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jacksonm
8th May 2007, 07:36 PM
Hi,
I just thought of a brilliant idea to solve monetization of multi-language domains: point them to different parking providers (or even your own mini-site) depending on the location the surfer is coming from. For example, if you have a domain which means something in both chinese and japanese, chinese surfers could be directed to e.g. namerich, and japanese surfers could be directed to somewhere else.

I already do DNS hosting with redundant servers, I understand IDN technology, and I understand parking needs for this niche segment. I have a registered business in Finland, so this is completely legit. I could have this service working, albeit in a manual entry mode, by the weekend. I could probably have a web interface up for self-service within a few weeks.

As far as I know, nobody in the world offers this type of DNS hosting service. Most people don't need it, except for google and microsoft...

I am still thinking about the pricing plans, but they would be reasonable. I would go for the low-profit per domain, high number of hosted domains business model, with exceptions made for very high numbers of queries per month, of course.

If you are interested, please PM me. If you have technical questions, then please reply to this thread.

.

mdw
8th May 2007, 08:06 PM
I think you're on to something here jacksonm!

So if I have kanji domains that mean something in both Japanese and Chinese I can go to your mgmt site and enter IP addresses for 2 different parking sites for each of my domains, right? I think you can find some customers here.

This is nothing I can't do myself without using a DNS solution of course. My name always resolves to my server, but after the request has found its way to my server I check the location and redirect to one of the parking sites based on that. Not a hard script to write.

So why do I think your idea is good? Redirecting at a later time by script is gonna be slower. Also doing it my way does not scale as easily. Doing it my way does not give me a nice web-based domain management interface so I don't lose track of what I'm doing. I can imagine clicking on checkboxes to change a dozen domains at a time. Another reason the idea is good - orphaned domains can be monetized by you to make some spare change!

jacksonm
8th May 2007, 08:19 PM
I think you're on to something here jacksonm!

So if I have kanji domains that mean something in both Japanese and Chinese I can go to your mgmt site and enter IP addresses for 2 different parking sites for each of my domains, right? I think you can find some customers here.

This is exactly what I mean.


This is nothing I can't do myself without using a DNS solution of course. My name always resolves to my server, but after the request has found its way to my server I check the location and redirect to one of the parking sites based on that. Not a hard script to write.

No, a redirect is not the same thing. With a redirect, if the user goes to "http://地獄.com", the user won't see the correct domain in the address bar when he's landed on the parking page. He will see something like: http://ndparking.com/地獄.com

With a DNS location system like I will build, a user from Japan who goes to "http://地獄.com" could be sent to IP address 1.2.3.4 and he will still see http://地獄.com in the address bar. A user from China who goes to http://地獄.com could be sent to IP address 1.2.3.5, etc...

HTTP redirection is not the same as DNS by location, as you can see.



So why do I think your idea is good? Redirecting at a later time by script is gonna be slower. Also doing it my way does not scale as easily. Doing it my way does not give me a nice web-based domain management interface so I don't lose track of what I'm doing. I can imagine clicking on checkboxes to change a dozen domains at a time. Another reason the idea is good - orphaned domains can be monetized by you to make some spare change!

Thanks for your kind comments.

.

mdw
8th May 2007, 08:33 PM
HTTP redirection is not the same as DNS by location, as you can see.
Absolutely a 2-thumbs up. My "running a script" scenario was meant to illustrate that the alternative is really just a hack that does not scale, and should not be the solution for commercial endeavors.

Imagine all the extra stuff going on in my alternative scenario:

The domain has resolved to my server, // game over already in your scenario
webserver responds and runs my script
a 301 response is sent back to the client
client issues another request to the appropriate parking site
that request is finally routed to the parking service


I'm tired just writing it.

Some possible mods -
1. do the Moniker parking thing, rotate thru a short list of Chinese parking services looking for best revenue
2. let me specify backup parking, e.g. in case namedrive goes down I want my Japanese viewers to go here

jose
9th May 2007, 04:11 AM
You can't map an address to multiple IPs.

What you're talking here is named cloaking or IP delivery and everyone is doing it for the most different reasons. Black hat SEOs use it to give SE spiders one thing and real visitors other... Is is used a lot, indeed, for serving local content. For instance, Google uses IP delivery for AdWords and AdSense advertising programs in order to target users in different geographic locations.

As a mean of determining the language(s) in which to provide content, IP delivery is a crude and unreliable method; many countries and regions are multi-lingual, or the requestor may be a foreign national. A better method of content negotiation is to examine the client's Accept-Language HTTP header.

