All of the credit for this blog article goes to one of my clients who received this inquiry and did her own investigation to conclude it was a scam. This is apparently known as the “Asian Domain Registration Scam” and the company or person is attempting to trick people into registering domain names they don’t need. My client received an email from the NTWifiNetwork.com that claimed to be concerned that another person in Asia was trying to register the .com version of her domain as .cn (China), .hk (HongKong), .asia (Asia), etc. So if her business was bluewidgets.com, their was an alleged person trying to register bluewidgets.cn, bluewidgets.hk, and so forth, and the email was saying “hey, there’s someone else out there trying to register your domain name and if you don’t do anything in 5 days, we’ll process his application”. The email is posted below:

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Like many of my blog articles, this one is written based on one of my client’s experiences that I’m hoping others won’t repeat. She has an online real estate tools website that helps real estate agents improve their marketing. She decided to outsource her search engine optimization (SEO) to a company she found on Biznik. After paying money to this company and waiting a month for the work to occur, she asked me to review what they had done. This article will focus on the link building portion of that work. Based on my investigation, I believe this is an excellent example of a link building scam.

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I wrote an article about a bad experience I had with Citysearch in January of 2007 and since that time, have received many comments from readers detailing their experiences with Citysearch. Due to my bad experience, I haven’t had any interaction with Citysearch until recently, when one of their account executives (a salesperson) contacted me via email with an offer. Unfortunately, this experience wasn’t pleasant for me either. (As you read this article, which is lengthy, please understand that in my former pre-webdesigner life, I was a Directory of Quality for a fortune 500 company – and part of my job was to improve customer satisfaction and prevent engineers from cutting corners on quality. This perspective and past experience greatly influences my strong desire to help small business owners avoid getting caught up in online marketing schemes.)

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You know how when people are on vacation, they tend to be more trusting of other people than they would be in their own city? I think that Biznik and other social networks have a similar effect. People who use Biznik (including myself) are typically using it to network with other people in their region. It’s a friendly place where users post smiling photos and information about their businesses. Everyone is nice and happy to offer you free advice. But don’t let down your guard, because the bad guys are on Biznik too.

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Great news for those of you who have competitors who you think might be spaming Google Map listings (adding more than one listing for a single business): a representative of Google Maps has just emailed me with a new private form!

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You may have read my previous article published in January 5, 2009 about Google Map Spam – Multiple Listings By The Same Company. I noticed that in my fabulous traffic tracking tool (Web-Stat) that I had several visits to this particular blog article from Google in Mountain View California. I hoped that maybe, just maybe, Google was reading my blog article and would fix this particular issue. I thought, no, I was just having delusions of grandeur.  I just checked my listing, and it’s now moved up to #1 for “website design seattle” and the two duplicate listing are gone!

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I am frequently contacted by folks looking for small business web design. My business is hopping, so I can afford to be careful when selecting which clients. For those of you who are shopping for a web designer, I wanted to share with you the 10 most common non-technical things that will cause me to turn down a job – and things that just might help you avoid getting scammed by an unethical web designer.   I know these items aren’t unique to the web design field. And if you run a small business – these may be very familiar!

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Recently my beloved website traffic tracking company, Web-Stat, announced a new feature: Geo-Targeting. This nifty feature enables your website to automatically detect a visitor’s location and do neat things like showing a particular banner ad or other location-specific content. It also  allows website owners to block all kinds of traffic to their websites by country, state, zipcode…and many other things. I thought, hmmm, why would someone want to block traffic? The answer: Spam Prevention!

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Google Map Spam? What in the world could I be talking about? I’m sharing this with you because in doing some SEO work for a client I discovered this shameful practice of cheating Google Local / Google Maps listings. Very shameful and unethical. If you find a company that’s spamming Google Maps, use this private form to report it.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I had one of my clients tell me she had gone to a workshop held by the “Internet Marketing Center” and that she was glad she went because she gained some knowledge about internet marketing techniques. So I decided to check out the website of the organization to see if it might be of help to my clients. This blog article gives just a brief overview of what I found.

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I received a phone call from a very frustrated prospective client the other day that I’d like to share with other people who might be thinking of starting their own website design businesses or shopping for a website designer. Here’s a tip: Hey all you web designers! Take care of your clients AFTER you finish their website design. Sound simple? Apparently not.

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I had a client recently forward unsolicited emails she had recently received that claimed to offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. I wanted to share these emails with you and to give you my comments on their legitimacy, or lack thereof. Read the rest of this entry »

This article is written for those of you who are in the process of looking for a website designer. One of the good things to do when you’re shopping, is to look through the web designer’s portfolio. Most folks looking through a portfolio of websites will notice the obvious, like what the websites look like. This article was written to hopefully help you notice something a big less obvious: whether the web designer is using “real” domains, creating “sub-domains”, or “directories” for his website clients.

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If you’re like me, you do quite of a bit online activities that utilize secure websites. Shopping on online stores, banking, and investing all require a secure connection between your browser and the website you are sending your private information to.

But how often do you notice whether the little padlock in the upper right hand corner of your browser is actually there? This article serves as a reminder to always, always, always check.

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I recently had a good friend ask me to figure out why her friend’s website was not coming up in Google. After a quick review, the answer was obvious: the site had no text content, it was 100% flash. It also had zero backlinks. There was no reason why Google would rank this site, in fact, it wasn’t even in the Google index at all. It had a splash page, and played the same music on all pages. Which leads me to a familiar theme that keeps running in my head: who should you select to design your website: an Artist or an Engineer?

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Beware of Pay-Per-Click Advertising on Citysearch!

After spending many months focusing on getting good organic search engine rankings for my own website, I decided to get some experience with pay-per-click advertising for two reasons. First I wanted to see if it would increase my own site’s traffic. Secondly, I wanted to be able to recommend a pay-per-click strategy for my clients. I decided to start with well known Citysearch. (Update: I now am confident in recommending Google AdWords for those clients who need pay-per-click traffic – but you must actively manage the ad campaign. If you want help managing a Google AdWords campaign, click here.)

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