According to one Press Release Last week, as the Danish domain OnlineCasino.dk sold for $ 580,000 . The buyer is a gambling business from Malta and the sale takes place after the Danish government decided to relax the restiktionerna for game companies in Denmark .

The seller is a domain investor named Mark Høeg and in the sale so he picks home first place in the list of sold domain names with Scandinavian far . In Sweden, held first place by spel.se that in May 2009 was sold for € 190,000 in Sedo.

With regard to these shops so it is important to remember that there are very many names that are sold for various reasons but that the deal becomes public.

On August 24 to 25 the world's largest domain conference , T.R.A.F.F.I.C, will be the  fourth conference of the year in Dublin , Ireland .

T.R.A.F.F.I.C. domain is the industry's largest conference with over 500 participants , including business leaders , investors and experts . TRAFFIC is the largest and most successful domain conference in the world and the purpose of TRAFFIC is to bring domain owners and aggressive , forward- thinking sponsors together with domain investors , so that everyone can expand their networks , thereby creating successful partnerships .

The participants jointly controls more than 20 million domain names with over 50 million daily unique visitors . Participants consist of a small but extremely powerful and forward- thinking group of people who are finally beginning to be recognized for the knowledge they possess . The conference will enable participants to interact with people from major traffic monetization companies like Google.com , Yahoo.com , Skenzo.com , DomainSponsor.com etc.

One other event at TRAFFIC in Dublin is the so-called Test Tracker . Here entrepreneurs pitching their business ideas to real investors in a bid to get real money . If you want to present your business so you can apply at this URL : http://targetedtraffic.com/test-track.php.

Traffic Conference is where the domain industry started and you can expect as a participant :

● Tips and tricks from the best minds in the industry
● A great opportunity for networking with the biggest and the best
● Buy and sell domains at one of the world's leading live domain auctions
● New knowledge makes it possible to stay on top of the ever-changing domain industry
● Collaboration with a number of niche exhibitors that can increase your sales dramatically
● And of course , the exclusive TRAFFIC feast , packed with more punch than ever !


If you are interested in participating in the TRAFFIC Dublin on August 24 to 25 at The Shelbourne in Dublin , visit http://targetedtraffic.com/dublin/registration-pricing.php and register for the conference today !

All tickets include :

Full access to the show : the exhibition , panel discussions , live auction and TRAFFIC celebration .
Four - course lunch every day
2 evening activities ( 24th/25th )

USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism has published a study where they analyzed the impact that the web is for Americans and among the nearly 200 study subjects who are taking up so one of them is the issue of Internet users would pay for social media .

Most do not want to pay . For example, the study found that 49 % of those surveyed have used the free micro blogs Facebook and Twitter but zero percent said they were willing to pay to use them .

The question was , " Would you pay to use Twitter if it took a charge ? " .

" With such an extreme conclusion , that 0 % would be willing to pay for these services , underlines the difficulty of getting Internet users to pay for something they already get for free " says Jeffrey I. Cole, Director of Center for Digital Future at the school .

" Twitter has no plans to charge its users , but this result shows , beyond doubt , the enormous problem of converting ' free ' users to paying users , "says Cole . " Online providers face significant challenges in order to get customers to pay for services they now receive for free. "

This is obviously an obstacle especially newspaper publishers hope to overcome . Last week , were reported the News Corp 's The Times visits fell to one third of what the number was before they started charging their readers .

" Internet users can access content in three ways : they can steal it , or pay for it , or accept advertising on Web pages they read , "says Cole . "users express strong negative opinions about online advertising , but they still prefer to see ads as an alternative to paying for content . Consumers want free content without advertising , but in the end they still understand that the content must be paid for - in one way or another .

July holiday also meant for domain brokers , so there is not this month with some huge sales . The reason for not OnlineCasino.dk included in these statistics is that the purchase has not been confirmed with the bank statement yet.

After the problems we have experienced with our current spam filtering provider we have  decided to start looking for a new third-party provider for our e-mail filtering. Today, over 175,000 mailboxes have spam filtering and we will now replace our mail server which handles approximately 2.4 million e-mails every day. More than 98% of those messages are spam messages that must be filtered out before they end up in customers' mailboxes.

