The email came from: Sunny with an address of Sunny@ntwifinetwork.com

To whom it may concern: 2009-5-27
We are a domain name registration service company in Asia,
Last week we received a formal application submited by Justin Lin who
wanted to use the keyword “_[yourdomainnamehere]_” to register the Internet Brand
and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn/.hk/ .asia/ domain names.

After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be
applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark.
We aren’t sure whether you have any relation with him. Because these
domain names would produce possible dispute, now we have hold down his
registration, but if we do not get your company’s an reply in the next
5 working days, we will approve his company’s application
In order to handle this issue better, Please contact us by Fax
,Telephone or Email as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely
Sunny
Checking Department
Tel: 86 513 8532 2060
Fax: 86 513 8532 2065
Email:Sunny@ntwifinetwork.com
Website: www.ntwifinetwork.com

Sounds plausible? What a nice thoughtful domain registration company to let someone know when another person tries to purchase domain names similar to theirs. Except it seems to be just a scam, an attempt to get you to register domain names you don’t need.

Here’s an article on this topic that my client found on ScamWarners.com. It’s the nearly identical email spam/scam except it’s  from “Treey, Attorney at law of Legal Department”. Both emails are from ntwifinetwork.com.

Another article that discusses a similar scam attempt, but with a different company: Asia Domain Name Registration Limited. Here’s the article: Asia Domain Name Registration scam. In this case, the recipient of the email responded and was encouraged to pay between $140 – $840 for five years for each domain registration. Keep in mind domain registration is typically around $10 per year. So they were attempting to lure the email respondent into paying over 16 times more than the normal price for domain name that they didn’t need or want.

Here are some additional links that describe similar scam attempts:

Asia Domain Name Registration Limited – Scam
Asian Domain Name Fraud Warning
Asia Domain Name Registration scam

Be careful out there!

Link building is a pain – no doubt about it. It takes a lot of time to get other people to create links to your website, and while I perform many different SEO activities for my website clients, link building is not one of them.

Even with my own website, I focus on adding content to attract links, rather than soliciting other website owners to give me links. I delete every single link exchange request I receive. So I was very interested in reviewing both the contract, and the evidence provided by a link building outsourcing company that one of my clients had hired. I was shocked and angered with what I found.

The SEO outsourcing company had given her a contract that included claims like:

“We will build 400 links from high-authority social media sites per month.”

“We will build 300 links per month from high-authority blogs.”

Wow, that’s like 700 links in one month! To be perfectly honest, I had no idea at all how someone could get 700 links from “high-authority” blogs and social media sites in one month.

Let’s review what “high-authority” means. In general, folks in the SEO world will use this phrase to mean web pages that have a high page rank that suggests that these pages have high quality content that has attracted many quality inlinks over time.  For example, my home page has a page rank of 5/10 – you can use this page rank tool to see this. Amazon.com has a PR of 9/10, so for me, a “high-authority” site should have a PR of maybe between 3 and 6. Generally, it takes quite a bit of time and work to get your PR to increase from 0 (zero) to 1 and then 2 and on up the scale. A LOT of work. Getting a “high-authority” site or page happens slowly, after many, many months and possibly years of work.

I asked my client to get proof from this company of the link building they had done. They sent a “Link Building Report” that contained approximately 200 URL’s. Note, 200 is a whole lot less than 700. Upon closer inspection of the URL’s, it became apparent that half of them weren’t URL’s to web pages, but rather RSS feeds. So the list because more like 85 actual URL’s to web pages. Way less than 700.

I asked the client if she would put these 85 real URL’s into a spreadsheet for me so I could do further analysis. She did this, and I noticed another pattern – that the URL’s were all from free web page or free blog builder sites or free social media sites, 26 to be specific. Here’s the list in alphabetical order:

blogspot.com
clearblogs.com
ehow.com
experienceproject.com
facebook.com
flickr.com
goarticles.com
helium.com
hi5.com
hubpages.com
knol.google.com
mahalo.com
multiply.com
mybuzzle.com
myspace.com
newsvine.com
quizilla.com
scribd.com
squidoo.com
tumbir.com
twitter.com
wetpaint.com
wikihow.com
wikispaces.com
wordpress.com
zimbio.com

No doubt you’ll recognize some of these sites. And while there certainly are many “high-authority” blogs on wordpress.com, as one example, that’s not what these link building scam folks did. They created  brand new accounts on these websites. Then, they created pages with fake content (they repeated 4 different fake articles they had created) with a link to my client’s website. We could literally see the time stamps on the pages. All pages were created with a week of each other, at the end of the month.

