When I do my first degree couple of years ago, I’m majoring in networking, but however I’m unable to practice what I’m learning since my first fob was as a programmer. I’m doing coding (mostly using Oracle Suites) until I moved to analyst roles recently

Until I started blogging and doing some internet thingy a couple of months ago, my interest to networking grown bolder. Although I won’t be doing any job related to networking anymore on my day job or I plan to do so in future, but there are few tools that I used and discovered in my learning process

DNSStuff.com
I have been using dnsstuff for few months since introduced by my friend. This website provides multiple tools related to IP, domain and hostname. I can said that this is all in 1 place, where you can do things such as WHOIS, trace route, ping and DNS report. Additionally, if you need an access to more tools, you can register and buy their service.

Senderbase
If you’re dealing with a lot of websites everyday such as moderating link directories, approving contents submitted by visitors, Senderbase is the ideal place to track down the status for any website. This is done by browsing to senderbase.org (Reputation score – if you want to know if a site been blocked or not) by using this URL below

http://www.senderbase.org/home/rep_lookup?search_name=blogjer.com .

I’m using my blog URL as a sample, and since this blog is relatively new, it was rated as ‘neutral’ Another piece of information that I is important and should be taken care here is the list of top virus sender and spammer based on IP address

Why network tools important?
I have talking about statistic, Google webmaster, little bit about SEO in my previous posts. Knowing basic network is important if you want to know a little bit more about your visitors. If you’re running blog, you can track down comments given by your visitors since normally they will provide URL and website. On most CMS, whoever sends email will came with the IP address logged into the database. In case you came across issue such as plagiarism such as on this issue (the issue has resolved by both party by now), this information especially IP address is crucial to defend or to prove any accusations

I’m feel little bit frustrated today when one of my websites is unavailable due to the server is down. The reason given is due to the file system is corrupted. But I can’t really understand why it should take quite sometime, and furthermore it happen twice, last night and this morning when the number of visitors normally higher. I work in IT background as well, and if this kind of situation happens, normally the production will be fail over to backup or disaster recovery server to restore the functionality as soon as possible. At the mean time the corrupted server can be fixed off line without affecting the productivity. Simple!!

With the cost of server cheaper nowadays, I’m can’t really understand why this thing can happen. I’m never operating any web hosting company but I know the server price pretty much from my subscription to several newsletters from several computer companies around.

All in 1?

As I plan to move all my websites into 1 web hosting company, I’m asking my self is this is correct move. If this situation happens in future, I will lose all my websites which means no revenue. The situation maybe different if I host my website with establish web hosting company oversees such as Hostgator, but since I just operate less than 1 year, the fee maybe a little bit higher.

Having only 1 web hosting company is better in terms of managing them, but as I have mentioned above, the situation could be worst if wrong web hosting company were chosen. I do want to know what you think. Or if you have encountered the same situation in the past, let share it here. At the mean time, I’m also looking affordable but trustable web hosting company around. Hope I choose the correct one this time. Chill out!!

Your website uptime and availability is the most important part for webmaster. However there are times when your server is up but the website is down due to works of unethical, unprofessional group of people so called of ‘cracker’ aka bad hacker.

I have experienced this on my website but not very serious where my hosting company has taken necessary steps to overcame this problem earlier

I’m not very good in scripting to detect anything wrong if in my website, but using this free tool available online will help you in monitoring your website on daily basis.

Using StatCounter to view the trend and behavior of your visitors

I wrote about stat counter few weeks back, and I’m pretty happy having it installed on my websites. It works like charm and I have greet the owner of this incredible tool. The features that I love most about StatCounter is their ‘drill down’ function which enable you viewing your visitors detail such as IP address on each type of statistic provided.

The most statistics that I love is ‘popular pages’. From here, you can view popular pages, reference source, pages viewed and how long they have accessing our website.

To determine if they’re genuine visitors, what I monitor normally if the came from search engines or direct, visiting time is not too long (eg: more than 1-2 hour), the pages viewed is vary (not in certain pattern such as they keep viewing on certain dynamically generated URL continually).

If you’re suspect something wrong with this visitor, use drill down function to get the IP address and mark it with any name.

Monitor the same IP from time to time if they behave the same way again. You also might want to block this IP address using Cpanel or you might ask your web host company to block the IP address

Using IP lookup tool

IP lookup tool is very useful to trace where the visitors came from. There are several website online provide this service, but most of them time I’m using http://www.arin.net/whois/. IP address is like computer identification number, it is unique. However this IP address can be changed and it was inaccurate if it sits behind proxy.