As of 2006, many well-known and well respected sites have taken up IP delivery to personalise content for their regular customers. In fact, many of the top 1000 sites, including household names like Amazon (amazon.com), actively use IP delivery.

jacksonm
9th May 2007, 05:46 AM
You can't map an address to multiple IPs.

You are 100% wrong and quite obviously understand very little about DNS. That's OK. I have been building and running large, international networks for more than 10 years now. DNS servers which support location based views have been around for a long time, but it's not a commonly used feature because most folks don't need it.

An example of what I mean is if you query google.com from different locations, you get the IP address of their geographically closer server.

There is nothing "black hat" or "SEO" about this.



What you're talking here is named cloaking or IP delivery and everyone is doing it for the most different reasons.

I am absolutely not talking about serving any content to anyone. I am absolutely not talking about IP delivery. I am absolutely not talking about intercepting HTTP traffic in any way, shape, or form. Please try to understand what I am talking about before insinuating that I am being dishonest.

BTW, that was a nice copy/paste from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking, maybe next time you should give them some attribution - it's the right thing to do. The article is quite accurate and written quite well, but it is apples and oranges to what I am talking about. The article is talking about when someone configures a single webserver to serve different content to different IP addresses. This is not at all what I have described, but I can potentially see how a novice could become confused.

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jose
9th May 2007, 04:21 PM
LOL. You're a very sensible guy. "insinuating that I am being dishonest." Where?

Also, why did you need to search for "Cloaking"? LOL

"I am absolutely not talking about intercepting HTTP traffic in any way, shape, or form" -> If so, how do you know where the user is coming from? LOL

jacksonm
9th May 2007, 04:40 PM
LOL. You're a very sensible guy. "insinuating that I am being dishonest." Where?

Also, why did you need to search for "Cloaking"? LOL

"I am absolutely not talking about intercepting HTTP traffic in any way, shape, or form" -> If so, how do you know where the user is coming from? LOL

By insinuating that what I claimed to be possible is not possible, you are by default insinuating that I am making a dishonest claim.

I knew that by your extremely uneducated response "you can't map an address to multiple ips", that you could not have possibly written that cloaking blurb all by yourself, so I wanted to find out where you plagarized it from.

Anyhow, I'm not here to teach you DNS or networking, there are books available for that. I'm putting up a service, and I already have 1 very large customer for the pilot.

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it. Perhaps you could sell ad number 11 out of 12740 after a month of trying, instead of trying to discredit my ideas with technical ignorance.


.

mdw
9th May 2007, 05:41 PM
Such a potentially good discussion about an idea for offering a new service tailored to holders of certain kinds of IDN domains. Kudos jacksonm for thinking outside the box! And kudos for Jose for questioning it, even though you got treated pretty roughly for your efforts. I think the most useful comment was re: the accept-language header in the HTTP request.

Making decisions based on this user-definable preference has big advantages - like giving appropriate content to a Chinese expat living abroad wanting to get Chinese language content. Imagine a Japanese businessman working in China... That's an important point to make Jose, you're right. And guessing where someone is making a request from is always going to have a decent error rate. jacksonm - you're gonna have to explain to people at least a million times why guessing location by IP is not failproof.

But checking the accept-language string happens later in the chain of events, leaving a real opportunity for big advantages to be realized by settling the matter long before any request makes it to any webserver. The business opportunity is real - my 2 cents.

jacksonm
9th May 2007, 06:25 PM
But checking the accept-language string happens later in the chain of events, leaving a real opportunity for big advantages to be realized by settling the matter long before any request makes it to any webserver. The business opportunity is real - my 2 cents.

I will be adding one more strongly requested feature to the service as well - the ability to show US based spiders Japanese advertisements when they index the parking page. This is also not based on IP delivery, rather making HTTP requests from US spiders appear to originate from a Japanese IP address. I think this will interest a great many people.

Another purported benefit is that the nameservers for the domain will not be associated with parking providers. Purportedly, googlebot ranks domains lower when their nameservers are set to parking providers.

I expect to have the service operational within a week. I will accept domains to be hosted during the 1 month trial for free, and I will enter them manually into the service. I won't invest the time in self-management web pages until I am certain that people really want to use this service on a continued basis.


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jose
9th May 2007, 07:05 PM
Dear God, jacksonm, are you talking serious?! Man, read my first post 100 times if needed, and tell me where do I say you're being dishonest. I wrote IT WAS POSSIBLE and used a lot. (The post was never edited!!!) I was posting a contributing post.

