Archive for February, 2006

Crusading on Spam and Phishing

Sunday, February 19th, 2006

We maintain a black list of IPs and domains that have spammed or phished us. This list is saved on our local computer in Microsoft Access and periodically uploaded to a MySQL table on the host that is made available to hackers, the FTC, and (when relevant) to individual state Attorney Generals. In mid-January this system failed and we’ve been working with Microsoft and various MySQL forums to try to resolve the problem.

The problem is resolved now and the black list is now again online. You can find it at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm
We’ve kept the local Access table updated during this time, so no information was lost. We encourage others to create their own black lists and distribute them until authorities are willing to take the lead. We will post more details on how we do this later.

The problem, we discovered, was a major fault in Microsoft Access. Several users have discovered and reported the problem; but Microsoft has done nothing at this time to fix it. The problem is in the module msjet40.dl. It apparently started causing problems when we updated our Windows 2003 SP3 to SP4. Some users resolve the problem by reverting to older SPs, but Microsoft asked us to stay with SP4. Instead, we had to replace the msjet40.dll module in Access with another MSjet40.dll two versions older, using version 4.0.62180. (Some users, apparently, succeed by going back only one version.) The problem with replacing, however, comes in that the protection scheme in Windows prevents you from putting older modules in newer versions of the program. So you have to go into the registry and turn this protection off before you can replace. And there is no standard rule on this.

Thanks, Microsoft, for your help. But wouldn’t it be better for you to just fix the problem.?

Posted in Security, Spam | No Comments »

Googles Sandbox: Real or Virtual

Saturday, February 11th, 2006

Those of us that struggle to get our clients to the top in the returned results know that Google appears to put new sites in a sandbox, or playground area. Your brand-new site may stay there for 6-8 months, and there doesn’t appear to be anything you can do about it. Meanwhile, you get a top slot in Yahoo and MSN. What happened?

Although the sandbox may appear real, there may be good reason to believe that Google isn’t really doing anything special with your site. The rules that Google uses to position your site may be doing what appears to be a sandbox affect.

Let’s look at some of those rules and see why this is true.

  1. If all else is equal, an older site will position better that a newer site. Google doesn’t like mom and pop sites. If your site has been around a while, Google figures you are here to stay.
  2. If you add links too fast, Google will penalize you. Unless you are doing something very special, fast link building is assumed as forced and unnatural. Google wants you to build your links naturally. With a new site, you are often trying to get a lot of links in a short time. To Google, that’s spamming.
  3. Google favors sites with links coming in from trusted and popular sites. That generally takes work over time. We’ve almost tripled our own visitor traffic over the last year. That takes solid work to do that.

This doesn’t mean you should wait around until your site bubbles up in the results because the sandbox is there - real or virtual. What is does mean is that you should develop a long-term strategy for your site by building links in from trusted sites. Build valuable content on your site so that other trusted sites want to link to you.

Posted in Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization | No Comments »

Purchasing Pay-Per-Click Ads: Yahoo versus Google

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

If you are planning to do Pay-Per-Click advertising, the biggies are Yahoo’s Search Marketing or Google’s Adwords.

If you purchase a Google Adword advertisement, your position in the listing is determined by the equation:

PI = CPC * CTR * text relevance of ad * history of keyword factors * other
where:
PI = position of your ad
CPC = cost per click
CTR = Click-through rate.

In other words, three of the five facters are determined by Google.

With Yahoo, I could buy a specific position. If I wanted to be #1 for a specific keyword phrase, I could purchase (or actually bid to purchase) that particular slot. Moreover, I could promise a client a position based on what they wanted to purchase.

This advantage is illusionary, however. First, I noticed that the advertisements on CNN (which are Yahoo ads) would often have a company at the top that had questionable ethics. In other words, regardless of their ethics a company could purchase the top slot. As a result, I realized I couldn’t trust any of Yahoo’s advertisements. The free or organic listing was more trust-worthy. With Google, I could drive a top position for my advertisment with little money if I had the click-through rate. In other words, with Google David could slay a Goliath.

Moreover, when I use to buy my ad Yahoo gave me 190 lines for the ad versus the 70 lines Google gave me. Yahoo only gives you 70 lines now.

The conclusion here (and Penny Marshall, a top Pay-per-Click expert agrees) - go with Google’s Adwords.

