We sometimes have clients contacting us in desperation when it comes to SEO – either because they have no idea who to trust, or worse, because they’ve been ripped off by what’s know as ‘black hat’ SEO fly-by-nighters. Black hat means they are the ‘dodgy brothers’ of the SEO game and best avoided.

But how do you know who’s honest Joe? And who’s going not only rip you off, but may also get your site black banned on Google, or worse, destroy your good name and leave your online reputation in tatters?

Let’s start with how to recognize the bad guys… the ‘black hats’…

How do you know if an SEO Company is ‘Black Hat’? They will try to out-smart Google by various unethical and ‘illegal’ tricks, they…

• Send you email ‘spam’ out of the blue. Actually I never trust anyone that sends me spam – of any kind. Spam is evil, and spam must die. It usually reads like this:
  
• Won’t explain what they do – usually because they’re using illegal techniques that could get you blacklisted from Google results pages altogether. And being blacklisted from Google is bad – your site won’t show up even for your business name or URL address. The only solution being to get a new domain and website, and start all over again.
• Will promise to register you on “1,000’s of search engines” – so what? Google has almost 90% market share, so why bother?
• Will promise you ‘thousands’ of links to your site, often on poor quality sites known as ‘link farms’. These are the sites that you stumble upon that are just full of links and nothing else, these sites are known as search engine spam. Google is savvy to these sites and if you have a link on one of them, your ranking may actually suffer.
• Use ‘blog spamming’ – this means to create links by various ‘spamming’ techniques like posting your domain name to hundreds of blogs comments fields. This makes your business look REALLY BAD, and will kill your online reputation. Imagine if you had to try to clean up hundreds of spam links to your website? Where would you start? You’d be better off starting all over again with a new site. Read last month’s case study of one of our clients who had this happen to them.
• Guarantee you a number #1 organic ranking on Google, by either claiming to have ‘cracked the Google code’ or that they have some kind of ‘special relationship’ with Google. No one can truly promise you a #1 ranking because the Google algorithm is top secret, and only a handful of people actually know it. Want to know more about how Googlebot works? Check out this article on Wikipedia.

Okay, so what about the good guys? (AKA the ‘white hats’… )

A ‘white hat’ SEO plays by the rules. And they should be able to…

• Show you examples of their previous work & success stories: They should have some real-world examples to show you wherein they have improved a site’s Google ranking, and also show that this has had a positive runoff in terms of real-world sales conversions. That is, their efforts have directly improved the client’s bottom line.
• Show you real client testimonials… from real people, not made up ones!
• Display honesty and transparency – explain exactly what they do, and how it affects site rankings.
• The proof is in the pudding – their own site should rank well for top keywords and exemplify their efforts and SEO skills.
• Keep up to date with the latest developments in SEO, e.g. how Twitter or Facebook might improve your SEO efforts.
• Play by the rules and follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: If they play fair everyone wins out in the end. Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Want to know more? Contact Meri Harli, SEO and Social Media Specialist, on 0408 369935, or email: meri@whitedoggreenfrog.com.

Not if, but when, Collingwood win the flag this year, we’ll give you 10% off any web development work during the month of October if you sing the Collingwood club song “Good old Collingwood forever…” to Haleemon. If you’re not a Collingwood supporter, you still must sing it with a smile!

Go the mighty MAGPIES!

We had a recent upsetting case of a well-established owner, with a business name like somebusiness.com, finding to her dismay that one of her competitors had registered a .au domain of the same name – somebusiness.com.au.  Understandably she felt that her competitor, a much smaller business with lower quality standards, was trying to trade off her good name.  At the time she’d set her website up, we remember suggesting she consider registered the .com.au domain, and now she’s in a difficult position, with little chance of recourse.

“Domain pirates” as they are called, regularly register domains that might be wanted by existing companies or businesses, and put them up for sale at exorbitant prices.  More troubling is the disturbing practice of some companies in the US, where they register known domains as they expire, in the knowledge that they’ll be able to hold any business owner to ransom.  Sometimes a domain owner is successful in negotiating a purchase to get their domain back, but they often have to outlay sums like US$500 or $1500 to be successful.  Unfortunately, domain ownership is difficult to challenge, once a domain is registered, and unless you are a multi-national with hordes of lawyers willing to monster unaware domain registrants, there’s actually little that can be done.  (If you do try to negotiate a price down, don’t sound too interested or desperate, and don’t let on that you’re committed to that name!)

