Cumulus Support

I have a silly question. Is there a "standard" domain name that PWS should use for their weather report?

I've been running my PWS since July 2012, and the FTP upload has just been going to a subdirectory of one of my sites, that no one ever visits. I'm also feeding out to all the services in the Configuration -> Internet -> Sites/Options. I know that's more useful than my own site anyways since they (or some) aggregate my data into theirs.

I'd like to make it a bit more accessible, and put it on it's own domain. I did some random searching, and saw [city]-weather.[tld], and a lot site names that didn't seem to follow any pattern.

The actual city I'm in is (unfortunately) a common dictionary word. So [city]-weather.com is already taken. I could go with [city]-wx.[tld], [city]-[state]-[country]-wx.[tld] or any of dozens of combinations.

I considered going with the greater metro area name, but that's not really precise either. I don't want to advertise a city that the center is 15+ miles from my station, especially where there are other PWS closer to the city center.

And obviously in the examples, replace [city] with my city name, and [tld] with any TLD (.com, .net, .org, .us, etc). I didn't want to accidentally drive traffic to some link farm.

Does anyone have suggestions, or should I just pick some arbitrary name, and hope Google picks up the fact that it's a station in this city?

I also thought about offering up FTP access for stations in my area, so we could all have our info up. I don't know any of the other station owners though, and it would seem to be more trouble than it's worth to try to find contact info and spam all of them with something they may not be interested in, or don't know how to configure. I do enough tech support for my paying customers, I don't want the extra workload.

There's no standard that I'm aware of. The domain I use doesn't even have 'weather' in it; I use a subdirectory called 'weather', i.e. http://sanday.org.uk/weather/ and plenty of people here on the island have been able to find my site.

No-one really knows exactly how Google works, but I think that as long as your content contains your location and the word 'weather', then people who are interested are going to be able to find it. You do have a problem with the name of your location being a common word, though.

Thanks Steve. I'll just pick something that sounds good, and stick with it.

I've done some SEO work in the past. The biggest factor for Google is the content in the page. Domain names haven't mattered for that in quite a few years. I'll just make sure the page has good details in it. I guess listing off distance from the neighboring city centers should be enough to help people find me.