Posted in Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization, Web Design, Yahoo | No Comments »

More on High Web Traffic: Links

Tuesday, February 7th, 2006

Links to your site are important for that web traffic, but are important in two different ways: building search engine traffic and simple referrals.

Search Engine Traffic
A link into your site from a popular site is useful for positioning you well in the search engines if it is a text link and contains important keyword phrases. Redirected and dynamic links, JavaScript links, and links with the nofollow tag won’t help you much if any, for positioning in results. Links from spamming sites won’t help you, and I don’t trust any Flash links to help me. If the linking text coming in (anchor text) is your company name or your name, it won’t help much unless you are General Motors or some other branded text. Links from images won’t help, either. No anchor text with images.

Most directories can’t help much as they either link from your company name or it’s a redirected or dynamic link, with the actual page results determined when the entry is pulled from a database.

What you really want for good search engine positioning is links from trusted popular sites. Links from .gov or .edu sites are good as they are almost always trusted. If you can figure out a trick to get news on CNN or AP, you are going to get lots of traffic.

Referral Links

Links from most directories and blog postings won’t help your position in the search engine results much, but are important because they may have high traffic and can often refer traffic directly to your web site from their link. Anchor text isn’t that important. A few exceptions are directories like DMOZ (free) and Yahoo ($299/year), which give you a trusted link.

Conclusion

So the question really comes down to how you want people to come into your site. If they will be using the search engines, work to get good links from popular and trusted sites with anchor text that has your keyword phrases. If they are coming in directly from other sites or blogs, put a strategy together for getting your traffic in from those. For example, created a blog swarm by interacting with hundreds of blogs and commenting on the related topic, pointing to a related page on your web site.

Posted in Blogging, Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization, Yahoo | No Comments »

Want High Traffic? Web Sites versus Blogs

Wednesday, February 1st, 2006

For getting high traffic, web sites and blogs involve different strategies.

If you are using a web site to sell your ideas, visions, or services you will probably find that most people find your site using the search engines. This means positioning well in the engines on your relevant keywords. This positioning, at least in Google, is primarily controlled by the number of links from quality and relevant sites into your pages. Your basic strategy for high traffic, if your site is designed properly, is to build up these links coming in naturally over a period of time. Our SEO book can give you good strategies for that.

For using a blog, the strategy is different. Your goal is to build a blog swarm, or creating energy in a number of related blogs, that point to your blogs postings or web pages. A blog posting can link to your web pages or another posting or your web pages can link to a posting. The blog has to be dynamic, be edgy (to invite comments). In addition, you have to go out to related blogs and build energy on your topic there. Our blogging book details the strategy here.

Don’t expect to see a high PageRank on a page your blog points to or many other blogs point to it, but do expect to see a lot of traffic. If you have your blog properly installed, when you update it the blog “pings” the blog directories, letting everyone know you’ve updated your blog. Moreover, people can subscribe to your blog and get your updatings. All of this is automatic and dynamic. When you blog, information gets to interested users quickly. Updating a web page means a user gets it on a result page after Google has indexed it again - which can take days or months.

Let’s take an example. We put a page on our web site about some major problems we see with Vonage. Next, we searched on Google for blogs on related topics using phrases such as vonage +”customer support”+ +blog. Next, we uses the returned results to find blogs discussing vonage problems and entered our comments as a part of their discussion, with a link to our page in each comment. We kept going - must have gone to over a hundred blogs and commented. As a result, there is a swarm and the Vonage page on our site is one of our most popular pages. It really doesn’t have any PageRank, as it is almost a gateway page. Yet it has high traffic. There is a caution here. Blog comments should be related to the topic for which they are posted. If you do anything else, it’s consider blog spam

Posted in Blogging, Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization, Vonage | 4 Comments »

Major US Tech Companies helping China Block Internet Information Flow

Wednesday, February 1st, 2006

From FORTUNE magazine:
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Cisco came under sharp attack from leaders of Congress and human rights advocates for aiding China’s efforts to censor the Internet and punish dissidents. Seems like profit is more important to them than Freedom of Information. For more information, see Tech Under Attack

Or see the difference yourself. Search for tiananmen in http://www.google.com and then again in http://images.google.cn.

Posted in Google, Microsoft, Search engine optimization, Yahoo | No Comments »