth place ranking for Aplus.net. The term "hosting" registered a tenth place ranking, the last position on the all-important first page of Google's search results.
The linking codes - which appear in the source code of Google's cached copies of some Aplus.net-hosted sites, but not in the sites themselves - appear to have been added without the knowledge of site owners. There is no mention of Web page modification in Aplus.net's terms of service agreement.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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