The FTC recently fined Fashion Nova $4.2Million for withholding negative reviews on their web site aka “Review Gating”

Review Gating FTC Rules Compliance – When it comes to getting reviews there are some obvious rules your should follow ethically AND because your customers (or potential customers) will figure out if you’re trying to ‘game the system’…

• asking for reviews only from happy customers (known as Review gating) and only showing reviews that get a high rating is a bad idea, not only is it against the FTC rules, people will spot it…
• Positive and negative reviews should be treated equally – in other words you can’t use pro active moderation to ‘filter’ out bad reviews
• Any incentives should always be disclosed and transparent
• DO not ask for reviews from friends, family and members of staff

we know that the FTC is understaffed and overburdened with cases to investigate, so if you’re not a big company getting lots of complaints, there is every chance you can get away with ‘flirting with the rules’ for the moment, but…

1. eventually the FTC will get hold of AI tools that make this kind of thing easy to detect and chase
2. more importantly imho, your potential customers ARE NOT STUPID!

They will spot if you’re ‘stacking the deck’ and have only good reviews…

In fact, asking for reviews only from happy customers, or only displaying reviews above a certain rating, can hurt more than it helps…

Having no negative reviews at all is an obvious “too good to be true” red flag to most potential customers

A ‘natural’ reviews profile will include negative reviews, the process of reputation management isn’t about stopping these reviews happening, they are a healthy function of feedback from a businesses customers…

It’s about re-framing the business mindset as to what a negative review is and the opportunity it represents!

There is so much positive to potentially be gained from including those negative reviews and then responding to them positively, showing you have done your best to solve whatever the problem was, and hopefully doing enough to turn the customers opinion back to a positive experience!

This builds more genuine authority for the good reviews you have!

After-all, Unhappy customers will leave a bad public somewhere review whether you gate your review process or not!

AND a business should actually want to be aware of unhappy customer feedback as soon as possible!

After all, if there’s a problem with your product, service, staff, process or delivery, the sooner you become aware, the sooner you can fix it and head off any more unhappy customers leaving negative feedback!

Sometimes a negative review is a simple reminder that as business owners we need to constantly be on top of the value we deliver to our customers, if we want our business to grow, over delivering and responding to feedback should always be a focus – putting the customer first goes a long way to building a healthy business in my experience.

Negative reviews can also help reduce customers who are a bad fit because the offer/product/service doesn’t actually do what they think it does or are looking for…

in other words – avoid problem customers!

and Vice versa, this can also help conversions when people see that the issue isn’t relevant to them.

Then there’s the golden nugget of a negative review that then has a positive follow up from the customer because their problem has been handled correctly!

All of this goes to show why understanding ‘Reputation Management’ and being able to handle that correctly for a local business is a high value service that can generate serious recurring income for your agency

The problem is the platforms that provide this as a service all charge monthly recurring fees, with restrictive limits on locations and/or numbers…

The Power Online Reviews plugin and Agency Dashboard allows you to do the same for a one off investment at a fraction of the cost

and it makes it easy to help your client stay compliant to the FTC rules!

Watch the Review Gating FTC Rules Compliance Demo here:
https://seouk.com/online-client-review-plugin/

Or check out the product here:

https://agencyclientfinder.com/s/jzpor/

For transparency – I am a part owner of this product, so this is not an impartial recommendation, I had this app built to fulfill my agency requirements.

Online Client Review Plugin – Get More Customer Reviews Local Agency

Any local agency owner will tell you, getting customer feedback can be a struggle to say the least.

And it’s no secret that unfortunately happy customers are actually less likely to leave a review than unhappy customers.

Add to that the basic human psychology that we need a lot of positive reviews to counter balance just ONE negative review and you can see why the whole topic of customer reviews can be scary and more than a little stressful for local businesses…

In fact for new businesses it can sometimes be the difference between success and failure, especially in high review markets like hospitality.

Being able to help them get out in front of it, get more positive reviews, and manage the negative one’s pro-actively, not only helps their business, it’s also an opportunity to reduce their stress levels!

And let’s face it, we all know just how important reviews can be to the buying process, how often do you make a buying decision without checking the feedback for the company or product first?

