Make sure you are not DNS DuNceS
posted in Affiliate Tools |
Are you DNS DuNceS?
Let me elaborate, quite simply. When a visitor types in www.yourdomain.co.uk in the url address bar, they obviously arrive at your website, now try omitting the “www.” prefix.
Do they still arrive at your website?
It’s surprising that there are quite a few affiliate & merchant websites which get an error. It’s a little embarassing if you made the mistake yourself, but if it’s your highly paid techie, you might want to wave a P45 jokingly in front of them.
We spotted this on a merchant recently & subsequently found some others, so we shall probably run a quick script testing all the merchants to evaluate what proportion suffer this basic flaw. The downside is that from tests carried out via paid paid search, we have noticed a rule of thumb that approximately 10-20% of potential visitors will omit the “www.” prefix. It’s certainly wasted traffic if they assume your website is down or a return visitor to a merchant during a cookie period.
To some of you the following may appear quite obvious, but it’s surprising the number of websites that have this fundamental error.
Dumbed Down Techie Bit
Here is the dumbed down techie bit, courtesy of my buddy Eric
The culprit is a missing entry in your DNS’s zone file. By adding:
yourdomain.co.uk. IN A 192.0.0.1
where yourdomain.co.uk is replaced with your actualy domain name (no ‘www.’ prefix – and don’t forget the last ‘.’) and where 192.0.0.1 is replaced with your IP address, this problem is solved.
From a Linux command-line, you can test this by entering the following commands:
> host xxxxxxxx.co.uk
If you see no response, that means it’s not configured properly. Compare that to:
> host www.xxxxxxxxx.co.uk
www.xxxxxxxxx.co.uk has address xx.xx.xx.xx
Which gives an answer. So if the administrator would add to their zone file:
xxxxxxxxx.co.uk. IN A xx.xx.xx.xx
Then their site would be accessible without the ‘www’ prefix.
Were you one of the DNS DuNceS? Ssshh … Don’t worry we won’t tell 😉
