a few newbie general questions

[valkyria]

Sorry for the inexplicit title, but I thought it was pointless to open a separate thread for all these issues...

Here are my questions:

1. How can I update the statistics in Awstats? Am I allowed to update? (eg set up a cron job as specified in the documentation). Or is it updated automatically by the server? If so, how and when?

2. The ads weren't showing up yesterday (no, it wasn't the adblocker, I tried with 3 diffrent browsers, 2 with no adblocker programs instlaled). I guess that happens. Now they are visible on every page. I won't get suspended or something if an error such as this one happens in the future, right?

3. What's the deal with the reffereal center/x10rewards? I understand I have to add another banner, besides the advanced one, right?

4. In the forum (phpBB) I installed a new theme, set it as default and modified it to display the ad. The problem is I can't delete the original theme( Template->make_filename(): Error - file admin/confirm_body.tpl does not exist). What do I do now? How can I get rid of it?

5 If, by mistake, you don't respect something in the terms of service, do you get a warning first, or are you just suspended?

6. Not related to x10hosting, but maybe older webmasters can help: About submitting the website to search engines and directories. It seems I have to wait with both for weeks or even months. Is there a nice and faster way? I don't get why the search engines can't just index the page, it's been crawled by their bots already.

Also, my web page is http://valkyria.x10hosting.com/ . Please let me know, if you have time, if there is something wrong with it. I tried respecting the terms of service as well as I could, but please tell me if I missed anything. Nobody likes to be suspended right?

Thanks for your time and sorry for the newbie questions. Any info/suggestion is welcomed.

[Tyrael]

Sorry for the inexplicit title, but I thought it was pointless to open a separate thread for all these issues...

Here are my questions:
...
Thanks for your time and sorry for the newbie questions. Any info/suggestion is welcomed.

1, duno
2, it was a bug, you wont get suspension for something like this. never.
3, duno
4, duno
5, you wil get suspended imho
6, If you make a sitemap, and send it to google (www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/), that helps indexing faster your site. And if you use adsense, thats help too.

Tyrael

[valkyria]

Thank you for the fast reply.

Sending a sitemap seems to be a very good idea, I'll try that as well. Thanks for the idea.

More suggestions are welcomed as well.

[Spartan Erik]

1. I'm not sure how you update the statistics in Awstats.. I'm sure it's automatically updated, I just don't know how often (I don't check Awstats all that much)

2. We've been experiencing this problem; account managers have been told to search the websites' source code for the ad code, rather than basing their suspensions on what they see

3. The referral center operates like this: one click on your ref link will give you 10 points (I believe); one click on your ref link and a signup will give you 100 points. You do not have to use the banner provided in the referral center; it is up to your discretion! Once we finish maintenance on the point converter, you can convert forum points to x10Cash, which may be used at x10Rewards to purchase domains, and even get PayPal payouts!

4. I don't have any experience with phpBB so I'm sorry, I can't help you there.

5. Most often you'll get suspended first; post a thread about it and the account manager will explain why you were suspended. If you feel you were wrongly suspended you may challenge your suspension. If it is a minor issue we sometimes let it slide :naughty:

6. Have you read about robots.txt files?

Your site looks fine to me!

[Corey]

I'll answer the ones that weren't definite answers.

1.) Awstats is updated once per 24 hours automatically.

3.) Spartan Erik is correct on his answers.

4.) I'm also not that familiar with phpBB, what I would do is try to create the file it is missing so it can delete it. Just create a blank file named whatever it is looking for. If that doesn't work you can try posting in our site management section.

Your site looks fine to me

-Corey

[zero5854]

you need to go manually submit you site address in popular search engines like yahoo and google. How? simply goto example www.yahoo.com and type in search "yahoo site submit" from there it should be the top link and then fill in your info. Do the same for Google.

ALSO...in phpbb ACP make sure to edit you metatags (keywords and site description)

Hope this helps!

[lambada]

For the search engine.

Try getting indexed in http://www.dmoz.org - you'd be surprised how many search engines use that as their base. Also make sure your searching for the right things. You might not be popular enough with one of your meta keywords to show up.

[valkyria]

Thank you everybody very much for your replies. This about covers all my questions.

Well, I still have the phpBB problem, and creating a file doesn't seem to fix it, and neither does their article http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/miss...nfirm-bodytpl/
I'll try to ask it on their forum, somebody there should either have discovered another fix, or will notice this bug and repair it in future releases.

Regarding search engines:

- I've created a robots.txt file, as every bot seemed to come, look for the file and leave... I set it to allow everything everywhere.
- I submitted it to about 10 search engines.
-I've sent it to dmoz.org
-I sent a sitemap to google webmaster tools
-My web pages has been crawled by googlebots twice and by many other bots as well.
Guess now all I have to do is wait and keep on developing the website...