You’re not alone:

• 86% of consumers read reviews of local businesses
• Consumers are 68% more likely to use a local business if it has positive reviews
• 70% of customers use ratings filters to see only businesses with 4-star and higher ratings
• Businesses with more than 80 reviews earn 54% more in annual revenue
• When searching for a local business, 60% of customers check Google My Business for reviews

source: Review42.com

This is of course a massive opportunity – being able to provide this as a service to local businesses is something you can charge for on a monthly basis, and it’s got to be the easiest ‘pitch’ you can make to a business, they already know the value you’re offering and understand why they need more positive reviews!

But how can you do that ethically, without breaking any rules?

Simple – by asking for MORE feedback, MORE often!

And making sure you manage that feedback…

This is where the “Power Online Reviews” plugin comes in, it makes it easy for a business to ask for feedback and reviews directly from customers on their site and manage the results internally.

There’s also a QR code generator that can be printed or sent via emails to get customers to exactly the right page on the site without having to type in a long web address URL

There’s a number of advantages you get from this process –

1. You get more feedback, and usually the extra reviews you get are positive, because happy customers are usually happy to say so, you just need to ask…

2. You control where the reviews go – by keeping it in house you can get ahead of any bad feedback before it gets on one of the main review sites where it can be more tricky to deal with.

Simply by getting back in touch with the customer to find out why the weren’t happy, and what can be done about it you can usually turn things around.

You’ll be surprised how far a “Sorry” and a discount coupon for a future purchase will go to head off a potential problem or negative post.

Remember most people will be a LOT less unhappy if they know you’ve listened to them, and shown some consideration for what made their experience negative.

The plugin can automatically send an apology message, along with a request for more information, which can help the local business quickly get to the root of the problem and fix it.

3. For the happy reviews you can set a ‘happiness level’ (e.g. 4 or 5 stars out of 5) at which the software will then ask the customer to repeat their review on one of the major review sites to build up the businesses online review profile!

The plugin can integrate with all the major review sites, including Facebook, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Google My Business, Trip Advisor, Ebay, Amazon, depending on what the local business needs.

The plugin also has a central “Agency Dashboard” where agencies can monitor and manage all the feedback across all their clients sites to provide a valuable “managed” service, making it even more ‘hands off’ and stress free for the local business.

Running a Local Business Agency can be very rewarding just from helping solve clients problems and increase their business value, having the opportunity to get them more positive customer reviews and relieve their stress levels makes it even better!

https://agencyclientfinder.com/s/jzpor/

Local Agency Client Finding App

Running a local business agency can be more than just financially rewarding.

The ability to help local business solve their online problems, reach more clients, bring in more leads & sales, and generally make their business more profitable can be very satisfying.

But before any of that can happen you’ve got to ‘get your foot in the door’ – and that is usually a serious uphill battle, even for the best trained sales people.

There is a way to turn the standard random scattershot process of lead prospecting on it’s head, and give so much value up front that you build immediate authority and have prospects reaching out to you!

To give your agency the best chance of success, it’s not just about finding potential clients – you need a way to quickly sift through and find the best quality prospects, businesses that need the simple services you can provide quickly, easily and profitably!

Then you need a way to stand out from your competitors.

A way to demonstrate instant authority and get the clients to close themselves!

Agency Client Finder Local Lead Generation Tool Updates

Here’s the process:

• Qualify the BEST clients – Not every client is equal, you should always look for the best clients to work with
• Analyze Their Needs – Reach out to a prospect with the wrong offer and you’ve lost them, you need to know what they need
• Show Authority – Deliver value in your first contact instead of just selling and the clients will close themselves for you
• Follow Up Hands Free – We all get busy, having a simple follow up process in place can double your new business for free

All of this can be done manually through the search engines and the right free third party sites & tools, if you know where to go, and how to perform the relevant searches.

But doing all this by hand is obviously going to take up too much time to be able to scale your agency in any appreciable way…

The more time you have to spend hopping from one tool to another the less clients you’re going to have!

That’s why you need an all-in-one client finding app like Agency Client Finder that manages the whole process, you just pick your niche & location and run the app through the steps.