There are a few different players in the market today that are capable of the demands we put on a new supplier, and after a thorough evaluation, we have chosen Swedish Halon as our new partner. Today they deliver spam filtering solutions for large Swedish web hosting companies and other companies and we are confident that with the new solution will solve the problems we've had in past years.

We expect to have the filtering in operation within two months, a separate page for spam filtering will also be posted on crystone.se for those of you who wish to read more about it.

We thought it would be good to give you a bit more information about our new data center that we previously announced the initiated relocation of our servers to. This post will probably be quite "technical" but we think it is important to give as much details as possible so we can show the steps we have taken to secure our operating environment.

The datacenter has fully redundant systems for power and cooling and has a sophisticated exterior protection and firefighting systems by halo producer gas. We now have two different and completely physically separated data centers located in Liljeholmen and Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm, allowing for purely geographical redundancy. The datacenter in Liljeholmen will also receive an upgraded substations during the summer of 2010.

In our new datacenter our customers servers are put in 47U server racks. The new center is also built to handle the most frequent external risks in the operation of servers, systems and applications. The facility minimizes the risks that is related to burglary, fire, power (ex. power outages, lightning and voltage fluctuations), water damage and sabotage. 

Crystone Hammarby has fully redundant power supply through ..

.. two completely separated power supply systems, if your company's servers comes with dual Power supply, this means that your server is still working even if one of our power supplies for any reason suffer a poweroutage. The facility is fully redundant with separate A-and B-force. Either one comes with enough power to supply the entire datacenter. You can also rent a component that connects your server to A and-B supply even though there's only one power supply in the acctual server. In this datacenter, we also have a high voltage ring with its own substation, which provides feeds from two different directions into the facility.

During normal operation, power is delivered from different directions into separate substations. Electric power then goes through a separate UPS systems, which together deliver the power on to power breakdowns in the data center. Would we, for any reason have a power failure at our high-voltage loop it's backed this up by redundant batteries connected to our UPS:es. Our reserve power is supplied from two large redundant diesel generators from Volvo Penta.

The UPS and diesel generator feeds are on separate systems and are not interdependent. If there is a power failure the energy will come from the UPS batteries instead. The diesel generators are powered up to later take over the electricity supply from the UPS and batteries. And when we regain our high-voltage power supply, the two feeds, eg. Emergency and primary electronic metering, are phased out. And once we are sure that the supply of high voltage power really works the operation is returned to normal.

Load balancing (GLBP)

Companies who wish to distribute traffic among multiple servers can use our load balancing service, GLBP (Gateway Load Balancing Protocol). This means that we connect two routers to your servers that balances the load. Router A and Router B also has a master/slave- relationship, meaning as long as the master is active, the slave remains as the backup and would identify problems with the slave master, it will shortly take over the operation and thereby minimizing downtime. We also offer a variety of backup solutions delivered on a SAN from EMC.

Here is a highlight of one of our newest clients, www.pscars.com.

“This a very unique site in the way it will be handling the car buying and researching process. This site is built not only for the consumers but it gives dealers a distinct advantage as well on the type and quality of the leads they will receive. 

Consumer Side:

PScars.com is completely free to our consumers at all times.  When they come to the site, here is a brief list of what they can do or will be able to do.

·         Create a Member profile

·         Create a car profile

·         Create a finance profile

These profiles throughout the process are completed as they follow the process in Building, Researching and Comparing cars within our Configurator.  PScars.com is the first site to take the prominent feeds of 3^rd party services, and make all the information available in an easy, practical system. 

As a consumer plays in the configurator and builds their car, the system is gathering all the car details, special packages, finance options etc and then when the consumer is done building the car, they can save it to their “garage” and come back to it when they are ready to do more, or post it to our dealer network.  They remain anonymous to the dealer throughout the negotiation process, can edit and make changes to the car, work with the dealer on up sells and additional packages etc completely anonymously. 

Once the consumer is happy with the price and car, they click “confirm” – once they do this is when the dealer is charged for the lead, and is provided with the consumers contact information.

Consumers will have a member’s area, the Pscars community, linked in to all the social media sites so they can post their cars and share with friends. Receive email newsletters and announcements, and be the first to become part of the Practical Systems family of sites.

Dealer Side:

On the dealer side, we have been working with dealers getting their input and feedback on how the back end or psdealers.com side should be developed.  What tools do they need to work with us, how can we make the whole process more “practical” for them as well.