I emailed several of these websites, and indeed they confirmed that this activity is in violation of their Terms of Service and told me that the pages would be removed:

From Newsvine:

“Newsvine is a social news site that prohibits advertising. Our content is focused on journalism, not traffic direction.

That’s really unfortunate that Newsvine is being ‘sold’ as part of a SEO package. Our system’s pretty good – users start out in an area called the Greenhouse, meaning their content doesn’t reach the majority of the site until they’re confirmed to not be spammers. The accounts will probably be gone by the end of the day.”

From Multiply.com:

“It is a violation of our terms. Your profile must describe you, an individual person. Examples of inappropriate profiles include, but are not limited to, profiles that purport to represent an animal, place, inanimate object, fictional character, or real individual who is not you. The Multiply Web site is for the personal use of individual Members only and may not be used in connection with any commercial endeavors. Organizations, companies, and/or businesses may not become Members and should not use the Service or the Web site for any purpose.”

From Wetpaint.com:

We generally frown on using Wetpaint as a link farm in order to try to increase search rankings. Also, most link building companies don’t realize that Wetpaint imposes a “nofollow” on all outbound links, so the benefits of using Wetpaint for such purposes are probably negligible.

According to the Wetpaint Terms of Use, you agree not to use the service to:
Upload, post, email, transmit, or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, “link farms,” “junk mail,” “spam,” “chain letters,” ‘pyramid schemes,” or any other form of solicitation.

So let’s review:

1. They claimed to create 700 “high-authority” links in one month.

2. They provided evidence of building 85 pages that contained links to my client’s website.

3. All 85 links were from 26 domains, all of which are free places online where you can create a webpage.

4. All 85 pages had duplicate content, the same 4 articles were copied and pasted over and over.

5. All 85 pages were brand new subdomains and pages with ZERO authority, ZERO page-rank.

6. Some of the 85 pages were created in violation of the terms of use of the core service providers, and will be removed as they are discovered.

What does this mean? It means that every single one of the links they created are completely, utterly, worthless at best.

At worst, Google might even detect this paid link building scheme and penalize my client’s website. Seriously – paid link building can actually be damaging.

What’s the moral of the story?

If you’re tempted to outsource your link building to a company – be very, very sure you know exactly all the details of what they plan to do BEFORE you pay them any money. Be sure you understand what Google considers good and bad link building.  After looking all around online for advice, I’m  not even sure that I now think outsourcing link building is a worthwhile endeavor  – this is one of the best discussions I could find and many of the commenters recommend never outsourcing link building. Here’s one of my favorite quotes:

“Outsourcing link development is risky business whichever way you look at it. I know of recognized SEM agencies in the UK who offer this service to their SEO clients, but who, upon hearing you wish to terminate your SEO contract, claim they will have to remove all the inbound links they’ve been maintaining. Now this may be calling your bluff to make you sign another 1 year extension, but the fact of the matter is that if these guys are doing it and doing it well, they probably own the network from whence your inbound links come.

Do you want to be held to ransom like this? I don’t.”

And another great quote from the discussion:

“We need to be honest with ourselves here folks… sooner or later the engines will identify these “highly effective, yet 100% ethical” bought link networks. If you’re paying someone to link their network of sites to you, you are effectively manipulating your listings by artificial means…. in other words the natural/organic listing ain’t so natural after-all.

Short term gains may be there for the taking, but long term we need to stop chasing algorithms and get on with developing great user content and websites that make other sites WANT to link to us. “

So before you hire an SEO company to outsource your link building – you need to really do your homework to make sure you understand exactly what they are doing, why they are doing it, and whether it’s really doing your website more harm than good.

I did manage to find one good article that contained tips on link building – but be warned, it’s a ton of work over a long period of time. And maybe that’s exactly as it should be.

The account executive offered me an opportunity to set up a “mutually beneficial” business relationship, whereby I’d refer my clients to Citysearch and in exchange, the Citysearch account executive would refer new website clients to me. These kinds of offers are not new to me, as I’ve also gotten them from Yellowpages.com sales people in the past.