You’ll end up with a bespoke report for each prospect that details their current online presence in detail, with what areas need to be addresses, fixed, or added.

Including:

• Full SEO Analysis – Are web pages search engine friendly
• Web Page Speed Tests – Full analysis of web page load speed performance
• Find Social Sites – Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Linkdin etc. related accounts
• Full Security Checks – Test for malicious code & viruses and blacklists
• Online Reviews – Check reputation with Google and other online reviews and star ratings
• Validate Emails – Validate email contacts and protect your email quality score
• Analyze Website Framework – Is site WordPress, Godaddy or Shopify etc.
• Test For SSL – Ensure sites have correct https security and valid certificate
• Google Maps – Check inclusion and correct location in Google Maps
• Google My Business – Check the Google My Business (GMB) listing is claimed and completed
• Full Telephone Number – Find telephone contact numbers for businesses
• Mobile Friendliness – Are sites mobile friendly and responsive
• Check Redirects – See if website automatically redirects from http to https
• Web Accessibility – Test web accessibility for user with disabilities. Legal requirements
• Directory Citations – Find and check all listings in important business directories

And more…

Instead of ‘pitching’ to the prospect, you are giving them a road map of what their online property is missing and how to move forward – then simply offer to help them move forward with that plan.

Running a Local Agency can be hugely rewarding, but it’s more likely to be that way when you can get high quality prospects and provide them with real value up front, without having to fight your way through the gatekeeper, or guess what services the business actually needs…

https://www.AgencyClientFinder.com

Despite the ever-increasing amounts of data that result from the use of high-resolution images and HD videos, website visitors expect to access the information with the lowest possible loading time. However, this is always not the case for websites run by small businesses.

Why?

Because they rely on a simple server, which often reaches its limits, especially when there is a high number of visitors.

Fortunately, using Content Delivery Networks for small business solves this problem. In addition, this technology is very efficient for those that wish to expand their structures or even have a faster portal for customer access. Want to know more about Content Delivery Networks? Read below and learn its benefits to SME’s

WHAT IS CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORKS (CDN)?

Traditionally, a website available on the Internet was hosted on a single server, and each access generated a new request to it. In the case of thousands of simultaneous accesses to a page, the site becomes slow and unstable. In this case, the Content Delivery Networks (CDN) service was created to solve this problem.

Therefore, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of globally distributed nodes and cache servers. That is, the content is stored on the main server, but then mirrored on additional, geographically distributed servers of the delivery network.

By distributing the servers, websites, and content with large amounts of data are played out at high speed regardless of the location of the user. This relieves the load on the main server, protects the page from overloading, or even collapsing when there is a lot of traffic.

This is particularly beneficial to websites with images, audio files, or videos, which requires a lot of bandwidth. The distribution of the files through the content delivery network significantly relieves the burden on your own server and speeds up the provision of the data

At first, its role was limited to improving content delivery by replicating commonly requested files (static content) on a set of globally distributed caching servers. However, as its popularity continues to grow, new features emerge.

BENEFITS OF CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK (CDN) TO SMALL BUSINESS

1. REACH A WORLDWIDE AUDIENCE

Using a Content Delivery Network, your content will be replicated and available as close as possible to the user. This means that the content will be distributed worldwide without having to go back to the origin server each time a new user connects.

In this case, you improve the user experience, thanks to the optimization of latencies.

2. IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

If you browse websites frequently, you know that the page load speed can count for a lot. If you have your website on a shared server or on a very small server, the page may not be delivered at the desired speed, compared to a website hosted on a dedicated server.

In addition, if a long-distance person accesses your site, they need to go a long way, which will cause a longer delay in loading. Therefore, performance is the factor that decides between instant content delivery after access and seconds of waiting.

One of the goals of CDN is to keep the latency between requesting content and displaying it as low as possible. Of course, you can’t do that if the content’s original server is thousands of kilometers away.

That is why the cached content in the CDN is stored on numerous servers around the world in order to get the shortest possible distance to the user.

3. AVAILABILITY

The global network of servers around the world also plays a major role in terms of content availability. If one of the points in the CDN is unreachable and busy, the request is simply forwarded to the next possible.

This does worsen the performance a little but does not ensure that the content doesn’t load at all. Still, its loading speed will be better than from the source.

