Carl’s SEO & Web Design Blog

Vonage went IPO last week. The initial offering was $17 a share. By the end of the day it had dropped 12.6% to $14.85. This was the worst first-day drop for any IPO this year. James DeStefano, and IPO analyst, believed the drop to be caused by a focus by investors on their long term business model - heavy advertising spending to get customers. Vonage is not earning a profit at the current time and doesn’t expect that to change soon. At the same time, competition is increasing. Could it really be a lack of morals and ethics in their customer relationships?

Microsoft has a new operating system coming out in less that a year - Vista. Let’s look at some real questions about Vista. Are the rumors you hear about Vista true or false?

I’m going to need new hardware to run Vista.

Not really. but if you want the neat features of the Aero user interface you will need a good Direct9x graphics card . Example graphics cards that DO support Vista include the GeForce 7600 GT and the Radeon X1600 Pro. For legacy systems of recent years or systems without a good graphics card, Vista wil revert to a legacy mode that drops the fancy user interface. Within a few months, you should begin to see hardware selling that is certified for Vista but selling with the XP operating system.

Vista is a pretty face on an old system. Why upgrade?

Although the planned features for Vista have been dramatically scaled back, the emphasis has been on developing a system that was much, much more secure. The product is built on the Windows 2003 Service Pack 1, with lots of improvements. It is not built on XP.

Microsoft is having trouble developing Vista and that’s why the release is set back to early next year.

An operating system is generally the most complex program to run on a computer. It has to own ALL the resources of the computer and manage these for all running application programs. It also has to maintain security. Windows 9x systems, including ME, were not operating systems. Windows NT was Microsoft’s first stab at a real OS, and Windows 2000 was next. All of these took lots of memory and fast processor power. Windows XP was next and processor and memory prices dropped. Now you could have a real OS on your desktop.

It’s been six years now since XP came out. Vista now has to work with .Net, SQL Server, Office, Media Player, thousands of application programs, and more. It also has to provide an unprecedented security level for the user. There is also more competition and strong competition: Linux and Apple and even Google are breathing down Microsoft’s neck.

Vista won’t be secure.

Gates is promising that in the development of Vista they focused on providing much better security. Many features were dropped in order to focus on the goal in a very strategic way. To install applications, for example, you will have to enter a password. The malware artists are getting smarter and Microsoft can’t promise Vista can’t be broken, but you will have a much, much harder time doing it. And, let’s face it, with security issues the user is generally the weakest link. The better artists use social engineering to get the user to break their own system.

Vista has too Many Packaging Options

True. With XP, if you want the hot version of Media Center it only comes as an OEM version. You have to purchase it as part of a computer from a main-line manufacturer. You can’t build your own system and add it. With Vista, you will be able to purchase it as part of the Premium or Ultimate versions of Vista. Then there is the Vista Business version, which has the PC Tablet functions but not the Media Center. Or Vista Enterprise for corporate businesses. And then there are those features that aren’t ready yet that you may be able to add later.

We were getting quite a few reports during the last few months that people were seeing their sites come up in the search results of Google with the tag supplemental results. What does this mean and why was this happening?

Google keeps a separate index of sites known as the supplemental index that it uses when it can’t get enough hits for a query on its main index. This index primarily contains sites with duplicate content, little or no content, or old sites that no longer have links into them. Obviously, this is not a place you want your web site. Your pages won’t rank for anything here. You want your pages in the main index. To see if you have any pages in the supplemental index, you can search using site:yourdomain.xxx, where your yourdomain.xxx is your domain name. Pages in the supplemental index will be tagged as such.

The problem was more acute the last few months as Google tried to fix the problem of canonical sites. For Google, http://www.yourdoman.com is a different page from http://yourdomain.com. PageRank gets split between the two and you have duplicate entries. The last indexing was trying to resolve this problem so that Google would see one site as the canonical, or main site. During this indexing time Google was pushing a lot of stuff into the supplemental index.

The indexing cycle is now finished, however, and you shouldn’t see the supplemental indexing problem with a good site now. If you do, one Google employee has suggested letting him (or her) know at sesnyc06@gmail.com. Better yet, follow the directions in our previous post to use 301 redirects to help Google know what your canonical pages are.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.