I can’t honestly refer my clients to pay-per-click companies like Citysearch, Yellowpages.com or Dex,  because of the personal experiences I’ve had and that my clients have had with them. And so after some thought, I responded to the Citysearch account executive with a pleasant, “no thanks.” I wrote that while I’d be happy to accept referral traffic from her, it would have to be with “no formal strings attached,” implying that I’d in no way be able to reciprocate.

A month went by, and I didn’t receive a response from the Citysearch account executive and I forgot about it. But then today, a month after sending me the initial solicitation and after apparently reading my blog article about Citysearch click fraud, the account executive sent me an angry email accusing me of “bashing” her company and was “shocked” that I responded to her email at all. Needless to say, it wasn’t a pleasant email for me to receive.

Rather than attack me, here’s how a representative of Citysearch who has found my blog article could have responded:

They could have read over the article carefully and seen that this issue isn’t just about me, but there are many folks out there with legitimate complaints about Citysearch and click fraud. They could have actually attempted to understand the issues and made an attempt to address them. Or they could say, yes, we’ve had issues in the past, but we’ve fixed them and to prove it, we’ll give you a free account for a month.

Wait, did I just say a free account?! Actually asking a pay-per-click company to prove that their claims will be true before signing a long term contract? Where would I get a crazy idea like this? Because I’m a certified Google AdWords consultant, and they give us these $100 coupons that we can give away to new clients so they can actually try out the service at no cost and no risk. If you don’t feel like the $100 was well spent, no problem. Some pay-per-click companies, like Google, let you do a test drive before you buy.

But not Citysearch (or Yellowpages.com or Dex or others). Their sales folks just tell us small  business owners to trust them, that they’ve got lots of satisfied customers.

I once sat across a table from a Dex Online salesperson (at the request of a client) who, after I’d showed him clear evidence of poor quality clicks from Dex to their website, told me that yes, they had a problem but now it’s been fixed. The Dex sales person wanted my client to renew their annual contract. So I asked him to give them a free trial period to prove to my clients that this issue of poor click quality was indeed fixed. He said he couldn’t do that.

So I asked the Dex online salesperson how were we supposed to trust him? He had just admitted, after being showed hard website traffic data, that the clicks he had charged my client for  during the past year, were worthless. And he was not only refusing to give them a refund, but wanted them to renew their contract based on his statement (with no supporting documentation) that the issue was now magically fixed? Without being willing to give my clients even a single month of free traffic as proof? Let’s review this. The sales person denied an issue. Then confronted with data, the sales person admits an issue existed. The sales person claims it’s fixed, but sorry, won’t give you either a refund for their past poor quality service or a free trial period for their new and improved services. Trust them, they say.

Trust sales folks? Seriously – give us a free trial period and let us small business website owners decide for ourselves. I’m sure there are some folks out there who like Citysearch and these other pay-per-click companies, but until a particular business owner in a particular market with a particular budget can see whether this type of advertising is cost-effective for them, I don’t think that it’s a one-size-fits-all “trust me it will work” online marketing solution.

If the Citysearch person was actually really interested in changing my opinion (and not just getting me to send her business blindly), why not offer  me a free trial? I’d certainly write a blog article praising Citysearch if the new experience proved to be a good one. Remember my last experience was 2 years ago – a lot could have changed at Citysearch. And if the Citysearch account executive was 100% sure I’d love the service, then this would be at no risk to them.  But rather than try to 1) understand my issues and 2) try to fix them or demonstrate they no longer exist, the account executive got angry and hostile with me.

So after two years of no contact with Citysearch – another bad experience. It’s a shame, because this could have been an opportunity for Citysearch to improve my opinion of their services. A missed opportunity indeed.

Just because someone opens a Biznik account, posts a photo, links to their website and writes articles, does not mean that this person/business is legitimate. You should apply the same suspicion and due diligence to anyone who is offering services – don’t automatically assume that if they’re on Biznik, that they’re trustworthy.

I had a client of mine hire someone on Biznik recently to perform Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on her website. She told me that the Biznik profile of this person looked nice, and that they had written many articles on internet marketing. But after spending nearly $1000 and receiving no results, she became uncomfortable and asked me to look into their services and give her my opinion. She provided me with a copy of her contract and a list of work they had performed.