This means that even under stress, CDN guarantees the fluidity and smooth functioning of the website. With the address always available, you will have always satisfied customers.

4. MORE SPEED AND CONVERSIONS

Research has shown that most users do not return to a website with poor performance. In fact, the majority of them give up after just five seconds of waiting. That is, a slow portal tends to receive less access, thus, carry out fewer conversions.

For this reason, enabling the CDN hosting service also reflects an increase in sales and access. For small businesses and even for news sites, this is the basis for building a good reputation and getting more customers.

5. BETTER PLACEMENT IN SEARCH ENGINES

When using CDN, in addition to your customers being more satisfied with the page’s response speed, SEO resources are also optimized. SEO techniques are useful for your site to appear in the top positions of search engines.

The quality of the information displayed and the consistency of the website as a whole. For example, websites with good speed are valued by the main search engines, something essential to gain good positioning.

Therefore, the use of CDN hosting improves your SEO work as a whole, and this means more organic clicks and more active users on your site.

6. TRAFFIC PEAKS AND SCALABILITY.

When it comes to the web, you never know when there may be an increase in traffic. Most hosting providers do not support a volume far beyond their average traffic because their systems would fail.

For this reason, some providers deactivate your site or deliberate measures that harm the operation of the site. This is done to avoid harming other clients.

Fortunately, CDN helps with great efficiency to avoid this problem. As static content on your site, which is often responsible for 80% or more of your traffic is cached on edge servers.

This creates a huge relief on your original server. Therefore, they don’t have to deal with high requests, just as your hosting provider doesn’t have to deal with a surprise demand.

This makes your site more scalable with the least possible effort, avoiding any outage scenarios that cost money and damage your business reputation.

7. INTEGRATION WITH DIFFERENT PLATFORMS

Another benefit of CDN is the integration with the different website creation platforms. Services like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and many others allow easy installation of CDN hosting without the need for technical knowledge.

This process is usually done entirely by plug-ins and does not require editing the page code directly.

For people used to working with content publishing services, the implementation of the CDN is simple and does not require the hiring of a specialized professional.

There are, of course, advanced settings that further improve the experience, but getting started using the service does not require in-depth knowledge in web development. In addition, many CDNs offer public APIs that allow you to integrate proprietary applications efficiently.

8. LOW OPERATIONAL COST

Operating a 24/7 site is not an easy task. You need to control access (network) and infrastructure resource usage (CPU, memory, and disk usage), database performance, and page response time. When a problem occurs with any of these variables, you will incur a lot to repair the damage.

However, with the benefits that the CDN brings in the perception of resources, infrastructure, and operation, this type of situation is much rarer.

Even a simple routing problem, which could result in slow complaints, goes unnoticed since CDN servers are spread across several different networks and sites. This distributes your site content normally.

9. VERY SECURE

In parallel with the growing number of data and transactions, the number of cyber-attacks on IT systems is also increasing. Unfortunately, the focus on the theft of data is targeted on the servers. This poses an enormous financial threat, especially for small businesses, which incur high losses in damage every year.
Most of these attacks are so-called DDoS attacks, but they only serve to distract from the actual attacks.
With DDoS attacks, servers are flooded with requests until the resources are insufficient, and they fail.

In view of the constantly growing possibility of threats, the requirements for the security of a CDN are high. It is not easy to distinguish legal traffic from targeted attacks and to intervene in the event of danger.

However, many of the modern Content Delivery Networks have very sophisticated and constantly developed security systems that are able to ward off threats. Keeping them away from the origin server and thus prevent major damage.

CONCLUSION

There are countless advantages to hiring and using CDN services. The tolerance towards slow-loading websites has decreased significantly on the part of users.

This is why fast loading times have now become one of the central aspects of a website. Also, this is reflected in the fact that search engines such as Google increasingly consider loading time as a ranking signal.

Content delivery networks offer the right solution for small businesses that want to grow and improve their user experience.

Lastly, In addition to all the benefits above, many CDNs offer the opportunity to try before buying the service, and with some (including the one we recommend) the free version will do all most business need..

So, take the opportunity and see the difference.

