Archive for March, 2006

Vonage - do you plan to wake up?

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

We are getting several emails from people that say they have had the same experience with Vonage we have. Here is one from Charlotte, NC from Edward and included with his permission:

Charlotte, NC 28211

comments: I have the same problem with Vonage and Bell South. Both are pointing fingers. It has been over two months. I appreciate your webpage. I was able to file form 475 for what that is worth. Vonage is great once it works but if you have a problem… Yeowza… Did you ever get yours to work?
—————————————————————————————–
(Yes, ours works now but we had a dead phone for just under 2 months.)

Posted in Vonage | No Comments »

Google - Bigdaddy

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

By now Google should have finished their massive Bigdaddy indexing. Quite a few people experienced problems on this update. One of Google’s goals on this was to bring together multiple domain URLs that point to the same site so that they appear to Google as a single site. For example:

http://www.netadventures.biz/
http://netadventures.biz
http://www.netadventures.biz
http://www.netadventures.biz/index.html

and even http://www.carltown.net, is an older domain we have that points to our new site.

These are all the same web site on my host. Google sees all of thee as different sites. This splits my PageRank over the various sites, depending on what is used to link into my site. Moreover, Google will try to identify these as a single site, but of these which site should Google use as my main URL?

One of the goals of the latest update is to develop better heuristics to help Google on this. Google has a fancy word for this - the resulting single site is called the canonical site.

For more information see a blog post by Matt Cutts, an employee of Google:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/2006/01/page/4/
This is a little old (January 4), but has lots of great information from Matt. As an important technical interface to Google, he can keep you up with the latest. Notice this same blog post (with comments) also refers to to the Google six-month Sandbox.

One thing you will see with this post is a way to help Google know which URL is your canonical URL. It involves setting up a 301 redirect on your host for the sites that aren’t canonical.

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

Using Directories on the Internet

Thursday, March 9th, 2006

There are several differences between the directories and the search engines of the Internet. Here are a few:

  • A directory generally organizes sites by categories and subcategories. You choose the category for your listing. Search engines have no categories or organizational structure.

  • When submitting to a directory, you suggest your site to a human operator. The operator may or may not enter your site to the directory. Search engines use an automatic submission, finding your site from links to it from other sites.

  • With a directory, you only submit your site once. You may be able to edit it later, but there is a lot of emphasis on getting it right the first time. With a search engine. your site is entered as soon as the engines see a link to it and the listing is continuously updated.

Does a Directory Listing Help You?

What good does a directory listing do you? Since when have you used a directory to find what you wanted on the Internet? People don’t. Then what use is getting listing in a directory? In most cases they give you very little direct traffic.

A directory listing is important for most people with web sites, however. The reason is that a link from a major directory to your site is considered a trusted link. A trusted link helps your position in the search engines. So a listing in a directory generally draws little traffic in itself; but by being considered as trusted it moves you up in the search engines and improves your web traffic to your site from the search engines.

For more, see:
http://www.netadventures.biz/searchenginedirectories.htm.

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

Google Adding Features

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006

Here are a few new features in Google. Unfortunately, for most of them you will be on a waiting list…

Create a Web Site

Google lets you create your own (and free) website using an easy-to-use page creator. Pages created in this way get no preferred treatment in search engine positioning - but hey, it’s free! Pages are indexed and ranked by Google, however. You can’t assign a domain name to your site - it defaults to:
http://your_account_name.googlepages.com.
For more information and to get on the waiting list see:
http://pages.google.com.


Track Your Site Statistics

As mentioned earlier (much earlier), you can have Google track a lot of information about your site. To get on this waiting list see:
http://www.google.com/analytics/

Using a Sitemap
By now you should know that creating a site map can help the positioning of your site dramatically. See our SEO book for why. But did you know Google can create the site map page for you? Here are some things you can do with a Google sitemap:

  • Find the most common words Google is indexing for your site

  • Find the top search queries that are returning pages from your site

  • Which queries lead to clicks

  • What pages could not be reached and why

  • If your robots.txt file is working right.

For more information see:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

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

Vonage going down the tube?