By looking into the IP address, you will have any idea at least from where it came from. If you’re using static IP address, you have a chance to be found more easily.

There are more powerful tool called ip2location from ip2location.com which can drill down the IP address and give you complete information who is your visitor by using combination of IP address and zip code. However, this service is available in US only.

Google Webmaster web crawl function

If you’re using Google webmaster, browse over to ‘Diagnostic’ tab followed by ‘Web Crawl’ at the left pane. From this page, you will see few types of error which might include someone who had tried embedding link on your website. If your website has thousands of pages where the URL is dynamically generated by your script, you will be able to view all errors by downloading the error as XLS file. Analyze downloaded file to view URL which was filtered by robots.txt or in 404 error, or any URL that is looks strange to you.

Using this free tools is worth in drilling down your visitors and content. If you have other free tool that is useful, please leave your thought

Google Webmaster shouldn’t be something new for most webmasters out there. I’m myself has been using this tool for almost 6 months. But the only features that I was using that time are sitemap submission and the statistic tab. I never care other tool until I read more SEO blog recently. Since that, I start fully utilizing this tool and this post will highlight about some of the important features that you should use.

1. The first page that you will see is the summary of your website. This page is very useful if you’re managing CMS (content management system) based website which holds thousands of data everyday where most of the content’s URL is dynamically generated by your CMS script.

As you can see below, after I start implementing robots.txt around 2 weeks ago, I have around 13k URL excluded from the search engines.

There are also almost 2k URL not found due to the content has been deleted. Normally Googlebot is faster than me in looking for the new content submitted (I set the crawl rate to faster)

There are 3 unreachable URL which is exist but I think Googlebot unable to reach it that moment due to various factor such as network or DNS issue or your server is in error state

2. I read this before on few SEO blog but didn’t take any action until recently. On this page, you have an option to display URL with www prefix in front of your URL or not. This simple tune is good in term of SEO and avoiding you web page treated as duplicate content

3. Crawl Rate. I have set the older site to fastest mode since the option site is available. However, please make sure your server is powerful enough in handling this request before turn it on. But for the new site, the ‘fastest’ mode is disabled with message ‘The rate at which Googlebot crawls is based on many factors. At this time, crawl rate is not a factor in your site’s crawl. If it becomes a factor, the Faster option below will become available.”

4. If you have robots.txt created for your website, this where you can test if you robots.txt file is correct. If you plan to make changes on you file, you can test it here prior that. You also have an option to test it with different google crawl bot such as googlebot and

5. After discover that my website has a lot of pages in supplemental index, I have started removing the whole directory that I don’t need, 404 URL, dynamic pages and also few other type of URL that I think will cause my content considered as duplicated. You have 4 different type of removal based on your needs. You can also remove entire site from index pages if you’re crazy enough

6. Sitemap is one of the powerful tool on Google Webmaster. It will accept .txt and .xml sitemap which is now accepted by all search engines as a standard sitemap file. Google still recommend you to submit your sitemap to this tool, even though sitemap auto discovery has been agreed by all search engines earlier this month.

This would be continuation of my previous post about identifying, remove your indexed page from supplemental index and prevent it from indexed by search engine in future. This should become your primary concern if you see drop in visitors coming in and as well as pages loading. You will be able to trace all this thing using Google Analytic or StatCounter that I have discussed before

Google
If you read my previous post, using SEO tool from Aaron will enable you to see how much your pages are fall under supplemental index. To remove the URL manually, you must read this official blog from Google about it.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/04/requesting-removal-of-content-from-our.html

Yahoo
Yahoo does provide tool in removing your page indexed by their bot. Thanks to SearchEngineLand where I first found this information. However this tool only allow you to remove indexed page one by one via Yahoo SiteExplorer

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/siteexplorer/siteexplorer-46.html

MSN Live
I don’t seem to find any tool to remove your indexed page except using robots.txt and meta tag. This is not suitable if your indexed URL is generated dynamically.

Among the main 3 search engines above, I found that Google has provided the most compelling tool in tackling this issue. One thing that I missed is, if they can remove 404 error page automatically, it would be rather helps. On Yahoo, event though the tool provided is not as efficient as Google, it still allow you removing indexed URL one by one. I’m not worried too much on MSN event though they don’t have tool for this since my URL indexed by them is less than what I have in Yahoo or Google