No matter what size your company is, your website is at risk, in fact over 43% of cybercrimes target small businesses!

Industry experts will point out it’s not a matter of ‘if’ you will get hacked, it’s more a case of ‘when’…

In this day and age almost every businesses relies heavily on technology, which opens up the potential of hackers getting in to your website and costing your company time, money and lost clients!

Whatever product or service you offer, hackers see small businesses as an opportunity to profit, at your expense.

Over 50% of businesses across the world admit they have had at least one attack in the last 12 months, and those are just the ones that have some way of knowing it’s happened…

Many businesses that get hacked don’t realise until it’s way too late and the damage is done – Would you?

[wptrafficguard id=’38’]

9 Cyber Security Tips For Every Small Business

Here’s the basic steps you can take right now to strengthen your website is security today:

1. Keep it up to date – Form the operating system on your computer to the themes and plugins on your site, ALL of these need to be kept up to date, automatically if possible.

Older and out of date software is the bread & butter of hackers, it’s where there are more KNOWN ways they can get in to systems, so keeping all your systems up to date is a big step in the right direction.

2. Don’t leave the windows open – not just the physical ‘RW’ windows, but all the computers in your office. Your staff need to be educated on the importance of security and shown how to put their computer in to sleep (or switched off entirely) whenever they leave their desk.

And login screens should all be password protected – otherwise ANY visitor to anywhere in your office (or out of the office if you have staff with devices out and about) becomes a security hole.

3. Use real passwords – ‘pass1234’ does not cut it as a secure password!

It’s essential to use strong passwords, such as DiceWare generated passwords [https://diceware.dmuth.org/] AND they should be updated several times each year.

If you have any shared passwords you should limit who has access to them and change these far more often.

To make your logins even more secure, wherever possible/practical your should use 2 Factor Authorisation (2FA) where you need an extra code generated by an app on your mobile, or texted to you.

4. Phishing emails – do not click on unexpected links or attachments, ever!
AND check the from email address is the genuine email address expected, not someone else pretending to be the client/customer/contractor etc.

Thieves are becoming more sophisticated and are willing to invest the time and effort to setting up fake email accounts that mirror a real clients email, then hijack emails to get funds redirected.

5. Get Anti Virus Software – Windows 10 has pretty good security built in, but adding an anti virus program adds another layer of security for thieves to get through.

You can see test results and comparisons of the best anti virus programs here:
https://www.av-comparatives.org

6. Make sure your site uses https protocol – this should be a priority for a number of reasons:

a. it not only makes your site far more secure

b. it also helps your ranking in the search engines

c. and it increases your reputation with visitors, yes, people do now look for the green padlock in their browser address bar!

Be aware this shouldn’t cost you the earth, in fact we show you where you can get an “SSL” certificate for your site for free in our web security action guide!

7. Backup – and yes, we’re talking about your website here, not just local files/data, don’t simply rely on your webhost taking care of this for you.

If/when your site does get hacked, being able to restore a recent backup is THE quickest and safest way to get your site back up and running.

There are also options on automating the process to make it hassle free, the simplest is running a plugin on your site that runs a backup and stores it somewhere safe for you on an automated schedule.

8. Secure your website – There’s quite a few actual steps involved in securing your website properly, so we’ve created a full step by step action guide for securing your website which you can grab by opting in below.

The obvious and easy steps that you should take immediately are to make sure you don’t still have default usernames [e.g. ‘admin’] or weak passwords [e.g. ‘pass1234’] for any of your logins.

9. Get Good Web Hosting – If you’re on ‘shared hosting’ then it doesn’t matter how secure your site is, if anyone else’s site on the same server gets hacked they will be able to get in to your site as well!

The upside hear is that good hosting on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) is no longer expensive, we can point you at some recommended providers, one’s we have tested and use for our own sites.