So, if you have a domain name, we recommend you register the .com or .com.au counterpart – this is known as “Protective domain registration”.  For instance, if your business had the domain somedomain.com.au, try to get the name somedomain.com registered if it is available.  Domain name checks should form part of your due practice as a business owner starting up a business.  As you look for a viable name for your business, also look on the web to see if you can register a domain with that name.  Try to keep the name reasonably short, and reconsider if a close competitor has a very similar name registered as some of your customers may end up going there instead!

If you have a larger (or internet-based) business, you may also consider registering the other domain variants such as somebusiness.net, .org, .biz and .info, although they are still less commonly used than the ubiquitous .com domain ending.  The very large companies will also register companysucks.com and —-company.com (where —- is common and unprintable).

We don’t recommend you go overboard with this, but bear in mind how you’ll feel in 5 years time when you’ve forgotten to do this and your competitor comes in at the last minute, grabs a domain similar to yours, and starts stealing your customers.

We don’t think you’d be happy!

Read more:   SCAM warning, Choosing the right domain name

News Snippet: Recent surprising mobile phone sales statistics show that Blackberry and Android are outselling iPhone, with a study showing percent market share for recent smartphone purchases as:

• Blackberry (RIM) – 33%
• Android – 27%
• iPhone – 23%

If you’re like me, this is surprising both in that iPhone are *not* the market leaders, and that Android sales are doing so well (and from what we hear, growing).

Reed has an Android phone, and loves it!  Haleemon loves her iPhone and Brian is teetering on the edge of iPhone-ness!

The study was by Nielsen in the US and makes for interesting reading.  In particular, Blackberry shows the lowest number of people wanting to continue with the same brand, perhaps showing a growing dissatisfaction.  It’s worth noting that the study excluded measuring corporate phone use, which would probably push Blackberry stats higher.

From a web point of view, the statistics are interesting for a number of reasons:

• an iPhone application will actually not reach as many people as you think it will
• as a variety of new iPhones come available, websites that work well generally on mobile phones, as websites, will become more important

Click to read more

Here’s a PDF of his slides: WordPress-AM-20100814-6up

A special offer was mentioned for MPCUG members – call us and mention MPCUG and get 6 months of our standard hosting on either AU or US servers for (total) $10.

Probably less interesting to the technical audience: a special WordPress offer for non-technical users (needing a site and hosting put together from scratch) was mentioned; call us for details.

Thanks for listening guys, and great to meet you!

Turns out this SEO company was spamming (randomly posting in) blogs with generic comments that link back to her website. Comments that not only had poor grammar, but misspellings of the suburb (Armidale is in NSW, “Armadale” is a suburb of Melbourne) as well:

Your blog is very enriched. You can see my website [Company Name] Australia which is best [keyword] Shop in Melbourne, Armidale, Brunswick. It also eminent [keyword] Suppliers and [keyword] Stores as well as best [keyword] Shops in Brunswick, Melbourne, Armidale .

**Please note that we have removed the company name, website, and industry keywords

Apart from the blatant grammatical mistakes and awkward language, this comment is being spammed on many (87 at last count) blogs in this particular industry – and these poor quality postings can really tarnish their professional reputation. What’s worse is that most of the blogs that are being spammed with these comments are hosted on Blogger/blogspot.com, a blogging platform owned and operated by Google. This is considered “black hat SEO” which is essentially a foolhardy attempt at fooling Google.

This is what will happen – there will be a spike in the client’s website’s ranking (which could possibly justify this SEO company promise of a listing on the 1st page of Google), but once Google tracks what is happening, our client’s website will be blacklisted. When you’re blacklisted on Google, you not only lose your ranking but basically will need to start at the bottom (which could be page 1,000!) and re-establish yourself all over again trying to earn back Google’s trust by submitting a request reconsidering your site. Not worth it.

This same SEO company had posted comments and entries on behalf of this company on sites and directories completely unrelated to the client’s industry, such as the “adobe learn” site and “athiest news and views”.  I rang up the company because I had to hear for myself their sales pitch: “We guarantee you’ll be on the first page of Google” and “It takes 3 weeks”. Disgraceful.

This is what the Official Google Webmaster blog page says about spam comments.

Unfortunately pleading ignorance just isn’t worth the headache and negative penalty effects that your site might receive as a result.

The quintessential tip-off of a dodgy company:  guaranteeing you’ll appear on the first page of search results.

Google does not disclose their searching algorithms. Google pays their employees very very well, provides all kinds of perks, essentially treating their team like royalty so that there aren’t rogue employees who tell all of Google’s deepest, darkest secrets; what is the likelihood that some random company can hold true to their promise/guarantee your business to be listed on the first page?

