We called the number here:

10800 NE 8th St, Suite 600
Bellevue, WA 98004
Tel: 425-586-6000

But the recording said they were closed for the holiday.

UPDATE: 7/3/09 8:24am

We’ve tried unsuccessfully to contact Wells Fargo and whenever they transfer us to Authorize.net, the line is busy. We did manage to reach a Wells Fargo person who said they have been in contact with Authorize.net this morning and that there was some kind of power outage. The representative said she didn’t know when they could be back up.

UPDATE: 7/3/09 8:27am

From http://twitter.com/authorizenet

We apologize for this disruption and ask for your patience as we work with the team at our datacenter to restore service.

We are down due to a fire at our primary data center in Seattle. We are working to restore services, but no ETA at this time.

UPDATE: 7/3/09 11:13am

My client tells me that her Authorize.net is back up and her online store is working again.

From http://twitter.com/authorizenet

Transactions are up except for Global processing and Concord. No ETA on those, but we are working on in.

1. Insulting the Web Design Profession

“I know web design is really simple. I could do it easily myself but I’m just too busy.”

When you’re interviewing someone, it’s best not to start off by insulting what they do for a living.  If you wouldn’t say this to your brain surgeon, then don’t say it to anyone you’re hiring, no matter what the job is. It hurts their feelings and makes them a little angry, which is not the mindset you want them in when they’re giving you an estimate.

2. Looking for Free Services

“I don’t have any money to pay for this but…”

This isn’t a hobby, this is my full-time business. I use this income to pay my mortgage, put food on the table and pay for medical expenses, just like you. If you can’t afford the services, best not to waste both of our time. If you want a free website, find a high school student.

3. Too Much Personal Information

“I’ve been diagnosed with xxx and xxx and have …”

The people who start off a conversation by telling me way too much personal information always seem to follow it by #2, looking for free services. If it’s not relevant to your web design, keep it to yourself. Of course, once you’ve become friendly with the designer and have a relationship, sharing personal stuff is fine. Just not on the first date.

4. Procrastinators - Hurry Up And Wait

“I’ve been thinking about getting a website for x years, and I need it done within the next 24 hours.”

Many people want a website designed overnight, even though they’ve had plenty of time to actually start it much sooner. This results in heaping enormous pressure on the web designer to hurry, hurry, hurry. I’ve found that these folks, probably due to an inherent procrastinating nature, will actually be very slow to develop the website. Once they make the initial payment, the pressure is released, and they de-prioritize working on the website. Sometimes, they end up abandoning the project altogether.

5. Bragging About Ignorance

“I know absolutely nothing about the internet or computers”

While honesty is great, there’s no need to tell prospective web designers how much you don’t know. You’re setting yourself up to be taken advantage of. If you don’t understand what the web designer says, ask questions, but there’s no need to expound on how much you don’t know.

6. Out of Your League

“Can you build me a website like Craigslist or eBay or Facebook?”

Seriously, I get folks who ask me this. They have no idea how complex these kinds of websites are, and they think they can just find someone to duplicate Craigslist or eBay or Facebook, and they’ll be rich.

7. Technical Mumbo Jumbo

“I know all about PHP, MySQL, CGI, Ruby on Rails…”

Just because you’ve heard of an acronym, doesn’t mean you know how to program in that language or utilize that application. Don’t throw out a bunch of words and claim to know what they do unless you really do.

8. Bid Requests With No Information

“I need a website for my business. Can you give me a quote?”

If you want an estimate, you need to give a web designer details about what your website will do, how many pages it will have, etc. You can’t simply say to a real estate agent, “I want a house, what will it cost?” The answer will be, “well, it depends on location, features, square footage, rooms, etc.” It’s the same with web design. Come prepared with some idea of what you need.

9. You’re Just One of Many

“I’m sending this same proposal to many other web designers.”

I’ve actually gotten requests for proposals where I could see the other web design firms that were cc’d on the email. It went right into my trash. While it’s great to shop around, try to be a little more sensitive and saavy.

10. I Need This Website To Save My Business and Make Me Rich

“I’ve been working on selling this great idea for 19 years and been unsuccessful. I’m sure that all I need is a website to make me rich overnight”.

If you’ve been trying to sell something for a long, long time and not been able to do it, it’s doubtful that a website will help. It’s really hard to sell things online, and some ideas just are not good ideas. Some businesses are so poorly run, having a website won’t help.

So when you’re out shopping for a web designer, keep these 10 items in mind. You’re looking for someone with whom you can develop a long-term relationship, and it’s important to get started out on the right foot. Be prepared and know what you need. You want to treat the web designer with professional courtesy, and always, always, check references by contacting the business owners listed in their portfolio before hiring them.

The email came from: Sunny with an address of Sunny@ntwifinetwork.com

To whom it may concern: 2009-5-27
We are a domain name registration service company in Asia,
Last week we received a formal application submited by Justin Lin who
wanted to use the keyword “_[yourdomainnamehere]_” to register the Internet Brand
and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn/.hk/ .asia/ domain names.

After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be
applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark.
We aren’t sure whether you have any relation with him. Because these
domain names would produce possible dispute, now we have hold down his
registration, but if we do not get your company’s an reply in the next
5 working days, we will approve his company’s application
In order to handle this issue better, Please contact us by Fax
,Telephone or Email as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely
Sunny
Checking Department
Tel: 86 513 8532 2060
Fax: 86 513 8532 2065
Email:Sunny@ntwifinetwork.com
Website: www.ntwifinetwork.com

Sounds plausible? What a nice thoughtful domain registration company to let someone know when another person tries to purchase domain names similar to theirs. Except it seems to be just a scam, an attempt to get you to register domain names you don’t need.