Learn More at BlogDefender.com

want to see what all the fuss is about and discover why doing keyword research the old way is dead?

watch this video…

The “traditional” way of doing keyword research is not only long winded, repetetive and boring, it’s also very hit & miss…

you can literally spend hours brainstorming and researching a few keywords and end up with none that are going to actually make you any money!

wouldn’t it make sense to come at it the other way around?

it’s actually a break in thinking on how to do keyword research, we call it the “Keyword Discovery Evolution”…

how would you like to be presented with a massive list of keyword/niche ideas and opportunities that are “discovered” for you, based on new & trending information, so you don’t have to do any brainstorming…

AND all of the keywords are pre-qualified to be valuable, based on them having traffic and a profitable CPC level, so you are only seeing real “Profit Opportunities”…

That’s exactly what we designed NicheReaper v2 for, see how it works and discover how to get the most out of it for your business before it’s too late…

Register Here: NicheReaper ver 2.0

Got a Question? Ask Here: http://seouk.com/questions/

The word is spreading, the glowing testimonials for this ‘must have’ WordPress tool just keep on coming…

Getting this kind of feedback makes the months and months of hardwork developing WPSim all worth while, so thanks to everyone who has left us some feedback!

don’t take our word for it, check out the testimonials below: –

Just purchased WP simulator and WP Cheat. Wish this was around when I first started to use WP. As then I would not of spent all that money paying someone to fix the mistakes I had made. Wow! For $50 what a deal!

– Andrew Ward

the Cheat Sheets, this is something I will cherish forever. This was the problem I was having… everytime I would get a wordpress sight up I never knew how or what to put on it… but thanks to the cheat sheets its all there for me…The BEST SOFTWARE I HAVE PURCHASED!
Thanks Matt… great Job!

– Cheryl Kolpin Marko

I have to say that WP Simulator is by far the most value for money buy I have made in 10 years or so online.

Not only that, the quality of the video tutorials is so high even I managed to get it up and running easily, and have my first Localhost live site imported and ready test without a hitch.

Matt seemed to have every angle covered as he worked through the video tutorials. Very professional.

– Roy

wow, Wow, WOW … Great timing, Matt!!

I already have “Blog Defender” and when I saw this offer yesterday it was a “no-brainer”…

the “clean themes” and overview of essential and suggested plugins is much needed and appreciated and are a HUGE time saver. Thanks!

Why hasn’t anyone done this before??

Congratulations on a job VERY well done! I’m looking forward to your next release.

– Greg Smithhisler

WP Simulator is a STELLAR product and was more than worth the wait!

I have been in this IM game for some time now and I have been through the pain and aggravation of screwing a WordPress site into the ground and having to rebuild from backups or even worse, scratch.

WP Simulator has now given me the freedom to create a copy of my live site on my local computer for me to test new things on without the fear of bringing down the live site.

Very cool!

If you are on the fence about this product then climb down off of the fence now and get WP Simulator before it’s to late. This is a must have for any WordPress user. I can assure you if you don’t get it, the time will come when you wished you had.

On a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 = sucks and 5 = Total Awesomness,
WP Simulator is a 5 PLUS!

– Steve Haase

As an internet marketer, I can assure you that this product beats the basic ‘localhost’ install I used to use 5 years ago until the present.

There is no clutter or aggravation anymore. Don’t think this is some rehash of a local host installation, WP Simulator is the ultimate test environment.

If you are new to the WordPress scene or just starting into this business, this is a must-have.

If you are a seasoned pro, then you bet your a** this is a must have!

If this product sold for $150, I would still get it in a heartbeat. I’ve been in this business for over a decade and WP Simulator delivers, period.

– Bob Blanchard

I know how good your products were I just bought this without a second thought.

As usual you are working hard to help us make money.

Thanks and I really look forward to using my new toy. It is going to save me hours as I have a lousy Internet connection as I live up a mountain and am the last phone on the line. Working off-line will be miraculous.

– Di Chapman

this all looks awesome.
I’ve wanted an offline solution for a long time & here it is… Thanks!

– Tony Bartlett

I think I would rate this as perhaps one of THE best programs I’ve purchased so far.

I wish this had been around when I first started on this journey as I’ve always been concerned about WP falling over, being hacked, breaking etc as I’ve heard happens a lot.

This concern meant I hadn’t actually started anything – I was always looking for that something to reassure me – and here it is!

The tutorials are fantastic, short, well put together, Matt’s voice is very easy to listen to and altogether a very professional set up.

So glad I made this purchase! Thanks to Matt and his team. Job very well done.