One of the best things about it, is it’s a pay for play system.  Currently dealers get 1000’s of bad leads from lead aggregators and have to weed out the poor quality leads in hopes of finding one or two that work.  With our system, they are notified when a consumer in their area posts a car, all the car details, credit scores, and trade in info, preferences, financing options etc so the lead becomes that much more qualified as all the details are already spelled out.  So it puts the consumer back in the driver’s seat so to speak, provides the dealers with a system that they will know and learn provides only quality leads, and they only pay for leads they work.

There is SO much more to what we will be including as we grow, but first we want to get phase one up and running. 

As you also see from the site, there are tons of areas for great advertising opportunities for the OEMs, major brands, independent dealers and affiliates.  When you select a brand, it takes you into a variety of customizable show rooms, with plenty of features for the dealers/brands to display commercials, downloadable PDF brochures of the cars, sale and specials etc.

On the business side, the dealers get other vendors in their arena to join their practical system, and it becomes this b2b directory again hopefully where then they build and invite people into their practical system, so through proper advertising and word of mouth, it just starts building itself and we keep adding more and more features, functionalities and markets as we grow." states Terrence Smalley of Practical Systems, LLC.

"We will be working long and hard to achieve the best results possible for Pscars.com. This will be a great opportunity to let our Organic Search Engine Optimization  efforts shine." states Andreas Linnuste, Managing Director of Crystone USA.

So Crystone would like welcome Pscars.com to our SEO community.

Earlier this March, Crystone and Microsoft launched a new collaboration on Microsoft's new Hyper-V platform for virtualization.

- Virtualization is growing fast and the opportunities are huge, "says Murat Yigit, Operations Manager, Crystone.

- Virtualization is providing opportunities such as full redundancy, ability to upgrade the performance without downtime at a much lower price than the conventional solutions available today on a broad front. We have seen that many small and medium-sized enterprises have a much better understanding of the opportunities surrounding virtualization says, Per Ahlberg, Microsoft.

- What was previously thought to be complicated and too advanced has become much easier today, "continues Per Ahlberg.

- We are very pleased that Microsoft has chosen us for this cooperation, we have a long and successful experience with Microsoft products, continues Murat Yigit. With this collaboration, we hope to build on our already good relationship. In early April, the new services will be aunched, where Crystone will offer Microsoft's entire broad repertoire of products in the virtualization platform, Hyper-V. For this project we have bought into a very powerful hardware, we also invested in our new and ultramodern server hall in Hammarbyhamnen.

- Microsoft's goal has been to find a supplier of Hyper-V in Sweden, which has both the technical maturity and good quality of deployment for our platform, Crystone meets all these requirements, "says a satisfied Sofia Skötte, Microsoft.

We have signed an agreement for the new server hall in Stockholm following the blackout that occurred on the 11th of March. This weekend was the first move of several planned. The decision to move the hall was already in place following the cooling failure that occurred on August 28, 2009.

"The blackout that hit the server hall in Liljeholmen last Thursday was what sped up our planned relocation. “says Murat Yigit, Head of Operations.

The new server hall, which has just been newly built, has a double and completely separate power supply, redundant networks, and extinguishing systems. Also the cooling corridors between the racks makes the cooling more efficient.

Crystone now has two server halls in Stockholm and a unique position to offer full redundancy through these.

"It is important for us to show all of our customers, that through our actions, we are actively taking charge of any situations." continues Murat Yigit.

We want to highlight the most important things we have, our customers, and thus begins an interview series dedicated to just these. First up is Robin Larsson, CEO of gambling company NoiQ.com , which we are helping with organic search engine optimization and online marketing.

Name: Robin Larsson
Lives: Madliena, Malta
Born: Town, Sweden

What is NoiQ and what are your duties?
We provide games on the internet within Poker, casino and sportsbetting. My job consists mainly of keeping the movement together, and will review all options for expansion of the company.

What is a typical day at NoiQ?
An ordinary day at NoiQ is that we work largely with two different parts. One part is to maintain our current players with the support and VIP services, while the second part is working more with the recruitment of new players.

You recently launched your new website, what are your expectations for this?
With our new website we wanted to simplify navigation between our various products significantly. We expect to have a larger spread between the products, and increase the turnover of the casino and sports betting.