Here’s an article on this topic that my client found on ScamWarners.com. It’s the nearly identical email spam/scam except it’s  from “Treey, Attorney at law of Legal Department”. Both emails are from ntwifinetwork.com.

Another article that discusses a similar scam attempt, but with a different company: Asia Domain Name Registration Limited. Here’s the article: Asia Domain Name Registration scam. In this case, the recipient of the email responded and was encouraged to pay between $140 - $840 for five years for each domain registration. Keep in mind domain registration is typically around $10 per year. So they were attempting to lure the email respondent into paying over 16 times more than the normal price for domain name that they didn’t need or want.

Here are some additional links that describe similar scam attempts:

Asia Domain Name Registration Limited - Scam
Asian Domain Name Fraud Warning
Asia Domain Name Registration scam

Be careful out there!

The name of this article is “On Horizontal CSS Centering using Absolute Positioning or how Relative Positioning can rock your css.”

In this case, I had a client’s website where they wanted these overlapping regions of content, so I had to use DIV’s to make this happen. I used the “z-index”, which worked just like it was supposed to, even in Internet Explorer.

But if you use this method, you run into an issue if you use “relative” positioning. You have to use negative “top” numbers to push up the overlapping divs, which naturally fall to the bottom. This leaves these big regions of emptiness at the bottom of the page, which looked terrible. So I changed to “absolute” positioning and was able to use normal, positive “top” values.

My next problem, is that my client wanted her website centered. But using “absolute” fixes things on the page, so that when you stretch your window wider, everything stays put. I needed it to move and recenter.

So this is where this lovely blog article written by “Candy by James” comes to my rescue. I’ll reprint the part that was most useful to me:

.wrapper {
position:relative;
margin:0 auto;
text-align:left;
width:whatever;
}

For good measure, you’ll need to apply the IE fix:
body { text-align:center; }

Then he uses this for the content:

.content {
position: absolute;
left: whatever;
top: whatever;

width: whatever;
}

Change the body tag, create wrapper, and then content inside it, and it will magically auto-center while letting you use absolute divs inside. I’ve tested this on PC (Firefox, IE7) and Mac (Safari, Firefox) and it works like a charm. Thank you James!

Long ago, my client had once opened a SuperPages.com account and started a pay-per-click campaign. She put the pay-per-click campaign in a “paused” state several years ago and forgot about it.

But then, she received an email recently that said SuperPages.com was actually billing her $20 per month since October 2008. She was surprised to see these charges were indeed showing up on her business credit card. SuperPages.com told her that they changed their policy in October 2008, to begin charging a monthly fee on paused pay-per-click campaigns, even though customers were not actually getting any clicks - because the campaign was paused, inactive, dead, you get the idea. The client’s credit card was getting charged $20 each month, month after month, no clicks.

My client called SuperPages.com provided by an online chat session (1-866-478-2611) and was successful in getting all of the credit card charges refunded (as of the writing of this article, this hasn’t been completed yet, but SuperPages.com has promised).

SuperPages.com’s parent company, Idearc Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2009. It seems that it would be prudent for folks who might find themselves in this situation to a) carefully review their credit card statements to look for charges and b) if they indeed have been accruing monthly fees for a paused pay-per-click account, contact SuperPages.com to ask for a refund. Time might be running out.

“Computer security specialists warn that Facebook users have been hit with a series of data-stealing attacks in the past week as cyber crooks increasingly stalk social-networking websites. This attacked is called 419 Scam.”

Here’s the link: http://webcastr.com/videos/informational/facebook-cyber-crooks-target.html

Anytime someone contacts you via the internet asking for money, whether it’s via email or via a social networking site like Facebook, it’s a good idea to be skeptical and attempt to verify directly with the individual - even if the individual is someone you think you know.

Link building is a pain - no doubt about it. It takes a lot of time to get other people to create links to your website, and while I perform many different SEO activities for my website clients, link building is not one of them.

Even with my own website, I focus on adding content to attract links, rather than soliciting other website owners to give me links. I delete every single link exchange request I receive. So I was very interested in reviewing both the contract, and the evidence provided by a link building outsourcing company that one of my clients had hired. I was shocked and angered with what I found.

The SEO outsourcing company had given her a contract that included claims like:

“We will build 400 links from high-authority social media sites per month.”

“We will build 300 links per month from high-authority blogs.”

Wow, that’s like 700 links in one month! To be perfectly honest, I had no idea at all how someone could get 700 links from “high-authority” blogs and social media sites in one month.

Let’s review what “high-authority” means. In general, folks in the SEO world will use this phrase to mean web pages that have a high page rank that suggests that these pages have high quality content that has attracted many quality inlinks over time.  For example, my home page has a page rank of 5/10 - you can use this page rank tool to see this. Amazon.com has a PR of 9/10, so for me, a “high-authority” site should have a PR of maybe between 3 and 6. Generally, it takes quite a bit of time and work to get your PR to increase from 0 (zero) to 1 and then 2 and on up the scale. A LOT of work. Getting a “high-authority” site or page happens slowly, after many, many months and possibly years of work.

I asked my client to get proof from this company of the link building they had done. They sent a “Link Building Report” that contained approximately 200 URL’s. Note, 200 is a whole lot less than 700. Upon closer inspection of the URL’s, it became apparent that half of them weren’t URL’s to web pages, but rather RSS feeds. So the list because more like 85 actual URL’s to web pages. Way less than 700.