– Niki Bullas

your program that came to me “thanks to God (?)” just at the right time, not only for my personal WP usage but also for my WP workshop projects here in France (now that I have the main problem solved: how to teach WP to somebody that hasn’t already got his host and domain name + how to run WP locally on both PC and Mac)!

I watched all the videos and you should have heard me say
“Génial ! Formidable ! Super !” all along the way…

Everything works like a charm, the xampp installation was almost too easy

WP Cheat is also a great tool, when I understood that I could get rid of most of my graphic shortcode plugins (a “ahaaa” moment!) which are a big problem in case you want to deactivate them, there was no doubt that I would get it.

With Blog Defender that I already purchased before, you give to us priceless and must have WP tools, the ones that every WP blogger should get.

Again: THANKS!

– Alexandra Lemonnier

If I had to choose one thing I liked best about WP Simulator I would be like a starving hound dog in a butcher shop. This product is absolutely the best I have ever seen.

The list of essential plugins that you provided is worth twice the price I paid for this product alone!

Add to that the exceptionally well done training videos, the amazingly easy to use WP Simulator itself and you have a product that anyone who has ever built a website using WordPress dreams about.

Thank you so much for creating this product. You have saved me countless hours of website downtime not to mention the loss of potential customers due to a broken site when one of my “experiments” failed to work.
You guys are the greatest!

– Kathy Ball

Take a look at this brand new WordPress tool now and see for yourself why it’s getting such rave reviews and feedback: – WPSimulator.com

WordPress is great right?

Right up until it all goes wrong…

You add a new plugin or change your theme and suddenly something breaks…

The first thing that runs through your head is “How the heck do I fix this?”

Then it dawns on you, your site is now broken and all your visitors are seeing it!

That’s not going to create a good impression, they’re not likely to hang around and wait until you’ve worked out what went wrong and fixed it, they’re going to go somewhere else…

Now you’re in a rush, you try to roll back the changes and even that doesn’t work…

Panic starts to set in…

None of this needed to happen, how often do you see this kind of crap happen to the “Pro’s”?

It does happen to them, but no one ever gets to see it..

Why?

Simple, they have a secret to developing their sites and testing everything out safely, without anyone getting to see their mistakes…

And now you can too!

Discover how here: –

WPSimulator.com

This is on a Dimesale, so go grab it while the price is still low!

P.S. If develop sites for clients this will let you do it all offline so you can get it all just right before the client ever see anything, just like the Pro’s do…

P.P.S. This is one of our own (SEO UK Ltd.) products that has been in development for over 4 months!

One of the signs of a good webhost is that they keep you up to date on important stuff…

On 9th April I was informed by my hosting company that they were experiencing a pretty big “Brute Force Attack” and that they were taking pro-active action to mitigate the effects.

As it happens, neither of my decicated servers, or my VPS, have had any down time since the attack began, that’s what you get from using a good web host company.

My blogs have not been hacked either, as I have secured them as per the BlogDefender.com WP security process. It works.

Now it turns out that this attack is one of the most significant ever, simply because of it’s scale. The “Botnet” in question is using over 90,000 unique I addresses (from compromised/hacked computers across the world) and attacking a large number of hosts across the globe, specifically targeting WordPress sites.

Securi.net have seen an increase in brute force login attempts increase from 31k per day last month to over twice that, at 77,410 per day this month!

In fact they say that brute force attacks against WordPress have trebled in recent months!!!

and here’s a quote from HostGator’s blog: –

“there is an on-going and highly-distributed, global attack on WordPress installations across virtually every web host in existence. This attack is well organized and again very, very distributed; we have seen over 90,000 IP addresses involved in this attack.”

Some hosts have had to go to pretty extreme measures to keep their servers and their customers sites up and running, even so far as to globally disable access to wp-login.php on sites, so their owners are locked out until the host can put a better solution in place.

Again, neither of my dedicated servers had this happen, as both hosting companies were able to deal with the problem in other ways, without causing clients like myself a problem.

