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Tuesday 9 October 2007

2.4.3.1. Finding email addresses

The first step in writing an email requesting an inbound link is to find the email address for the webmaster you want to contact. This can take quite a bit of poking around, but it is amazing how often you can uncover the right email address with a bit of persistence if you just look at all the pages on a web site.

Figure 2-9. Anacubis helps you see which sites are similar to (or already linked to) your site

Six Degrees of Separation

To create a view with the similar sites shown in Figure 2-9, I had to iterate the process. In other words, the initial view of sites similar to www.mechanista.com showed only a few sites. I had to expand several of these initial sites to show sites similar to them to get a greater pool of similar sites. One wonders: if you keep on iterating ad infinitum, do you get all web sites, or are there only six degrees of separation?

"If a web site has a contact form but no explicit email address, you can often find the email address the contact form is mailed to by viewing the HTML source code for the contact form's page. Another place to look for email addresses is within a syndication feed. If the site provides an RSS or Atom feed, the creator's email address is often included as part of the feed."

As you may know, you can use the Whois service of Internet domain registrars to find contact information for site owners, although with multiple domain registrars this information is more fragmentary than it used to be. In addition, some sites intentionally do not publish information about the real domain owners when they register domains, for example, by putting the domain in the name of the web host.

A good first stop if you want to try using a Whois service to get email contact information is Network Solutions (http://www.networksolutions.com), the "classic" Internet domain name registrar. Next, try Whois.net , http://www.whois.net, which has one of the largest databases for Whois information.

If these two sources fail, do not give up! Go to Internic , http://www.internic.netwhois.html. The Internic service will not give you contact information, but it probably will tell you the specific domain registrar who registered a given site and the address of the domain registrar's Whois server. You can then go to the Whois server maintained by the appropriate registrar and usually find email contact information there.

If this sounds time-consuming, well, it is. To justify the time, any sites that you contact should indeed be related to your site.


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