How do you think it has been so far to work  with Crystone, which is your SEO provider?
It has worked very well and has been very easy to work with Crystone, which is our SEO provider!

Have we so far lived up to your expectations?
Crystone has certainly lived up to our expectations and we look forward to a long partnership.

We previously wrote on our blog about the domain auction for Haiti that was held by MissDomain after the initiative of Internet Sweden a domain auction. Sales were passed on in full to help the victims of the earthquake disaster in Haiti.

The auction generated around 10 012 EUR (approx .$ 13,600 USD), a total of 217 domains were donated to the auction and 73 were sold. The most expensive domain was IJ.se that went for 2350 EUR (approx $3,200 USD).

Crystone's own donation, webhotell.com, was the domain that generated the largest number of unique bids and the final price ended up at an impressive 900 EUR (about $1,230 USD), which resulted in a bronze place among the domains that were sold.

Here we have listed the 10 most expensive domains:

1 IJ.se 2350 EUR
2 forsakringar.nu 1100 EUR
3 webhotell.com 900 EUR
4 prylar.nu 850 EUR
5 uthyres.nu 850 EUR
6 skidor.nu 800 EUR
7 festlokaler.nu EUR 325
8 bytjobb.nu 225 EUR
9 idol.nu 190 EUR
10 tippa.nu 176 EUR

We have at the year end of 2009 completed the sale of our Norwegian operation to FS data. The reason for selling is that we want to invest and grow in our other markets, primarily Sweden, USA and Turkey, and we are through this sale gain both capital and other resources to do so in an even greater extent than we do today. 

For Crystone AB, Crystone LLC and Hostley customers this means, of course, no change at all. And to our Norwegian customers, there will be no change in existing systems and server structure in the near future, it will be business as usual. 

The Domain Auction Site, MissDomain.com, announced a few days ago that they would be holding a domain auction. This is following the initiative and idea from InternetSweden.se, a domain auction where the sales go to help the victims of the earthquake disaster in Haiti. A prerequisite for this success is obvious and that there are buyers who are interested in the domains in the auction, but also to donate some domains that can be auctioned.

Crystone has therefore chosen to donate nine domains to the auction. Among these are names that domanparkering.se, windowstekniker.se and but.se but the domain that stands out most, and probably has the highest potential value is probably webhotell.com.

New search ad formats for Google AdWords were recently introduced to provide a more informative and richer search result to Google AdWords researchers. New search result formats will include maps, images,  videos and more.

Some of the new ad formats include visual elements. For example search results for movie releases may display an ad with a screen capture of the movie trailer.

The AdWords team has been developing these new ad formats and testing them to provide a better ad search experience to online shoppers.

Google Wave, an online, real time collaboration and communication application, is going live to approximately 100,000 beta testers today. If you have requested a beta invitation then don't expect to receive your invitation until late today according to Stephanie Hannon, co-founder of Google Wave. Stephanie tweeted at about 10:30 AM Eastern this morning that invitations would be delayed because the support staff for Google Wave is located in Sydney, Australia and they want to be awake when all of those beta testers start using Google Wave.

According to Google, a wave is equal parts conversation and document. What that means is that folks can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, videos, photos, maps and lots more.

Furthermore, a wave is shared. Any person participating can reply anywhere within the message. They can also edit the content and add participants at any point in the process too. If you as a participant come late to the party you can use a playback feature that lets you rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

Google also says that a wave is live. This means that data that you are contributing is being transmitted as you type it. People participating on the wave can have faster conversations, interact with extensions and see edits in real-time.

The application possibilities for marketing your products and services through Google Wave are not yet clear but we can reasonably assume that if Wave is a success, which is likely, then there may be some new opportunities open up for extending your reach to more prospective customers across the web with organic search engine optimization.

Video search engine optimization and marketing is a powerful medium of distributing content. Google and many other search engines are now showing video listings in their search results. Now more than ever before it's vital that you learn how to optimize your videos to rank high.

To generate traffic from your videos you need to focus on creating high quality "how-to" videos which create the need for the visitor to visit your site to get the complete solution which they are looking for. Take the time to produce good quality videos. When we talk about video quality we are referring of course to the resolution of your videos, but were also referring to the actual content of your videos. The content of your video needs to be extremely valuable and must provide a fantastic benefit to the viewer.