This botnet is mainly targeting /wp-login.php and /wp-admin to try and get access using brute force, and obviously the main target for login attempts is the username “admin”

The top passwords targetted include some fairly obvious one’s, make sure you’re not using something as weak as any of these:

admin
123456
666666
111111
12345678
qwerty
1234567
password
12345
123
123qwe
123admin
12345qwe
12369874
123123
1234qwer
1234abcd
123654
123qwe123qwe
123abc
3123qweasd
123abc123
12345qwert

if you are using something like this then you may already be hacked…

We’ll be sending out an update to BlogDefender.com members shortly on how to check to see if you have been compromised.

so what about some practical advice…

The most important thing you can do right now is:

1. Make sure you have a super strong password
2. check out BlogDefender.com for a full, step by step, WordPress security tutorial.

Extras:

1. delete any unused plugins & themes
2. setup an “admin” that doesn’t use the name “admin”, and delete the one that does
3. make sure all your plugins, themes & version of WP are up to date

please hit the “like”, “share” or G+1 button(s) if you found this useful…

Sources:
http://blog.sucuri.net/2013/04/mass-wordpress-brute-force-attacks-myth-or-reality.html
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/strategy/item/32269-massive-brute-force-attack/
http://blog.hostgator.com/2013/04/11/global-wordpress-brute-force-flood/
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/04/brute-force-attacks-build-wordpress-botnet/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22152296

Recommended Hosting:

Unixy
LiquidWeb

You can never have too many backlinks, right?

Well, actually nowadays you can, if: –

~ you have too many of the same types of backlinks, your link building must target a variety of sources, and some are now far more effective than others

~ if your links have too few “anchor texts”, again variety is the key

~ if you have too many links from the same site, ‘site wide’ links can get your site penalized by google

but that’s not all, here’s what are (imho) the 3 biggest “Backlinking Myths” or mistakes right now: –

Backlinking Myth #1: Backlinks are all about getting link juice

Wrong!

You should be aiming to get 3 different types of traffic as a result of your backlinks: –

a. the free, targeted, organic traffic that comes from ranking well in the search engine results

b. direct traffic, in other words REAL, live visitors finding and clicking on your link

c. VIRAL traffic from people sharing your link with others

the last two are where most automated link “submission” tools fall over, the sites that they submit your links to simply don’t get any real traffic to pass on, so they may give you a bit of a boost in the SERP’s (search engine results pages), but you’ll get little to no real visitors clicking through those links.

AND these are excactly the type of links that recent Google updates have been targeting to ‘downgrade’ the link juice boost they give.

Backlinks myth #2: If you get more links than your competitors, you will rank higher than them…

Nope, it’s just not that simple…

For Google to rank your site high now they are looking for a ‘natural’ link spread or ‘footprint’, in other words you need link from a variety of sources.

You should also be getting links to your internal pages, not just your home/index page.

If the majority of your links are from one source/type of site, or if they ALL point to your home page, Google will see this as “unnatural” and your site won’t rank well.

Link Building myth #3: Backlinking doesn’t work since the latest Google Updates (Penguin specifically)

Wrong again.

Linkbuilding still works.

the only difference is you need to be getting a variety of in bound links to your site, and yes, some are more effective than others.

It really boils down to one simple aim that Google have, which is to deliver the best possible search results (i.e. good content) for people’s search requests.

So a succesful link building strategy needs to be based on this, it has to focus primarily on sites that Google recognises as being designed to promote and share good content.

The upside is this is not only effectively “white hat” link building, it’s also concentrating on site that deliver real, live visitors.

Here’s the simple 3 step plan to follow: –

~ dig out sites that encourage people to promote and share of good quality content…

~ test them out to work out which offers the best organic ranking benefits, direct traffic AND viral traffic (take all 3 in to consideration)

~ add your content & links to take full advantage of all 3 traffic types

This way you’re no longer simply looking for links that give you a bit of a boost in rankings, you’re targeting sources of genuine website visitors!

Of course the usual problem them rear’s it’s ugly head, how do you find the time to do all this, especially if you have more than 1 or 2 sites…

That is where automated software tools can step in, but only if they will get you the right kind of links, most simply don’t.

‘DTG’ is brand new and it does exactly that, check it our here: ~> Automated Linking Software

[this post: http://seouk.com/3-backlinking-mistakes/ ]