Google provides a LOT of information on their site and in the Webmasters area. Before you pay some dodgy company $200-300/month (yes, that’s what they charge!) to ruin your ranking, arm yourself with information. You don’t need to be an expert, but you should walk into the meeting with some knowledge of the basics.

If you’re lucky and persevere, Google may be forgiving in the long run. The question you need to ask yourself is how many months will your site not appear in the search listings and how much business will you have lost as a result? Moreover, how much money will you then in turn need to pay for a legitimate SEO expert to fix your ranking, remove your site from being blacklisted, and put you back into Google’s good graces? Think about that and whether it’s worth it?

Unfortunately, ignorance is not bliss and in this day and age, you get what you pay for. These dodgy companies prey on innocent, unsuspecting business owners and lure them in with false promises.

Knowledge is key, read for yourself straight from the horse’s mouth in Google’s SEO Starter Guide the do’s and don’ts so you aren’t fooled!!

Firstly, does the proposed internet filter protect our children? In short – no, in fact, and perhaps surprisingly, it makes it much harder to do so! Let’s talk about why that’s so in more detail – because in a lot of ways that runs counter to what you’d think.

The proposed filter works by blocking known bad or problem websites (such as phishing or malware sites that infect your computer). Once it is active, those sites cannot be reached directly. The problem lies in the fact that there are a number of workarounds for filters – the most common being “proxy sites” and what is known as a “VPN”. Proxy sites work by making it look like the access is coming from somewhere else, so the site can be accessed through the intermediary. Unless we filter all the proxy sites, we can’t stop that from happening – and even if we filter all the known ones, new ones pop up all the time. Once the sites are being accessed through proxies, it becomes harder to detect that they are being accessed. “VPN” access works by taking all the traffic from your PC and running it through a site in the US, making it automatically bypass any Australian filtering system. This is one serious concern re filtering – a filter simply pushes much of the traffic access underground, making it harder to detect and deal with. It doesn’t actually protect our kids, and dangerously, it may lull many parents into thinking that they’re safe.

Perhaps the most foolproof method of protection is basic common sense – create a sense of family around internet use. Have the computers in a public area, or at an absolute minimum, facing a bedroom door which must be open during use. One family I know bought an auto timer for their modem and set it to turn off at 10pm, thus effectively shutting off internet use overnight. However, at the end of the day, nothing can replace encouraging an open culture with your kids where such things are able to be discussed.

Secondly, are there dangers in the setting up internet filtering that may cause problems down the line? To look at that very simply and briefly, let’s examine actual history from a democracy not too dissimilar to Australia – Turkey. Turkey introduced an internet filter only two years ago. In that time, already the whole of YouTube and Google have been censored – two major sites that in themselves cannot be considered controversial! Do we really want to create the mechanism that would allow our Government to walk down the same path, even assuming all good intentions and perhaps a saner government?

Good news – filtering is already available for free

The good news is that there is already a simple family filter, ready to use, which can be used to cover all the PCs in your house. Provided by OpenDNS, FamilyShield prevents access to porn and questionable sites, and perhaps more importantly to virus and bank phishing sites. The virus filtering in itself should make this a no-brainer! To get this set up, visit the FamilyShield site which explains it in more detail – you’ll need to change an entry in your ADSL modem settings. It’s about 10 minutes work for an IT guy to do, if you know someone. Once this is done, most bad sites will be filtered, and you can further customize the sites that are filtered by setting up your own OpenDNS account.

It’s a pity that ISPs don’t yet provide this service in a re-badged form, but from an ISP’s point of view, there’s not much demand for this service, it would create a support burden, and no other ISPs are offering it. Ironically as soon as one ISP starts offering it, I’m sure the others would follow suit! Rather like the “unlimited” plans maybe!!

For the IT administrators among you: If you have a Billion modem or a modem that supports the dnsomatic.com dynamic DNS service, or are willing to run an OpenDNS client on your network, you can create an OpenDNS account which allows you to be specific about what you want filtered – there are over 40 regularly maintained and updated categories.

This article is obviously not directly web-related – if you like it and find it useful, please comment and we’ll continue the occasional trend of publishing other types of articles.

–

Cameron Male, Director of I-net Central says, “Installing this technology into the modem/router is far more effective long term rather than installing some flimsy software on each computer which can be bypassed with a small amount of computer knowledge”

Please welcome John Marryatt, our new Sales Manager. John was involved in selling content managed websites back in the year 2000, and comes to us with 20 years of sales experience.

With great fondness and sadness we had to say goodbye to Wendy McMahon this month. Wendy was our Office Manager and has been a huge help over the three years she’s been with us and we are already missing her friendly cheerful presence around the office. Wendy has moved to work closer to her home and we wish her all the best for the future!