I asked the client if she would put these 85 real URL’s into a spreadsheet for me so I could do further analysis. She did this, and I noticed another pattern - that the URL’s were all from free web page or free blog builder sites or free social media sites, 26 to be specific. Here’s the list in alphabetical order:

blogspot.com
clearblogs.com
ehow.com
experienceproject.com
facebook.com
flickr.com
goarticles.com
helium.com
hi5.com
hubpages.com
knol.google.com
mahalo.com
multiply.com
mybuzzle.com
myspace.com
newsvine.com
quizilla.com
scribd.com
squidoo.com
tumbir.com
twitter.com
wetpaint.com
wikihow.com
wikispaces.com
wordpress.com
zimbio.com

No doubt you’ll recognize some of these sites. And while there certainly are many “high-authority” blogs on wordpress.com, as one example, that’s not what these link building scam folks did. They created  brand new accounts on these websites. Then, they created pages with fake content (they repeated 4 different fake articles they had created) with a link to my client’s website. We could literally see the time stamps on the pages. All pages were created with a week of each other, at the end of the month.

I emailed several of these websites, and indeed they confirmed that this activity is in violation of their Terms of Service and told me that the pages would be removed:

From Newsvine:

“Newsvine is a social news site that prohibits advertising. Our content is focused on journalism, not traffic direction.

That’s really unfortunate that Newsvine is being ’sold’ as part of a SEO package. Our system’s pretty good - users start out in an area called the Greenhouse, meaning their content doesn’t reach the majority of the site until they’re confirmed to not be spammers. The accounts will probably be gone by the end of the day.”

From Multiply.com:

“It is a violation of our terms. Your profile must describe you, an individual person. Examples of inappropriate profiles include, but are not limited to, profiles that purport to represent an animal, place, inanimate object, fictional character, or real individual who is not you. The Multiply Web site is for the personal use of individual Members only and may not be used in connection with any commercial endeavors. Organizations, companies, and/or businesses may not become Members and should not use the Service or the Web site for any purpose.”

From Wetpaint.com:

We generally frown on using Wetpaint as a link farm in order to try to increase search rankings. Also, most link building companies don’t realize that Wetpaint imposes a “nofollow” on all outbound links, so the benefits of using Wetpaint for such purposes are probably negligible.

According to the Wetpaint Terms of Use, you agree not to use the service to:
Upload, post, email, transmit, or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, “link farms,” “junk mail,” “spam,” “chain letters,” ‘pyramid schemes,” or any other form of solicitation.

So let’s review:

1. They claimed to create 700 “high-authority” links in one month.

2. They provided evidence of building 85 pages that contained links to my client’s website.

3. All 85 links were from 26 domains, all of which are free places online where you can create a webpage.

4. All 85 pages had duplicate content, the same 4 articles were copied and pasted over and over.

5. All 85 pages were brand new subdomains and pages with ZERO authority, ZERO page-rank.

6. Some of the 85 pages were created in violation of the terms of use of the core service providers, and will be removed as they are discovered.

What does this mean? It means that every single one of the links they created are completely, utterly, worthless at best.

At worst, Google might even detect this paid link building scheme and penalize my client’s website. Seriously - paid link building can actually be damaging.

What’s the moral of the story?

If you’re tempted to outsource your link building to a company - be very, very sure you know exactly all the details of what they plan to do BEFORE you pay them any money. Be sure you understand what Google considers good and bad link building.  After looking all around online for advice, I’m  not even sure that I now think outsourcing link building is a worthwhile endeavor  - this is one of the best discussions I could find and many of the commenters recommend never outsourcing link building. Here’s one of my favorite quotes:

“Outsourcing link development is risky business whichever way you look at it. I know of recognized SEM agencies in the UK who offer this service to their SEO clients, but who, upon hearing you wish to terminate your SEO contract, claim they will have to remove all the inbound links they’ve been maintaining. Now this may be calling your bluff to make you sign another 1 year extension, but the fact of the matter is that if these guys are doing it and doing it well, they probably own the network from whence your inbound links come.

Do you want to be held to ransom like this? I don’t.”

And another great quote from the discussion:

“We need to be honest with ourselves here folks… sooner or later the engines will identify these “highly effective, yet 100% ethical” bought link networks. If you’re paying someone to link their network of sites to you, you are effectively manipulating your listings by artificial means…. in other words the natural/organic listing ain’t so natural after-all.

Short term gains may be there for the taking, but long term we need to stop chasing algorithms and get on with developing great user content and websites that make other sites WANT to link to us. “

So before you hire an SEO company to outsource your link building - you need to really do your homework to make sure you understand exactly what they are doing, why they are doing it, and whether it’s really doing your website more harm than good.

I did manage to find one good article that contained tips on link building - but be warned, it’s a ton of work over a long period of time. And maybe that’s exactly as it should be.

My question to Jefferson was regarding when and why a small business owner might want to trademark their domain name. Here was his answer:

It really depends on the domain name.  What you really want are domain names that match your trademarks.

Usually, if you have a trademark (Alderbaran Web Design), you want to also own the domain name the matches it (AlderbaranWebDesign.com).  This is a good thing when selling your business or if you are just creating a consistent brand message.  It also allows you to prevent Cybersquatting and other ills of the digital world.

I recommend to people that they make sure they can get a matching domain name for their product, service or business name BEFORE they decide on what to call themselves (or their products or services.)

If you have a trademark registration, then you can prevent anyone from offering competing goods or services thru a website with a similar name.  So, if you obtain a trademark registration for “Green Gopher” for a sustainability search engine and someone else pops up offering a search engine at www.1greengopher.com, you can use a quick (1-3 month) administrative process through the World Intellectual Property Organization to force the domain name to be transferred to you.  Or you can sue them in Federal court (much more costly and time consuming.)