You're the one who started calling me a newbie!!! Are you defying me?
If so, I want an answer to my question: "I am absolutely not talking about intercepting HTTP traffic in any way, shape, or form" -> If so, how do you know where the user is coming from?

LOL

alpha
9th May 2007, 07:09 PM
time out girls. who gives a crap who said what techie gibberish.

someone just build the damn traffic contraflow so we can make some more $$'s

blastfromthepast
9th May 2007, 07:14 PM
Jose, you are wrong. Sorry. Jackson has a solid concept.

alpha
9th May 2007, 07:26 PM
jacksonm - while we are on the subject of honesty and transparency, maybe you should consider amending your sig:

http://www.malesfamily.com/screenshots/sig.jpg

i'm sure Olney doesnt mind people putting links in their signatures - but not stealthy ones that are invisible.

jose
9th May 2007, 07:32 PM
Jose, you are wrong. Sorry. Jackson has a solid concept.

I am wrong about what? Has everyone gone crazy in here? Plz explain.

Again, I SAID IT WAS POSSIBLE AND USED A LOT.

touchring
9th May 2007, 07:35 PM
jacksonm - while we are on the subject of honesty and transparency, maybe you should consider amending your sig:

http://www.malesfamily.com/screenshots/sig.jpg

i'm sure Olney doesnt mind people putting links in their signatures - but not stealthy ones that are invisible.


Most parking providers do not allow self-promotion, but i guess invisible links are ok, ok right? :)

jacksonm
9th May 2007, 07:47 PM
jacksonm - while we are on the subject of honesty and transparency, maybe you should consider amending your sig:

http://www.malesfamily.com/screenshots/sig.jpg

i'm sure Olney doesnt mind people putting links in their signatures - but not stealthy ones that are invisible.

:-) It was a test. BTW, there are others here, but I won't point them out.

.

alpha
9th May 2007, 07:52 PM
... there are others here, but I won't point them out...

oh go on, we need to spice things up a little during these slow days :)

jacksonm
9th May 2007, 07:59 PM
oh go on, we need to spice things up a little during these slow days :)

OK, as close as I'll go is to tell you to review the sigs of people in this thread, but be fast! (find the hidden link to h t t p://クレジットカード.com/ - http deliberately spaced out here by me so it's not automatically turned into an url ). There are still others around...

http://www.idnforums.com/forums/11021-highest-google-results.html


Anyway, back to the discussion at hand.

.

touchring
9th May 2007, 08:22 PM
y must links be hidden? Google will penalize hidden content.

if you msut hide, use a light color.

jose
9th May 2007, 08:28 PM
y must links be hidden? Google will penalize hidden content.

if you msut hide, use a light color.

He's the expert... LOL

jacksonm
9th May 2007, 08:28 PM
y must links be hidden? Google will penalize hidden content.

if you msut hide, use a light color.


I had some links which were the same color as the background. It was just a test to see if googlebot would pick them up or not because they had same color as the background, and I ran it for about a week or so. I didn't notice any difference in anything, but then again, when names are parked and you point your DNS to the parking provider, you never know who queries your domains (theoretically web traffic).

OTOH, the text of the link was the same as the link itself, not a black "." pointing a link to a domain like in the thread which I pointed out. Actually, it was the "." link which inspired me to give it a test!

.

mulligan
11th May 2007, 11:00 PM
I came across this country IP detector/redirect script.

Looks like it quieries the IP of the visitor, matching it to their country and certain variables can be adjusted to send them where you want them to go


http://web-heaven.com/

Drewbert
12th May 2007, 02:20 AM
Best not to do geographic/language content based on IP #.

If your database becomes outdated when some IP# allocations change, you could be wrongly asumming that a certain IP # is in China when it is in fact in Japan.

This can cause a MAJOR problem for yoou if the user on that IP # is connecting via a big ISP, because that ISP's DNS system will cache the incorrect IP # - sometimes for quite some time - causing a large number of potential clients to be served up with the wrong language content.

Better to do it at browser level using browser language detection.

We've been doing some ROUGH geographic seperation by putting both ND's and DOPA's name servers in for names that have meaning in both Chinese and Japanese, under the theory that Chinese users are more likely to hit the DOPA servers first. Never actually tested it to see if it's working as intended.

With the piddle of traffic, it hardly matters at this stage.

jacksonm
12th May 2007, 06:46 AM
If your database becomes outdated when some IP# allocations change, you could be wrongly asumming that a certain IP # is in China when it is in fact in Japan.

