I had a client recently tell me that she was emailing me “vector” images. The web, I thought, was made up of bitmap images - .jpg, .gif, .png - and so this confused me. I took some vector math in college - it was the math series right after differential equations - and boy was it confusing. So even to this day when I hear “vector”, I feel a little pit in my stomach.
I guess I’ve been lucky, I don’t get too many harsh, mean, angry comments on my blog. But this week I’ve gotten two, and so it got me to thinking about how blogging might necessitate having a bit of a thick skin.
I just got spam in my WordPress blog. Nothing odd about that. But what is odd, is that I recently wrote a post about getting spam from Amsterdam from IP addresses like 94.102.60.152. I added the IP address to my blacklist and the spam is now getting caught by Akismet. But then tonight a strange thing happened…
Today I received four similar spam comments in my WordPress blog. All four had email addresses that appeared to be randomly generated, and the comments were a single line of randomly generated letters and numbers, like j2miob2e5gylwz9w. But the interesting thing is: that they are all from Amsterdam.
I wanted to share with you another SEO (search engine optimization) and link building spam email one of my clients received and forwarded to me. If you remember my previous article about how to tell whether a company that sends you unsolicited email is virtuous, you should be able to decipher this one yourselves:
Clients often have free emails accounts when they start a website design project, and one of the decisions they need to make is whether to stick with their free email account or whether to utilize an email account that’s based on their website domain name. This post will review the pros and cons associated with each.
Tonight just for grins and giggles, I decided to see who owned Aldebaran.com - it redirected to another website, which meant to me that it wasn’t being used - so I figured I’d contact the owner and see if they wanted to sell it.
I’ve just receive an email spam that attempts to prey on folks who are having trouble paying their mortgages - which is pretty cruel. I’ll use this an an example of how to identify potentially fraudulent spam emails, what the CAN-SPAM act is, and how you can report folks that violate it.
When new websites are “born”, it make take a while for them to start getting search engine traffic. And you can’t get search traffic from a search engine until they have visited your website and “crawled” over it’s pages. It’s important for new website owners to know how to tell if and when search engines, like Google, the most important search engine, has come and crawled around their website. But how do you tell when Google has visited your website?
Anyone can put a Google AdWords Qualified Individual or Company logo on their website. So how is a small business owner to know that the person or company who claims to be qualified is really actually certified by Google?
This article is written for clients who may have just had their ECT (Ecommerce Templates) online store upgraded to a new version. One of the wonderful things about using ECT for your online store, is that they are very dedicated to continually improving their product, and come out with updates (newer versions) on a very regular basis. How do you, as an ECT store owner get the most out of your upgrade? Read on.
I received a classic email scam today that I wanted to share, just in case there was someone out there who was actually tempted to call the phone number. The email is from “George Aguie” of the “Abidjan ivory coast west Africa” and the return email address is “aguei11111jorge@yahoo.co.jp“.
Yes, my favorite web hosting company has a new feature that I wanted to let you know about: easy backups of your entire website - including databases and email! Although DreamHost makes regular backups for you, it’s a good idea to have a local (meaning on your own computer) copy of your website files just in case of a natural disaster. DreamHost is, after all, located in California 
Simply login to your DreamHost control panel, click on Home, then on Backup Your Account. Follow the instructions. When it’s ready, DreamHost will email you with a link and instructions on how to download the zipped files. Simply follow the email steps and download the files to your computer.
Another reason to adore DreamHost.
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I work on website redesigns, which means I often work in a temporary subdirectory. When I’m ready to launch the website, I move the files from their temporary home, into their permanent home, typically under the root of the website. But if I’ve installed WebYep on a client’s website, moving these files will break things, and since I can’t find this on WebYep’s FAQ page, I’m posting it here in the hopes of helping others.
If you’re undertaking a new website design, one of the things to consider is whether you want to have a custom logo designed, or simply use clip art or stock photography for your website. Since one of my clients, Jefferson Coulter, is a trademark attorney in Seattle, I asked him to write an article about this topic.
I’ve written two articles on click fraud related to pay-per-click services of Citysearch and Yellowpages.com. Both articles have received many comments from small business owners who had similar bad experiences. I’ve also received several phone calls from blog readers who wanted some advice from me regarding what to do after they’ve found themselves locked into a contract with a company like Citysearch, Yellowpages.com, Dex Online etc and are very unhappy with the results.
So here’s my advice to small business owners on how to avoid getting caught in the costly web of online pay-per-click advertising.
I receive link exchange requests often, and will share the most ridiculous ones I receive with you for two reasons. First, I want you to know when to decline these. Secondly, I don’t want you to actually hire a company that has people send out these awful, illogical, useless requests.
Like many of my blog articles, this one comes as a result of a client asking me to look into a suspicious correspondence received concerning their website. In this particular case, my client received a fax from a company called “Domain Registry Rights”. The fax was chock full of legal-speak, with scary words like “protecting a domain registrant” and poorly written warnings like “you are required to advise the domain notification processor of you intent to license this name or the expiration of this notice”. Very scary stuff, even with the grammatical errors.
I often receive requests from people I don’t know asking me to exchange links. Exchange means that they’ll put a link on their website to me if I put a link on my website to them. Then we’d become one big happy link family. And the more links to your website, the better, right?
Well, it depends.
I wrote an article in January ‘07 on my experience with Citysearch click fraud and since then have written articles on a client’s experience with YellowPages.com click fraud as well. Both of these article continue to collect comments from people who find them selves stuck in pay-per-click contracts that aren’t yielding any valid traffic. Many times these readers phone me looking for advice, which prompted me to write yet another article warning small business owners about signing pay-per-click contracts. I wanted to write this article to give readers an update on Citysearch and click fraud.
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