I very much appreciate Jefferson letting me post his response on my blog. If you’re in need of a trademark attorney in Seattle, give Jefferson Coulter a call. He’s done work for me, and my partner’s business, and his work is excellent. Thanks Jefferson for helping to answer this prospective client’s question!

The account executive offered me an opportunity to set up a “mutually beneficial” business relationship, whereby I’d refer my clients to Citysearch and in exchange, the Citysearch account executive would refer new website clients to me. These kinds of offers are not new to me, as I’ve also gotten them from Yellowpages.com sales people in the past.

I can’t honestly refer my clients to pay-per-click companies like Citysearch, Yellowpages.com or Dex,  because of the personal experiences I’ve had and that my clients have had with them. And so after some thought, I responded to the Citysearch account executive with a pleasant, “no thanks.” I wrote that while I’d be happy to accept referral traffic from her, it would have to be with “no formal strings attached,” implying that I’d in no way be able to reciprocate.

A month went by, and I didn’t receive a response from the Citysearch account executive and I forgot about it. But then today, a month after sending me the initial solicitation and after apparently reading my blog article about Citysearch click fraud, the account executive sent me an angry email accusing me of “bashing” her company and was “shocked” that I responded to her email at all. Needless to say, it wasn’t a pleasant email for me to receive.

Rather than attack me, here’s how a representative of Citysearch who has found my blog article could have responded:

They could have read over the article carefully and seen that this issue isn’t just about me, but there are many folks out there with legitimate complaints about Citysearch and click fraud. They could have actually attempted to understand the issues and made an attempt to address them. Or they could say, yes, we’ve had issues in the past, but we’ve fixed them and to prove it, we’ll give you a free account for a month.

Wait, did I just say a free account?! Actually asking a pay-per-click company to prove that their claims will be true before signing a long term contract? Where would I get a crazy idea like this? Because I’m a certified Google AdWords consultant, and they give us these $100 coupons that we can give away to new clients so they can actually try out the service at no cost and no risk. If you don’t feel like the $100 was well spent, no problem. Some pay-per-click companies, like Google, let you do a test drive before you buy.

But not Citysearch (or Yellowpages.com or Dex or others). Their sales folks just tell us small  business owners to trust them, that they’ve got lots of satisfied customers.

I once sat across a table from a Dex Online salesperson (at the request of a client) who, after I’d showed him clear evidence of poor quality clicks from Dex to their website, told me that yes, they had a problem but now it’s been fixed. The Dex sales person wanted my client to renew their annual contract. So I asked him to give them a free trial period to prove to my clients that this issue of poor click quality was indeed fixed. He said he couldn’t do that.

So I asked the Dex online salesperson how were we supposed to trust him? He had just admitted, after being showed hard website traffic data, that the clicks he had charged my client for  during the past year, were worthless. And he was not only refusing to give them a refund, but wanted them to renew their contract based on his statement (with no supporting documentation) that the issue was now magically fixed? Without being willing to give my clients even a single month of free traffic as proof? Let’s review this. The sales person denied an issue. Then confronted with data, the sales person admits an issue existed. The sales person claims it’s fixed, but sorry, won’t give you either a refund for their past poor quality service or a free trial period for their new and improved services. Trust them, they say.

Trust sales folks? Seriously - give us a free trial period and let us small business website owners decide for ourselves. I’m sure there are some folks out there who like Citysearch and these other pay-per-click companies, but until a particular business owner in a particular market with a particular budget can see whether this type of advertising is cost-effective for them, I don’t think that it’s a one-size-fits-all “trust me it will work” online marketing solution.

If the Citysearch person was actually really interested in changing my opinion (and not just getting me to send her business blindly), why not offer  me a free trial? I’d certainly write a blog article praising Citysearch if the new experience proved to be a good one. Remember my last experience was 2 years ago - a lot could have changed at Citysearch. And if the Citysearch account executive was 100% sure I’d love the service, then this would be at no risk to them.  But rather than try to 1) understand my issues and 2) try to fix them or demonstrate they no longer exist, the account executive got angry and hostile with me.

So after two years of no contact with Citysearch - another bad experience. It’s a shame, because this could have been an opportunity for Citysearch to improve my opinion of their services. A missed opportunity indeed.

Just because someone opens a Biznik account, posts a photo, links to their website and writes articles, does not mean that this person/business is legitimate. You should apply the same suspicion and due diligence to anyone who is offering services - don’t automatically assume that if they’re on Biznik, that they’re trustworthy.

I had a client of mine hire someone on Biznik recently to perform Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on her website. She told me that the Biznik profile of this person looked nice, and that they had written many articles on internet marketing. But after spending nearly $1000 and receiving no results, she became uncomfortable and asked me to look into their services and give her my opinion. She provided me with a copy of her contract and a list of work they had performed.

The details of my investigation can be read here. It’s now obvious to me that based on the contract and documentation of work performed, she’s been cheated. It really gives you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize that there are people out there who are taking advantage of small business owners, especially in these tough economic times.

If you are tempted to hire a person or a business that is part of a social networking site, like Biznik, please remember that they are no more likely to be trustworthy than a business you found by using Google or some other means. The only way to know if a company is reputable, is to talk to several of their customers.

Please be careful out there. (There will be more articles that follow on this topic to hopefully help you identify and avoid being cheated by SEO scams.)

I found this wonderful article: How do I install Firefox without using Internet Explorer? and it worked perfectly. It let me install Firefox, which in turn, allowed me to download and reinstall a fresh version of Internet Explorer. It had a excellent step by step process. So I wanted to give this article a link and say thank you!