This can cause a MAJOR problem for yoou if the user on that IP # is connecting via a big ISP, because that ISP's DNS system will cache the incorrect IP # - sometimes for quite some time - causing a large number of potential clients to be served up with the wrong language content.


Good points Drewbert. Let me elaborate.

1. ISPs don't cache the IP they have assigned to their users, they cache IPs of websites that their users visit.

DNS content is cached according to TTL "time to live" values which are set in the records of the DNS server(s) hosting the domain name's DNS (your own servers, registrar in some cases, or parking provider). In this case, the records would be controlled by my DNS servers, and the TTL is set by me (intentionally low, e.g. 5 minutes). The DNS caches at ISPs do not set TTL on queried domains, they only observe them to know when to throw a record out of the cache and query it fresh.

2. I am using a geoip database which is updated weekly, in conjunction with my DNS system. When a user from e.g. china queries for domain XYZ, he is served the DNS record with the "cn" tag associated with it.


This system which I have proposed has the feature of keeping URLs intact, regardless of where you send the user. HTTP level redirection scripts do not that, they redirect from e.g. http://XYZ.com to http://ndparking.com/XYZ.com.

With all that said, this system serves a very limited purpose and is actually going to be nothing more than a feature of a much larger system. The real benefit is being able to provide a DNS service where US-based spiders receive the IP address of a reverse proxy in Japan when they query your Japanese language domains. This means that when they visit your page, they see exactly what a user in Japan would see. This has been speculated by some to be the reason why Japanese traffic is so low - because the spiders see ads in english. All other users than spiders will receive the IP of the parking provider's web server when they query the domains from DNS.

I will have the system operational within a few days and will be starting the pilot with perhaps 1000 domains from a couple of large Japanese domain holders. We will run the trial for 2 months to see if there is a noticeable increase in search traffic or not. The system will also be able to provide fine-grained reports, e.g. which IP addresses looked up which domains at which times and from which country they likely originated. I will plot these per domain over time with RRDTool, to provide graphical representation of per-domain DNS lookups. I suspect that a certain percentage of IP lookups on IDNs are actually other domainers, or something else, because not all of them actually result in visits to web pages.

If you are interested in taking part in this trial, then it is extremely simple for you. You can trial as few or many domains as you wish. All that is required is that you set the DNS in your registrar to point to my DNS servers, and then you tell me the list of domains you have done this with as well as where you want each domain parked. To stop the trial at any time, all you have to do is go back to your registrar and set the DNS back to where it was before.

Questions, comments?

.

Drewbert
12th May 2007, 06:32 PM
>This means that when they visit your page, they see exactly what a user in Japan
>would see. This has been speculated by some to be the reason why Japanese traffic is
>so low - because the spiders see ads in english.

What ads are these spiders looking at? The adsense adverts that are 100% javascript?

What am I missing here?

And many ISP DNS systems IGNORE low TTL values (yeah I know, they're not supposed to, but they do).

dada
12th May 2007, 11:33 PM
Cool idea.
Yandex has a funny way to decide whether the site can be included.
One of the criteria is that the site's hoster should be in the ussr.
And so a good cyrillic site.com is NOT included.

jacksonm
13th May 2007, 08:06 AM
What ads are these spiders looking at? The adsense adverts that are 100% javascript?

What am I missing here?


They look at the generated template of the page as well as the generated ads for the target location. The ads from parking sites like namedrive are not generated from the client side doing a query to e.g. google, they are sent from the server.

With clever usage of DNS and local proxies, we can cause two things:

1. the spider decides that the web server is located where the proxy is, true or not

2. the spider sees 100% local language on the page, in this case japanese, regardless of where the spider is located


And many ISP DNS systems IGNORE low TTL values (yeah I know, they're not supposed to, but they do).

I hear you, but DNS caching is completely irrelevant in this discussion. IP addresses of users are not cached anywhere - they are assigned by the ISP's network and change when needed via DHCP. IP addresses of domain hosts (web servers, etc) *are cached*, but it does not matter - I am not talking about constantly changing IP addresses of domains. Set it once to join the trial, participate for a few months, if you don't like the results then set it back. Caching is a non-issue.

.

Cool idea.
Yandex has a funny way to decide whether the site can be included.
One of the criteria is that the site's hoster should be in the ussr.
And so a good cyrillic site.com is NOT included.


If the Japanese trial goes well, I will definitely consider expanding to Russia as well.

.