The details of my investigation can be read here. It’s now obvious to me that based on the contract and documentation of work performed, she’s been cheated. It really gives you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize that there are people out there who are taking advantage of small business owners, especially in these tough economic times.

If you are tempted to hire a person or a business that is part of a social networking site, like Biznik, please remember that they are no more likely to be trustworthy than a business you found by using Google or some other means. The only way to know if a company is reputable, is to talk to several of their customers.

Please be careful out there. (There will be more articles that follow on this topic to hopefully help you identify and avoid being cheated by SEO scams.)

Why would you need a private form? Well, their current/old method of reporting Google Map Spam was a public forum, so if you reported a company for suspicious Google Map activity, the company could find out you reported them and give you some grief. This happened to me recently and it wasn’t pleasant.

I emailed the Google Map support person with my situation, and she assured me it would be fixed soon.

And this morning she emailed me the new totally private Google Map Spam Reporting Form.

There’s also a new general form if you need Google Map Help.

This means if you see your competition abusing Google Maps by entering multiple listings for their business, you can report them to Google privately, without fear of retaliation. You can also get help with your own Google Map problems in private. Many thanks to Google for listening to the issues of their Map users and responding so quickly.

Thank you Google!

(Due to offensive comments received, comments have been disabled on this article. Some people don’t like it when they’re caught cheating I guess)

Re-read my previous article and take a good look at the screen shot. See how the top two are the same company, and I’m in fourth place? Take a look at what I noticed today:

.

I can’t believe my eyes! Did Google actually read my blog article and fix this issue? Or was it because I posted the issue in their Google map spam forum? Or is it completely unrelated?

I guess I’ll never know for sure, but what I can say is that something changed, and if you see that there’s a company that’s spamming Google maps, you should report it in their forum and if you have a blog, write an article about. I do believe, now more than ever, that Google does try to give you the most relevant search results and tries to fight fraud and cheating whenever they can, so if you see something amiss, report it and maybe you’ll get lucky too!

1. Insulting the Web Design Profession

“I know web design is really simple. I could do it easily myself but I’m just too busy.”

When you’re interviewing someone, it’s best not to start off by insulting what they do for a living.  If you wouldn’t say this to your brain surgeon, then don’t say it to anyone you’re hiring, no matter what the job is. Yes, I know web designers aren’t brain surgeons, but we’re human and it hurts our feelings and makes us a little angry, which is not the mindset you want them in when we’re giving you an estimate.

2. Looking for Free Services

“I don’t have any money to pay for this but…”

For professional web designers, this  isn’t a hobby, this is our full-time business. We use this income to pay mortgages, put food on the table and pay for medical expenses, just like you. If you can’t afford the services, best not to waste time. If you want a free website, find a high school student or one of the many online website builder tools. Many web developers post their prices on their websites, so be sure to review that to make sure it fits within your budget.

3. Too Much Personal Information

“I’ve been diagnosed with xxx and xxx and have …”

The people who start off a conversation by telling me way too much personal information always seem to follow it by #2, looking for free services. If it’s not relevant to your web design, keep it to yourself. Of course, once you’ve become friendly with the designer and have a relationship, sharing personal stuff is fine. Just not on the first date.

4. Procrastinators – Hurry Up And Wait

“I’ve been thinking about getting a website for x years, and I need it done within the next 24 hours.”

Many people want a website designed overnight, even though they’ve had plenty of time to actually start it much sooner. This results in heaping enormous pressure on the web designer to hurry, hurry, hurry. I’ve found that these folks, probably due to an inherent procrastinating nature, will actually be very slow to develop the website. Once they make the initial payment, the pressure is released, and they de-prioritize working on the website. Sometimes, they end up abandoning the project altogether.

5. Bragging About Ignorance

“I know absolutely nothing about the internet or computers”

While honesty is great, there’s no need to tell prospective web designers how much you don’t know. You’re setting yourself up to be taken advantage of. If you don’t understand what the web designer says, ask questions, but there’s no need to expound on how much you don’t know.

6. Out of Your League

“Can you build me a website like Craigslist or eBay or Facebook?”

Seriously, I get folks who ask me this. They have no idea how complex these kinds of websites are, and they think they can just find someone to duplicate Craigslist or eBay or Facebook, and they’ll be rich. I realize I’m just ranting now, but this post is in the Rants category for a reason. The lesson is, take a little bit of time to honestly gauge the scope of your project and the capabilities and portfolio of the web developer under consideration.