In hindsight, it might always be a good idea to have multiple browsers installed on your computer - so if you have Internet Explorer, maybe you should download and install Firefox just to be safe. I use Firefox as my main browser and love it.

Well, I’m no security expert, not by a longshot.

But I wanted to share a recent experience with a prospective client who was using an online database to store some of his business information and hopefully it might help you avoid some very unpleasant consequences. In this case, no harm was done and the sensitive information was destroyed - but it could have been much, much worse.

Often in the course of determining whether I’m a good fit for a client I get to look around websites that other developers have created. Sometimes I find things that really surprise me and this is one of those cases.

It is very important that you, as a small business website owner, really understand what your website is doing. As an example, I once discovered that a previous web designer had added code to copy himself on all of the emails submitted by a client’s website. Imagine, every single time someone fills out a contact form, the web designer would receive all of that information - for what purpose, I can’t imagine, but suffice to say it was sloppy at best, unethical at worst. But that’s the topic of another article…

Sometimes clients need a database added to their website. Often, this is because there is an application, like an online store, or a blog, that needs to be set up, and these applications use a database to store information.

But sometimes, clients want a custom database installed. It’s very important to understand what kind of information is reasonable to store, and what kind of  information is really not appropriate to store in an online database. As a rule, I won’t store any kind of information that if it were to be accessed by another person, would cause harm to anyone else or my own business. But different businesses have different rules.

Say you’re a plumber and you want your client information stored in a database. You want to store names, addresses, phone numbers and email. If someone gains access to that database, the worst that could happen is your clients get email or snail mail that might be spam. Not too bad.

But say you’re in the healthcare industry. Your client names are considered confidential. You fall under the rules of HIPPA. If you’re in an industry like this, you probably should not be storing any client information whatsoever in an online database - or if you want to, be sure you’re using an SSL certificate to send it securely and be sure to warn clients of the potential risk. Many healthcare professionals will warn clients that using email to communicate is not really secure - and if you’re using an online database to keep their info, even if just their names and email addresses - you should probably warn them in a similar fashion.

And in general, I would never store very sensitive information that is used for identity fraud, like social security numbers or credit card numbers in an online database. Perhaps you think this is obvious. I was shocked to find out that this prospective client had done exactly that using shared hosting, without giving any thought to security or identify fraud or confidentiality of his patients. He was asking clients for all kinds of medical information, names, addresses, insurance policy information…social security numbers…and sending it all completely unencrypted (he had not purchased or installed a SSL certificate - so the transmission was not secure)…to a shared hosting database. When I discovered this, I was appalled, and immediately told the client and pushed them hard to delete this database asap. The client agreed, thankfully.

Many of my small business owners are using shared hosting. This means your information is on a machine somewhere that many other people have access to, by definition of shared hosting. Hacking does occur. Also, every single tech support person at your hosting company has access to your database as well, for good reason.

In sum, depending on your industry, the kind of information that you are storing in an online database will vary - but you should be aware of the potential issues resulting from a breech of that data. If a breech isn’t hurting anyone, then you’re fine. But please think through the consequenes carefully - don’t just let your web developer create a database and store all kinds of personal information about your customers without giving it some thought.

The email came from a company called “Global Vibrations” in Washington DC and the return email was marcshneider@mplw.net. Like I usually do with these emails, I first looked up mplw.net and found it was all about multilingual search engines. There was a link to sitemap services, and that’s where I found, to my amazement, this graphic:

Wow, a Google Sitemap for $250. Now I realize many of you are thinking, what the heck is a sitemap and maybe this is a resonable price. Not so!

First off, Google and Yahoo and everyone else use the same XML sitemap format. You don’t  need a different one for Google and Yahoo. Secondly, it’s a little text file that simply lists the pages on your site. It’s supposed to help search engines find all the pages on your site. Now whenever I design a website, I create one, just as an insurance policy to make sure Google finds all the pages, but if Google has already found your pages, you might not need one. Click here to see if Google has indexed all of your website’s pages. Google even provides a free site map generator.

Now, if your website isn’t fully indexed and you think you need a sitemap, what’s a reasonable price? Well, for many of the websites I design that are under 30 pages, making a sitepmap takes maybe 15 minutes. Maybe a neurosurgeon can make $250 in 15 minutes, but not most web designers. Therefore, charging a flat rate of $250 for a sitemap is really, really, really overcharging folks for something they might not need and even if they do need it, it’s pretty quick to create.

This is just one example of an SEO company or individual charging for things that are pretty close to free. Here are some others:

Submission to Search Engines

I often see this offered as a service. First off, if you take the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, you’ve got nearly 70% of the search engine market covered (see January 2009 results). What if I told you could submit your website to these three search engines for free? Seriously. Here are the links:

1. Submit your website to Google
2. Submit your website to Yahoo
3. Submit your website to MSN

Now, if the big three let you submit for free, what are chances the other little players charge you? You get the point. Please don’t pay someone to do this for you. And you only need to do this ONCE for your website. Submitting over and over will only annoy them, and we don’t want that.

Robots.txt File

This is another example if a very small file that can help your website. Again, this takes maybe 5 whole minutes to create and is typically much smaller than the sitemap file. Oh, and Google also has a tool that will help you create this little helper file too. Click here to get Google’s help to create a robots.txt file. It’s supposed to give “bots” those mysterious little programs that crawl around the web directions. Again, not super hard to make and should only take someone a few minutes.