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006

The problems Vonage is having with its customers are increasing. Back in November of 2005 when we first reported our problem with Vonage a Google search on vonage +support +blog returned 297,000 pages. A search on the same term in Google today returns 609,000 pages - more than doubling in about 4 months. Vonage is going down the tube faster than a bobsled at the Olympics. Instead of pouring more money at those Yahoo ads, they should be putting money into fixing their problems. And the fact that Vonage can cut off your phone for almost two months not compensate you makes me believe that Vonage seems oblivious to any ethical or moral values in selling a product that appears to be failing.
More

Posted in Vonage | No Comments »

Crusading Against Spam - Part II

Friday, March 3rd, 2006

With a Bush Administratin and Congress that seems owned by te DMA, the business of stopping spam is in your own hands. And yes, it can be controlled. To quote Jim Louderback, Editor-in-Chief at PC Magazine:

We can’t rely on someone else to fix this problem…Although the bad guys are ultimately to blame, each of us, individually and collectively, holds the power to wipe them out. “

First line of Defense

Our host has a spam blocker for all our email. If you host with us, we can provide you with a spam blocker for $10 a year. We also have a spam blocker on our personal system that catches some of the stuff that gets through. If spam or a phish makes it this far, the IP and domain goes into our black list that is at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm. This goes to hackers that like to nuke hosts that pass spam. Sometimes (for U.S. hosts), we’ve notified the state attorney general. After all, it is illegal (as a result of the CAN-SPAM act.) To get off the black list, the spammer has to pay us a fine.

There are many black lists out there maintained by various companies and people. There are also servers that send out automatic updates on these lists to those that subscribe to them. Ours is free.

Once you are aggressive on this with your own black list, you better have good protection on your system as the bad guys will target you. You need good antivirus, both hardware and software firewalls, and a good anti-spyware system.

Protecting Your Web Design

Never put your email address on any of your web pages. There are plenty of those bad guys that farm pages to get email addresses off the source code to spam and phish. Use a form for people that wish to contact you. Our contact form is at http://www.netadventures.biz/opmcontact.htm. You can look at the source for this page and see an email address, but it is a virtual address and won’t work. The form processor on the host converts the virtual address to a real address and the form works - and we are protected.

Stopping Blog Spam

After we got 27 blog spams in one hour (we think someone was targeting our blog), we realized we had to do something. We added a really good spam blocker to our blog, and even the bad guys are complementing us. If someone spams our blogs now, they get a warning. If they continue to spam, the blocker gets more aggressive. Moreover, the blocker learns with time and gets better the longer, automatically creating its own black list. It is totally automatic - no work on my part. If you do send a real comment and it gets blocked, use our comment form to let us know. The thing stopped 11 blog spams the first day.
What About You?

If you need help in this for your system, we are available. We can even help you start your own black list. Contact us by phone or email.

Posted in Blogging, Spam, Web Design | No Comments »

Latest Google Dance

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006

Well, the latest Google dance is stabilizing. What did it do to your PageRank? More important, what did it do to your positioning on your keyword phrases and what did it do to your site traffic? Did it hurt or help you?

If your site dropped in the rankings, remember that Google is really trying to improved the quality of the returned results on searches. If you dropped in ranking 0r positioning, the chances are it’s because you are spamming the search engines or either you made some changes in your site that affected your ranking. Here is a quick checklist to run through:

  1. Be sure you aren’t using keyword stuffing. You can spam this way by using primary keyword phrases too much on a page OR by using the same keyword phrase as the anchor text (visible text) on too many of your incoming links. Also, avoid using hidden text or cloaking.

  2. Be sure sure your pages have lots of text. Splash screens are murder on search engine positioning. Your home page should have 300-400 words of text.

  3. Search engines can’t see image links or JavaScript links. Flash links don’t work too well, either. Even if the search engines can read a Flash link, it won’t use the link to help your position much if any. They also don’t like redirects.

  4. Search engines can’t use dynamic links; that is, URLs with special characters in them.

  5. Be sure all the code on your pages is valid. Some code errors can prevent indexing.

  6. Be sure you aren’t linking to any sites that are spamming the engines. Don’t link to link farms and similar types of sites. Be sure when you do reciprcal links, that you are only reciprocating with sites that directly related to your topic. With a directory, you site should be in a section of the directory that relates to your topic or location. If you haven’t made changes in your site, this is more likely the problem for a lost ranking.

  7. Be patient. During a Google dance, your PageRank and position may go up and down. Give Google some time. Also, if you are a new site Google generally won’t rank you too well for several months. There are some ways to defeat this (see our book); but this is the general strategy.

For more information, get the latest version of our book.

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