Analyze other videos in your market. Find what others are doing with success and emulate them without ripping them off.

YouTube.com is the dominant video engine and has the largest user base, so it's a great idea to upload your videos to YouTube.com.

To properly optimize your videos for high rankings you need to use your primary keyword or phrase in the video title. Your video title also needs to be benefit driven. You want to pique peoples interest when they read your video title, as the title will be displayed where ever your video ranks in Google or YouTube's search results. Write your main keyword phrase into the video description and ensure that your description is written with proper grammar so that it makes sense. Do not stuff your video description with keywords. Use 5 to 6 keyword phrases relevant to your video within the tags section when uploading your video to YouTube.com. If you are submitting your video to multiple video engines or video hosting websites do not use the same video title. Write completely unique titles for each place on the web that you upload your video.

Ensure that you have a clear call to action at the end of your video and incentivize people to visit your website after watching your video. Embed your domain name or website address right into the video just like you would watermark a photo.

Benefit from the YouTube.com community features, reach out to your audience through your opt-in email subscribers if you have any and ask for community support, vote it up, add a comment, Digg it, make it a favourite etc.

Link to your videos to improve their rankings, vary the anchor text using your targeted keyword phrases within the anchor text. Consider linking to your videos from articles that you've distributed across the web.

More and more site owners that are savvy about organic search engine optimization are concerned that they might get penalized accidentally because of duplicate content on their websites. If you run mirror sites, will search engines ban you? If you have listings that are similar in nature, is that an issue? What happens if you syndicate content through RSS and feeds? Will other sites be considered the "real" site and rob you of a rightful place in the search results?

Google is very concerned about content duplication. On August 12th, 2009 Greg Grothaus, a member of Google's Search Quality Team, gave a talk at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose about duplicate content and hosting duplicate content on multiple domains.

Google has published a video about the talk on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. We have embedded the video below for you.

Don't start out your link building campaign by acquiring incoming links too fast. That will certainly lead to Google taking notice and devaluing those links you've worked so hard to acquire.

Start by submitting to trusted web directories such as the Yahoo! Directory and to Business.com. Follow up with submissions to some of the smaller but still valued directories.

Links pointing to your website are always more important when they are within content, a part of a paragraph of text, as opposed to being placed in the footer of a page or within a lengthy bulleted list.

The anchor text of your incoming links should include a broad combination of keyword phrases and not just the keyword phrases that you are targeting to achieve rankings for. In fact, no more than 10% of the links you have incoming should be using your targeted keyword phrase as anchor text.

It's very important that incoming links to your website com from not only relevant themes and relevant web pages but that the words which surround your link also be relevant too.

And last but not least, do not just focus on building incoming links pointing to your home page, also build incoming links that point to relevant sub pages on your website too.

The search engines need to crawl websites regularly to index new content and check for changes to existing content and also to make themselves aware of content that has been removed from the web. Sometimes the amount or frequency of time which the search engine robots spend on a particular website can cause that website server to experience load problems. For that reason most of the major search engines allow webmasters the ability to slow down the crawl rate to help web servers to keep up with the load.

When performing search engine optimization on your website, using this feature is not usually needed and isn't generally recommended either, but it is available should the need arise to use it. Smaller websites which do not update their content regularly will likely never need to slow down the crawl rate. They probably won't receive any benefit from using a crawl delay, because search engine robots will adjust their crawl rate to an appropriate frequency based on the content that it finds on a website each time that it visits that same website.

For large websites that have lots of web pages that are updated more frequently, they may need to be crawled more often and deeper too so that all of their content can be indexed by the search engines.

If you feel that your site needs to set a crawl delay you can do so by setting the crawl delay inside of your robots.txt file. In the robots.txt file within the generic user agent section you can add this directive as shown:

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 1

You can only use positive, whole numbers as values. The higher the value, the less frequent your crawl rate will be. Most webmasters will want to use the lowest value possible, which is a value of 1. Never use a value of more than 10 because that will severely impair a search engine robot from effectively crawling the content of your website.

This is how crawl delay settings effect your crawl rate:

No crawl delay specified - Normal

1 - Slow

5 - Very Slow

10 - Extremely Slow