Meta Tags

Now this item is a tricky one. It’s super easy to change a website’s meta tags. But what to change them to is the part that takes the time investment. What are meta tags? These little pieces of code, very short, that are (or should be) a part of your website code near the top of your page. Want to see what your meta tags look like? Just go to your home page, click “view source” in your browser. Look at the top for something like:

<title>Hello I am your title and should be filled with keywords</title>

That’s the “title” tag. And here’s the description tag:

<meta name=”Description” content=”Hello I am a description of this particular page” />

That’s it. See how short they are? The hard part is doing the research to figure out what to put in these two meta tags. But actually changing them is very quick. A good SEO person should involve you in this research. Changing the tags is trivial, deciding what to change them to is not. And what about the keyword meta tag? The keyword meta tag was declared dead and useless in 2002. Don’t pay someone to add or modify it.

Link Building

Be really, really careful of link building scams - they can actually do damage to your search engine rankings.  On the Global Vibrations website I saw they were offering a month of link building for over $3000. This is a huge amount of money - and you need to find out exactly what you’re getting for this. If they are just going to spam small business website owners with endless link exchange requests, it’s not worth it. Find out details, ask questions. If they can’t explain their link building practices in language that you understand, look elsewhere.

W3C Validation

While it is debatable whether having your website validate is a benefit to SEO, actually finding out IF your website code is valid is free. Click here to use the W3C Validation tool.

Image Tag Optimization

Sounds impressive huh? Well, it’s a very small task depending on the number of images you have on your website. In general, whenever you add an image, there’s a part of the image code that can contain keywords. It’s contained in the ALT attribute of the image tag. So if you sell widgets, it might look like this:

<img src=”images/widget.jpg” alt=”widget”>

It’s just a little bitty extra piece that should, as a matter of good design, be on every image.

Local Google Listing

By now you’re getting pattern, right? Google stuff is FREE. Click here to learn how to get your business listed in Google Local.

Want good FREE SEO advice? Visit Google’s Webmaster Central. Even if you’re not a web designer, it will give you a good education right from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. And if someone gives you a list of SEO services they will provide - do a little bit of research to see if any of these things are really something you can do yourself. There are lot of people out there to take advantage of this thing called SEO - a little education goes a long way.

———————————————————

More articles from others who receive spam from Global Vibrations:

http://www.billhartzer.com/pages/marc-schneider-and-global-vibration-inc-the-myth-of-multilingual-search-engine-promotions/

http://www.seonj.com/marketing/global-vibrations-inc.html

http://www.spiread.com/blog/2008/12/12/beware-of-this-search-engine-optimization-rip-off

http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2007/09/16/315/

http://r2d5.net/category/company/global-vibration-inc

And here’s the original email my client received:

Did you receive the e-mail which I sent to you recently (copied here-below)?
Please confirm since I have had problems lately with emails intercepted by spam-filters set too high.

Cordially,

Marc Shneider, Ph.D.
marcshneider@mplw.net

I am Dr. Marc Schneider and I work for Global Vibration Inc. in Washington DC ( Tel: 1 202-787-3989 ) - I would like to speak with the person in charge of your international clientele. Who is my contact? Who should I speak to??

In fact, after visiting (website URL), I have noticed that your website cannot be found on foreign search engines (I tested it on Hispanic search engines, German search engines, Asian search engines, etc.) Our company is specialized in multilingual search engine promotions in 28 languages . From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, we can show you how to develop a true international online presence by promoting your website on foreign search engines.

Let us show you how to develop a presence on the multilingual web without having to translate your website: It is not necessary to translate your website in order to submit to foreign search engines, however, you need to have at least 1 page in Japanese optimized with Japanese keywords and meta tags in order to submit to Japanese search engines, at least 1 page in Spanish optimized with Spanish keywords in order to submit to Hispanic search engines and so on…

I strongly suggest that you watch our online presentation which will explains clearly how to get top rankings on foreign search engines with only 1 entry page per language (click on the following link or copy-paste it into your web browser): http://www.mplw.net/demo

From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, get users to find your website when searching with YOUR KEYWORDS in their Native language.

Please call me at 1 (202)-787-3989 or email me and let’s work on giving your website the true international exposure which it deserves to have with foreign native online users!!

Regards,

Marc Shneider, Ph.D.
marcshneider@mplw.net_____________________

GLOBAL VIBRATION INC.
1250 Connecticut Ave N.W. Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036 USA
TEL: 1(202)-787-3989 - FAX: 1 (202)-318-4779
http://www.mplw.net :
Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services since 1999.

One benefit of using this mod is that it has the ability to send out emails recursively. This means that if your hosting company has a limit specifying how many emails you can send out per hour, you can set the mod to make sure it doesn’t exceed that limit. For example, if your hosting company has a 100 email per hour limit, you can set this mod to send out 9 emails every 6 minutes (90 per hour). Pretty cool feature.

You should make sure you know the rules of your hosting company so that they don’t blacklist you as a spammer. One common rule is that people can opt in or out of your newsletter, meaning you can’t just send it to whoever you want. Some hosting companies have very complicated rules, and this is one reason why many clients, even those with ECT online stores, will use a monthy fee-based service. Another reason they use these other services, is that often they have really fancy tools that make it easy to format pretty newsletters. This mod is a very basic, kinda do-it-yourself newsletter program. It does not have any bells and whistles, but it is inexpensive.

Once you’ve purchased and installed this mod, you can follow these steps to send out a newsletter to the people who have added themselves to your email list inside your ECT online store.

From the store’s admin page, click on “Home”. At the bottom of that page, you should see a line for “Mailshot” with a link that says “Admin Page”. Click on the link.

