Recently I started to experient with creating my own network of sites with different class C IP addresses, there's quite a few companies offering SEO hosting with multiple class C IP addresses which is very useful and there are some reasonable prices around (beware you do get what you pay for though).  I have a mixture of WordPress and .net websites so I wanted an SEO hosting company that could cater for both as it seems most SEO hosting companies only offer Linux.

I came across 2gbhosting.com which on the face of it sounded quite good:

- 99.9% uptime guaranteed
- 24/7 support
- .net, php 5 and everything else you would pretty much need

I signed up with my 6 domains and I must say that I have never used such an APPALING service, the uptime is more like 50% (if you are lucky), the performance on a site with hardly any traffic is dog slow.  In fact one of my good ranking domains has now got the following description in Google:

Here's some reponses from their support after I logged several calls regarding the availability of my sites:

So if a backup is running I can tell you for a fact  that your sites WILL stop running, what a great service.  In summary DO NOT USE 2GBHOSTING.COM FOR YOUR SEO HOSTING.

I came across this video today which sounds really useful, I'm going to try this on a couple of small sites and measure the results.

http://www.inlineseo.com/tactics/authority-tagging/

Let me know if you try this and get any good results.

I often visit SEOMoz for good information and now they've published their 2009 SEO roundup which is well worth the read:

Search Ranking Factors

We've all seen it, you end up on a blog and you'll be reading the nice helpful comments and then suddenly "cash loans - Nice post mate!".  (I get them on here a lot as well...delete, no thank you Mr Spammer).

Google has recently posted an entry on the Web Master Tools Blog about its stance on blog spammers:
hard facts about comment spam.

It's an interesting read about comment spamming but it's also interesting to read the comments and opinions of others which is quite natural.  On the subject of natural, link building needs to look natural and we all know the best type of links are links with the same theme as your site and from a good authority domain.

You can find numerous cheap Indian companies that offer "300 backlinks" for say $250 but these bad companies just comment spam every blog possible regardless of theme creating lots of devalued links that doesn't help anyone.

Considering the above people should not stop commenting and if you like reading blogs and leaving useful comments on the same theme as your site whilst building links naturally (they may or may not have much value) then you can find blogs that don't have NOFOLLOW by using search engines to find known blog commenting systems that will actually create a back link.

NOTE: I personally use this technique for experimenting with new sites to actually measure the effect of the aforementioned blog commenting and other SEO tactics.  The community is full of different opinions on the subject so I find it best just to try it myself and monitor the results.

Blog Comment Finder

• http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/
  Just type your keywords into the search box!
  
  
• http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB341GB341&q=%22blog+comments+powered+by+DISQUS%22+%2Bmakeup&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
  Google search for blogs powered by disqus and enter your keywords on the end (makeup in this example)
  
  
• http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUK354&q=%22powered+by:+BlogEngine.NET+%22+%2Bwedding&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
  Another Google search like above but for blogengine.net blogs and keywords

One aspect of on page SEO is to get your keywords to the top of the page.  Now if you're not using nice clean ASP.NET MVC, which by the way doesn't have a nasty viewstate, but the traditional aspx code behind model then as you probably know you the more controls that use viewstate the larger the hidden input field containing the actual viewstate data will be. 

The viewstate also increases page size which is another separate issue but what I wanted to do was look at moving my keywords towards the top of the page whilst keeping viewstate.

There are a few ways of getting around this problem like keeping viewstate on the server (which I might look at later) but the option I went for is to just move the hidden viewstate to the bottom of the form.

I can't take the credit for this fix as I found the solution here http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/how-can-i-move-the-viewstate-hidden-field-in-asp-6038.html so thought I'd just redistribute.

I had to change the code slightly but here's my base page using the render method to change location of the viewstate:

   1: public class BasePage : Page

   2: {

   3:     protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)

   4:     {

   5:         var stringWriter = new System.IO.StringWriter(); 

   6:         var htmlWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter); 

   7:         base.Render(htmlWriter); 

   8:  

   9:         string html = stringWriter.ToString(); 

  10:         int StartPoint = html.IndexOf("<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"__VIEWSTATE\""); 

  11:         if (StartPoint >= 0) { 

  12:         int EndPoint = html.IndexOf("/>", StartPoint) + 2; 

  13:         string viewstateInput = html.Substring(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint); 

  14:         html = html.Remove(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint); 

  15:         int FormEndStart = html.IndexOf("</form>") - 1; 

  16:         

  17:             if (FormEndStart >= 0) { 

  18:             html = html.Insert(FormEndStart, viewstateInput); 

  19:         } 

  20:         } 

  21:         writer.Write(html); 

  22:     }

  23:  

  24: }