Brian has been to Colombia several times over the last year working with a charity “Let the Children Live”, based in Medellin, the second biggest city with a population of about 3.5 million and an ongoing problem with street children.  Brian has fallen in love with Colombia and has been helping them raise money, learning Spanish, and WDGF is in the process of redoing their websites.  If you’d like to find out more, drop us a note; they are struggling as a result of the deepening English financial crisis and paradoxically the strong Colombian peso.

Brian has been quite the busy man; he has also recently been interviewed by James Gardiner from CineTechGeek. In this two part video, they discussed creating cinema websites, how to set one up, selling tickets online, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and making it work for the cinema site as well social networking. Check out the videos here and let us know your thoughts:  Part One and Part Two.

You may have set up Facebook, Twitter, maybe even an RSS feed of blog posts, but don’t discount what a newsletter can do for your business – and for your customers.

When your visitors sign up to your mailing list via your newsletter sign up form, you are in control of what you send and when you send it; and email newsletters cost almost nothing to send compared to paper newsletters – these being distinct advantages!  By the way – your newsletter should provide valuable and useful information, and don’t forget the ATTENTION GRABBING HEADLINE!

It’s important not to be annoying or self-serving in your newsletters;  I always recommend only very subtle selling, if any, especially in the first 2 – 3 newsletters, then perhaps add a special offer in the fourth newsletter. Obviously it depends on what industry you are in as to what the right mix is.  You should, of course, have links to your blog posts that are relevant to the content in the newsletter.  Also, don’t discount the value of getting people to sign up at your counter or in your office on paper for the newsletter – you can get a lot of people via old fashioned techniques!  If you do that, one important thing is to make sure you do add them to the newsletter in the next few days so they remember you.

Mailing lists are simple to set up and maintain, if you would like a consultant to contact you to assist you in setting up a contact form and mailing list, give us a call.  Mailing lists are a thing that builds up over time; if you start today, you could surprise yourself by how quickly you build up a big list – and that can be a valuable asset to your business.  After all is said and done, business is about human contact, and a quick note with some helpful and friendly information can be one way of staying in touch that costs very little.

Contact us today and get 15% off the setup of a newsletter mailing list.

Dear David,

Our records indicate that your account is overdue by the amount of $233.95. If you have already made this payment please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

_____
From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.37pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,

I do not have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead. I value the drawing at $233.95 so trust that this settles the matter.

Regards, David.

_____

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.07am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account

Dear David,

Thankyou for contacting us. Unfortunately we are unable to accept drawings as payment and your account remains in arrears of $233.95. Please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

_____
From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.32am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,

Can I have my drawing of a spider back then please.

Regards, David.
_____

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.42am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear David,

You emailed the drawing to me. Do you want me to email it back to you?

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles
_____

From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.56am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,

Yes please.

Regards, David.
_____

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 12.14pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

_____

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 09.22am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Whose spider is that?

Dear Jane,

Are you sure this drawing of a spider is the one I sent you? This spider only has seven legs and I do not feel I would have made such an elementary mistake when I drew it.

Regards, David.

_____
From: Jane Gilles
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.03am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Whose spider is that?

Dear David,

Yes it is the same drawing. I copied and pasted it from the email you sent me on the 8th. David your account is still overdue by the amount of $233.95.
Please make this payment as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles
_____

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.05am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Automated Out of Office Response

Thankyou for contacting me.

I am currently away on leave, traveling through time and will be returning last week.

Regards, David.
_____

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.08am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Hello, I am back and have read through your emails and accept that despite missing a leg, that drawing of a spider may indeed be the one I sent you. I realise with hindsight that it is possible you rejected the drawing of a spider due to this obvious limb ommission but did not point it out in an effort to avoid hurting my feelings. As such, I am sending you a revised drawing with the correct number of legs as full payment for any amount outstanding. I trust this will bring the matter to a conclusion.

Regards, David.

_____

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 2.51pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

Dear David,

As I have stated, we do not accept drawings in lei of money for accounts outstanding. We accept cheque, bank cheque, money order or cash. Please make a payment this week to avoid incurring any additional fees.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

_____
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 3.17pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?

I understand and will definitely make a payment this week if I remember. As you have not accepted my second drawing as payment, please return the drawing to me as soon as possible. It was silly of me to assume I could provide you with something of completely no value whatsoever, waste your time and then attach such a large amount to it.

Regards, David.
_____

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Tuesday 14 Oct 2008 11.18am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Whose spider is that?