Topic: Welcome to SMF!

[SoaringSpirit]

Hey, I take offence (  ), my hubby works for Telkom , but I didn't have that problem on any other site I was on so I thought it might be teething problems here.

[SoaringSpirit]

Okay, just had that error again, on the tab it says "HTTP500 Internal Server" and the page cannot be displayed thing and when I refresh it tells me the server timed out or something like that.

[Re@PeR]

Any client (e.g. your Web browser) goes through the following cycle when it communicates with the Web server:

Obtain an IP address from the IP name of your site (your site URL without the leading 'http://'). This lookup (conversion of IP name to IP address) is provided by domain name servers (DNSs).

Open an IP socket connection to that IP address.
Write an HTTP data stream through that socket.
Receive an HTTP data stream back from your Web server in response. This data stream contains status codes whose values are determined by the HTTP protocol. Parse this data stream for status codes and other useful information.

This error occurs in the final step above when the client receives an HTTP status code that it recognizes as '500'.


This means the error is either on the server or any of the routers in between is corrupting the data output stream causing this error, as Telkom is resetting the DNS servers every night (to prevent people from hosting a website on their personal computer) the error may well be caused by DNS servers with out of date addresses which causes the routers to route information all over the world to wrong clients instead of only your client / web browser.

The DNS servers is like a telephone book translating the website address from forums.wayoftherede.com to an IP address that the server can actually understand (the actual IP address of the site at the moment is: 68.178.254.170) Since this IP address is not static (the address changes from time to time), all the telephone books have to be updated at one stage or another and since Telkom resets all telephone books every 24 hours, occasionally things get messy when the server requests an update on each telephone book while at the same time Telkom wipes the records. So what in fact is happening, while the server updates our local telephone book, Telkom is wiping it and packages which is routed all around the world through different routers are sent to the wrong addresses, it's like chopping up a body and sending the leg to China, the head to SA, the arms to Brazil because of out of date telephone books.

Hope that makes sense, unfortunately not much I can do about it (except buy out Telkom if that was possible  )

[SoaringSpirit]

Okay, now repeat that in english please!    No seriously, I sort of get what you're saying, basically I just have to live with it.

[Re@PeR]

Mine was like that all night for all the sites I was visiting, it is gone now

Everyone will get this maybe once every 24 hours, depending on how fast you Internet Service Provider can update their DNS servers, so for some, this will be a regular thing (blame your ISP for that) and for other this will be something only occurring once in a blue moon.

[SoaringSpirit]

Out of interest, I did some googling to see how easy it would be for newcomers to find us and this site doesn't seem to come up that I can see. Do you need to register on google or something. How does it work?

[Re@PeR]

It needs to be signed up through a webmaster account and getting them to index usually takes months.

Also you can create backlinks, which means every time you post a link of the forum somewhere, a search engine will pick it up and increase the site's ranking, if the ranking is high enough, it will be indexed without being submitted.

Have lost the mass submitter link, that link would have submitted the site to 120 different search engines.

Here's some more ideas on how to increase the rankings: http://forums.mycee.co.za/index.php?topic=673.0

[SoaringSpirit]

We definately gotta get the word out there otherwise how can we get new members.

Think ya betta look for that mass sumitter link 

[Re@PeR]

Lost that link unfortunately 

Here's a link you can watch to see whether Google have indexed anything: http://www.google.co.za/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=8vO&q=site%3Aforums.wayoftherede.com&btnG=Search&meta=

[Pseudonaja]

Out of interest, I did some googling to see how easy it would be for newcomers to find us and this site doesn't seem to come up that I can see. Do you need to register on google or something. How does it work?

The thing that got Google famous is their method of indexing the search results. When someone searches a topic and selects a result, Google makes a note of the website as being relevant to the search topic. Next person to search something similar will get that website higher on their results. This means you get the webistes that are most likely what you're looking for, but also means new websites need to be googled and hit several times from the right keywords to rise in the ranks.

[Re@PeR]

I did submit the site for ranking, but until Google or any of the other engines index anything, there is nothing to search for and nothing to click on to boost the ranking, unless you're willing to pay SEO to boost the site to number one on all major search engines in under 24 hours.

If SEO is not good enough, you go illegal and use black SEO.

Backlinks are really important as well, the more people link to the site, the higher the quality of the site will be valued by search engines and ranking will skyrocket.

So every time you post a comment on myspace, add a small link to the site below your comment (with small fonts if you want) or put a link on the image, most search engines use image links for rankings as well.

If it is allowed, put links in your signature on all forums (in the form of images or anchor text) to the site, even doing it on this site will boost ranking as soon as indexing starts.

[Re@PeR]

Putting a [url="http://forums.wayoftherede.com"] and a [/url] around your images or certain keywords is what is called link whoring, and it works like bomb to promote the site, it is not permitted to backlink on some forums and you might get banned for doing it, but if it is allowed, every post you make is like a free advert for the site, whether users click on it or whether search engines pick it up.

[Re@PeR]

So far this is the stats regarding backlinks picked up by search engines, as seen, even putting a link in your email will be picked up, the myspace backlink is mine, I added a comment with a hidden link.

http://forums.wayoftherede.com/   41,867
http://www.mycee.net/   59
http://www.wayoftherede.com/   36
http://mail.google.com/   28
http://wayoftherede.com/   24
http://mycee.net/   7
http://www.whois.sc/   7
http://www.myyearbook.com/   4
http://forums.mycee.co.za/   4
http://us.f584.mail.yahoo.com/   3
http://us.f905.mail.yahoo.com/   2
http://www.google.co.za/   1
http://us.f593.mail.yahoo.com/   1
http://freelancetalk.co.za/   1
http://sun.facebook.com/   1
http://comment.myspace.com/   1

[SoaringSpirit]

Out of interest, I did some googling to see how easy it would be for newcomers to find us and this site doesn't seem to come up that I can see. Do you need to register on google or something. How does it work?

The thing that got Google famous is their method of indexing the search results. When someone searches a topic and selects a result, Google makes a note of the website as being relevant to the search topic. Next person to search something similar will get that website higher on their results. This means you get the webistes that are most likely what you're looking for, but also means new websites need to be googled and hit several times from the right keywords to rise in the ranks.

Okay, so what keywords should we be using, what exactly to we need to do to make this happen. 

[Pseudonaja]

Here's a question:
If you use www.wayoftherede.com, is it redirected server-side or is there code in the index page that redirects?
does www.wayoftherede.com and forums.wayoftherede.com have different backlinks?