Singapore Web Hosting Blog

yes, our main web site, SingaporeWebHosting.com, dropped ranking in Google.

google “Singapore web hosting”, at this moment 11:40pm Mar 25th 2005, our site is No. 6, 5 minutes ago, it was at No. 4. It may be No. 12 one hour later.

most importantly, it had been at No. 1 for almost all related keywords, (Singapore web hosting, Singapore web design, Singapore email hosting , etc.) for more than 1 year. then suddenly from Feb 4th 2005, it dropped to nowhere.

it was hit really hard by latest Google update (alegra), like many other web sites.

we did nothing after Alegra, because I believe we did nothing wrong from beginning. we do not use any blackhat technique.

then slowly ranking has been getting back. first, on 5th page 2 weeks after alegra, then 3rd page, 2nd page, now back to 1st page. it’s still jumping up and down.

we didn’t do anything in order to recover.

there might be a few reasons from what i can see. hope it can be helpful to those who are hit. purely my guess, no evidence. so don’t blame me if it’s far from truth.

1)google is testing something and messed it up. that’s why our ranking is back while we did nothing. currently i can see two sets of data, in one set, our site is No.4, in the other, it’s No. 6. these two sets have diferent amount of search results. look like google is merging these two slowly. they may be testing many other things as well.

2)anyone can have only one site listed on 1st page under same keywords. the No.1 site for “Sinagpore web hosting”, and many other keywords, is also ours (1stSingaporeWebHosting.com). these two sites just cannot rank well at the same time.

3)age might be a reason. 1stSingaporeWebHosting.com is half year older than SingaporeWebHosting.com. both sites are designed and optimized by the same people using the same techniques, the only difference is age.

whatever the reason is, we’re not going to do anything. the fact that our newer site is getting back to top reveals that solid search engine optimization work still rules. ranking might suffer due to many many reasons, but if you believe you’ve done the work, your site deserves the top spot, then leave it, it will be back.

As you can see on our web site, we provide SEO - Search Engine Optimization Service.

There’re many SEO companies out there. Compared with some of the established SEOers, we’re really small fish, and we’re ok with that. Personally, I don’t think we’ll go after clients worldwide at all in the near future. In Singapore, we’re one of the best SEO service providers.

But there IS one kind of SEO company that makes us uncomfortable, sometimes really fed up - companies that promise guaranteed top 10 (20, etc.) listings.

There’s no such thing in search engine optimization industry. Anybody who claims guaranteed 10 or 20 rankings is simply lying. It would be obvious if you think further. Search engine results are calculated by algorithm owned by search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, Inktomi. How can anyone outside Google guarantee you top 10 or 20 listing in Google? Who has the power to control Google? None.

Nobody can honestly say they can get guaranteed top positions. At whatever price. 1 million may or may not bring you top spots. There is possibility, but no guarantee. This is true especially for Google who dominates 80% of all online traffic now. Go search for “search engine” in Google, Google itself is listed at No 4 currently. Surprise? This is the culture of Google. They don’t even allow manual adjustment to their own ranking. Everything is decided by algorithm. How can any outsider claim guaranteed top 10 or top 20?

Still, there’re many “SEO companies” promising guaranteed ranking. If it’s possible, why don’t they get their own site in top 10 under keyword “SEO”? There’re only ten spots in top 10, however, there’re way much more than 10 companies who claim guaranteed top 10. C’mon, give yourself a ranking first.

Think about it.

Shared Hosting and Dedicated Hosting
the primary difference between dedicated and shared hosting is how the web server is used. with Shared web hosting, the web server is shared between many different websites. with Dedicated web hosting, the web server is dedicated to your web site. both have their advantages and disadvantages. dedicated hosting is of course much more expensive than shared hosting as you actually use the whole server.

Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, is a standard that allows a web server to execute an external program and send its output to the browser that requested it.

CGI was the original method of creating dynamic web applications. you can write a program in C/C++, Perl, or whatever language can run on your web server computer, and tell the web server to treat it as a CGI program.

Perl is the most popular language used to write CGI scripts.

Server-Side Scripting Languages
server-side scripting languages, such as PHP, ASP, are all intended to fulfill the same role as CGI without the burden of launching an external program for every request.

By installing a plug-in, the web server software knows how to do things like running programs written in Perl or PHP all by itself, instead of having to ask the operating system to run them as separate programs. when a web page containing one of these languages is requested, the web server uses its internal plug-ins to run the code in the page, then send the results to the Web browser.

Perl
Perl is a programming language that excels at manipulation of text. as such, it is ideal for the development of dynamic web pages. this isn’t to say that web development is the only application of Perl - it is heavily used in automation of administrative tasks on Unix-based systems, for example.

PHP
Personal Home Page (PHP) is a somewhat less flexible language than Perl, but is more specialized towards the creation of dynamic web pages. this focus means that you can do pretty much anything you can do with Perl using PHP.

designed for use as a server-side scripting language (whereas Perl was not originally designed for use on the web), this language bears similarities to other common languages (Perl, C/C++, Java, JavaScript) to make it easy for existing programmers to use.

ASP (Active Server Pages)
Active Server Pages (ASP) is a framework for running scripting languages as server-side scripting languages. developed by Microsoft, this is mainly supported by Windows web server. as a solution for creating dynamic web sites, ASP basically fills the same role as PHP, but with some degree of freedom in your choice of programming language. the trade-off is a loss of freedom in your choice of web server software.