You should now be looking at the newsletter admin screen. It’s recommended that you first send your newsletter to yourself before sending it out to everyone. Follow these steps:

1. Put in an appropriate number (”6″ is recommended) in the delay box. This is a very, very, very important step. Your batch size and delay must not exceed the limit set by your hosting company.

2. Put your own email in the To: field
3. Enter Subject:
4. Click “Design View”
5. Create your message.
In the message, you must put in how to unsubscribe.
Here’s the code
http://yourdomain.com/store/cart.php?unsubscribe=##Email##
Replace yourdomain.com with YOUR domain and make sure the path to your online store is correct.

6. How to add an image from a product in your store (optional):
First you will need to know the exact URL of the image. Navigate to the product and then put your mouse over the image you want. Right click and select “View Image” and you should see just the image all alone. The image URL is now displayed in your browser. It might take the form of “https://yourdomain.com/store/prodimages/imagename.jpg”

Copy the URL. Now back in the Newsletter area, put your cursor where you want the image to go, and click on the little “Insert Image” icon that looks like a tree. Paste in the image URL.

7. Click Send email. Don’t worry, this only sends it to you, if you clicked “Test” earlier.

8. You should receive the email. Check it over for errors.

9. Now you’re ready to send out the real thing! Uncheck the “test” box.

10. Put your cursor in the To: field and click the “Insert in the To Field” little icon. It looks like a little envelope with a lightening bolt. It will put this: ##Email## in the To Field.

11. Click “Send”. Do NOT refresh your window or close it - it needs to stay just as it is until it’s finished. It may take several hours.  One of my favorite clients uses this in her store and it takes about 20 hours to send it to her huge database.

If for some reason it stops in the middle, do whatever you can to avoid refreshing the page and starting over, as it will send it to your readers all over again. If you accidentally log out, for example, open another window in your browser and log into your store.  Then in the Mailshot window, click “Pause” and then “Resume” and it will continue where it left off.

A detailed description of the Advanced Newsletter/Mailshot admin area is here:
http://www.ectmodifications.com/installs/mailshot/Mail_Interface2.html

Watch the video:

Here’s the email my client received:

Subject: your website
From: “Jason Adams” <jason@keyphraseplacement.com>
We can put your site at the top of a search engines listings. If this is something you might be interested in, send me a reply with the web addresses you want to promote and the best way to contact you with some options.

Sincerely,

Jason Adams
Director of Marketing
Keyword Placement Inc.

But when you go to their website, you see this:

A suggestion to folks sending out spam from a website domain: It’s probably a good idea to actually have a website up and running at your domain before you send out your spam. Having an error message like this doesn’t look good.

It’s also important to note that the client who received this email is already at the very top of the search engines for her targeted keywords - which is probably how the spammer got her email address in the first place. Ironic, isn’t it?  The penalty for being ranked well is getting spam asking you to hire people who can help you rank well. 

And here’s a nice bit of information: This email has been sent out with many different names, as you can see form this link  to the Cedar Hill Community Blog, which has apparently been collecting spam. It’s been sent out from “Chris Thomas PowerPoint SEO” and “Mike Taylor Placement Technologies“. This link to the J-Town Traffic Watch has these names and “Linda Mancini“.

UPDATE: Wow, they’re busy sending out spam today. Two more have arrived to my clients:

From: “Mike Lewis” <mike@keyplacementseo.com>

We can put your site at the top of a search engines listings. If this is something you might be interested in, send me a reply with the web addresses you want to promote and the best way to contact you with some options.

Sincerely,

Mike Lewis
Director of Marketing
Keyword Placement Inc.

———————————–

(Note from Jill, keyplacementseo.com actually has a working website, perhaps this is the actual company that’s sending out all the spam today)

———————-

Subject: your website
From: “Paula Reynolds” <paula@clearpathtraffic.com>

We can put your site at the top of a search engines listings. If this is something you might be interested in, send me a reply with the web addresses you want to promote and the best way to contact you with some options.

Sincerely,

Paula Reynolds

—————

(Note from Jill, clearpathtraffic.com  redirects to http://bbs.100te.cn/newstyle/zantingtz/1.htm and that appears to be in Chinese? And how come Mike and Jason get to be “Director of Marketing” while poor Paula Reynolds has no title. How unfair!)

Update: 4/20/09 from one of my clients, another clearpathtraffic spam:

Subject: your website

If you’re interested in showing up as a first page result for more search
terms on google and yahoo, reply back with all addresses you’re looking to
promote and the best number to contact you with details.

Sincerely,

Linda Harrington

Note, the return email is to Linda@ClearPathTraffic.com, but no other company name or contact info is mentioned. ClearPathTraffic.com is still showing a bunch of  Chinese characters on it. And looking at the Whois for ClearPathTraffic.com, I find this additional evidence they are in China:

Domain Name      : clearpathtraffic.com
PunnyCode        : clearpathtraffic.com
Registrant:
Organization   : LiFeng
Name           : LiFeng
Address        : ChengDuDaShiJie246Hao
City           : ChengDu
Province/State : SiChuan
Country        : CN
Postal Code    : 610041

Here’s the spam from “Victoria Ulter”

Hello this is Victoria Ulter touching base with you about our V/MC Processing Suite of Services. We were trying to reach you for quite some time and I wanted to see if we could just send you some information in the mail so you could determine if our services were of need at the moment?

The mailing address we have on file is 6556 Mother Lode Dr in Placerville, CA. If this is still correct please let me know and we’ll send you a brochure.

#1.) New - Corporate Group Discount Program

You can join at no cost for our Corporate Group Discount Program which will give you 90% Off an entire host of services from:

>> >> Office Supplies
>> >> Shipping Services
>> >> Printing Services
>> >> And More

#2.) Our Main Area- Credit Card Processing Programs

> > Best Rates and Fees: Please Note We Do Not Charge PCI Compliance Fees

Discount Rate: 1.39% swiped and 1.79% keyed
Mid-Qualified and Non-Qualified: 2.25%-3.25%
10 cents for Each Transaction
$5 Monthly Statement Fee
No Contracts
24 Hour Funding/Free Online Reporting

> Free Terminals including New Nurit 8400 Landline, New Nurit 8000 Wireless,  Virtual Terminal System, OTI Contactless

#3.) 18% Premium Cashflow Loans and/or Cash Advances, Receive Funding In 48 Hours

#4.) Free New Point-Of-Sale System, A $1,000 Value At No Cost

#5.) Check Processing Service For Only $1.00 A Transaction, No Discount Rates For Checks

#6.) 100 Free Custom-Designed Gift and Loyalty Cards

#7.) Free ATM Machine Program, You Receive $1.00 Of Each Surcharge Just For Having Our ATM At Your Location

#8.) Fuel and Fleet Programs Including Voyager and Wright Express

#9.) Private Label Credit Cards So You Can Issue Your Own Credit Lines To Customers

#10.) Partnership Opportunities For Banks

Please let me know if your mailing address is still the same to send the brochure and also if this is the correct email address to forward the Link to our Purchasing Site for the Corporate Group Discount Program.

Thanks,

Vickie Ulter
Business Development/Marketing Assistant

See the end of the email? Notice the complete absence of a company name, a company address, a company email or phone number or website? This is how you can figure out if an email is really a legitimate business. Look at the return email address. In this example, it was vulter@autoemailsystem48.com - again, if someone is a legitimate company sending email, their email address should come from that company. Look for these clues before answering any unsoliticted email you may receive!

Subject: Live IP Verification
From: PayPal (return address is check@mail.com)
Reply-To: noreply@mail.com
To: undisclosed-recipients

We noticed one or more login attempts from a foreign IP address.

Log In now to resolve the problem.

The link goes to: http://windowmevision.co.za/live/read.php which of course isn’t PayPal, in fact, it’s a website that is redirected to: http://sa-in.com/catalog/images/.live/id.htm and this website has duplicated PayPal’s logon screen.

Again, this is NOT a PayPal website, it’s a phishing scam.

You can report fake PayPal emails here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/securitycenter/antiphishing/PPPhishingReport-outside

And fake PayPal websites here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_external-webform&f=pps_spf

This website is still live, so the more folks that report it, the better.

The first red flag I found, was when I tried to check out, and got to the page where you enter your name and billing information. My browser (Firefox) gave me this warning:

Security Warning

Your have requested an encrypted page that contains some unencrypted information. Information that you see or enter on this page could easily be read by a third party.

Now, since I work with online stores, I know that sometimes these warnings are triggered by very benign issues, so I went ahead to the next step in the process since it hadn’t asked me for my credit card info yet.

The second red flag, was that the online store was charging me $9.95 for shipping. Now, I was purchasing carbon offsets - meaning that there was literally nothing that was being shipped to me. Not wanting to get charged for shipping when there was nothing being shipped, I stopped the checkout process and started looking for a phone number to call.

The third red flag, was that the phone number I found didn’t work.

So I emailed the company telling them about all of these issues. This was a Saturday.

On Monday, I got a phone call (from a wireless number, according to my caller id) from the company. Even though I had detailed all of the above issues in an email, they wanted to know what my problems were.

I told them about the security issue, and they assured me their store was secure. I politely informed them that, no, it wasn’t. Until my browser warning goes away, the store is not secure. They said they would relay this to their “technical staff”.

They also told me that since my purchase was under $50, I was being charged shipping - even though nothing was being shipped - they said, sorry, that’s the way the online store is set up. They offered to give me a refund after I made the purchase. They were not the least concerned about charging other people for shipping when nothing was being shipped.

Then they said that their website was being completely redesigned and that it would be done “next week” and all these issues would be fixed.

Lastly, I told them about their non-working phone number, and they said, yes, it was fixed now. (I called to verify this, and while it was working, it was a voicemail for a person - it didn’t mention the company name at all).

I asked the company if they would email me when their online store was secure, and they said they would, and then simply hung up.

Since I develop online stores for my clients and do quite a bit of online shopping, I am always on the lookout for online stores ways of conveying trust - telling their prospective customers through all kinds of ways that they can trust their online store. But trust must be earned, and when you encounter a security warning, unwarranted shipping charges, and a disconnected phone number, you’re inclined to take your business elsewhere. With online stores, details matter!

I ended up purchasing my carbon offsets from a different company, whose website was secure, who didn’t attempt to charge me shipping, and who had a real live person at the other end of the phone.

Why would you need a private form? Well, their current/old method of reporting Google Map Spam was a public forum, so if you reported a company for suspicious Google Map activity, the company could find out you reported them and give you some grief. This happened to me recently and it wasn’t pleasant.

I emailed the Google Map support person with my situation, and she assured me it would be fixed soon.

And this morning she emailed me the new totally private Google Map Spam Reporting Form.

There’s also a new general form if you need Google Map Help.

This means if you see your competition abusing Google Maps by entering multiple listings for their business, you can report them to Google privately, without fear of retaliation. You can also get help with your own Google Map problems in private. Many thanks to Google for listening to the issues of their Map users and responding so quickly.

Thank you Google!

(Due to offensive comments received, comments have been disabled on this article. Some people don’t like it when they’re caught cheating I guess)