7. Technical Mumbo Jumbo

“I know all about PHP, MySQL, CGI, Ruby on Rails…”

Just because you’ve heard of an acronym, doesn’t mean you know how to program in that language or utilize that application. Don’t throw out a bunch of words and claim to know what they do unless you really do. The unethical web developer will know that you don’t know what the words mean, and this sets you up for getting scammed. Probably the same goes for auto mechanics.

8. Bid Requests With No Information

“I need a website for my business. Can you give me a quote?”

If you want an estimate, you need to give a web designer details about what your website will do, how many pages it will have, etc. You can’t simply say to a real estate agent, “I want a house, what will it cost?” The answer will be, “well, it depends on location, features, square footage, rooms, etc.” It’s the same with web design. Come prepared with some idea of what you need, an outline of what pages you need and what features you want will be very helpful. Look at the websites of your competitors to see what they have, take notes, and then you will be in a good position to get an estimate that will be accurate.

9. You’re Just One of Many

“I’m sending this same proposal to many other web designers.”

I’ve actually gotten requests for proposals where I could see the other web design firms that were cc’d on the email. It went right into my trash. While it’s great to shop around, try to be a little more sensitive and saavy – there’s really no need to tell folks you’re shopping around, we know that – and you want web developers to put forth their best efforts on your proposal right? So no need to let them know that you’ve send the same form-letter email to other firms – just hurts your chances I think.

10. I Need This Website To Save My Business and Make Me Rich

“I’ve been working on selling this great idea for 19 years and been unsuccessful. I’m sure that all I need is a website to make me rich overnight”.

If you’ve been trying to sell something for a long, long time and not been able to do it, it’s doubtful that a website will help. It’s really hard to sell things online, and some ideas just are not good ideas. Some businesses are so poorly run, having a website won’t help. Unethical web developers will take your money, regardless of the prospects of your success – so really try to be realistic about what a website can, and can’t do so you don’t end up wasting money and being disappointed.

Summary

So when you’re out shopping for a web designer, keep these 10 items in mind. You’re looking for someone with whom you can develop a long-term relationship, and it’s important to get started out on the right foot. Be prepared and know what you need. You want to treat the web designer with professional courtesy, and always, always, check references by contacting the business owners listed in their portfolio before hiring them. I think web development is a lot like being a car mechanic – magic things happen under the hood – and the best way to avoid getting scammed and finding a web designer you will be happy with for the long term is to keep these things in mind. And also, keep in mind that this article is a little bit of a rant – venting some frustrating while trying to help folks out there who are shopping for a web developer understand what goes on in the mind of a web developer. I’m sure some folks will not like this post – hopefully most will be able to appreciate the honesty and desire to help folks from getting scammed.

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!

There are two criteria that you should meet before you think about doing this. First, your business should have a defined region. There may be certain countries that you are 100% sure you don’t have clients in, or maybe don’t want clients in. Secondly, you get lots of spam from those same certain countries.

I meet both of these criteria. The vast majority of my clients are in North America. I’ve got one in Latin America, one in the UAE, had one in France…but in general, they’re in North America. And I routinely get lots of spam from two countries in particular: India and Russia. Spam costs me money because it takes me time to read and delete messages from these folks, and it’s also just plain annoying.

Take this example of an email I got yesterday afternoon from “Abubakar” with an email address of  “abu@cattechnologies.com”:

“Hello,I have visited your web site but i found some of drawbacks i.e:  1)your website has low Back links.  2)your keyword rankings are very low.  If you assist me to introduce our SEO services.Ihope you get more sales for your current website. I will be waiting for your reply…  Thanks & Regards,  Abu.”

First off, I hate spam. And I detest spam that actually tries to frighten me or actually insults me in order to get my business. I’ve worked very hard on my own website’s search engine rankings, and this particular spam just sent me over the top. When I looked in my Web-Stat account, sure enough, the person who filled out my contact form was from India. And then I remembered seeing the Web-Stat notice that they had a new Geo Targeting feature!

Now, I get spam from India and Russia all the time. In fact, if you look at my website statistics, 3% of my website traffic comes from India. And I get solicitations several times a week asking me to outsource my work to India, join in a back-linking scam, give them SEO work, etc. The only people who call me on the phone, asking me to outsource, are people from India. I confess I’ve been annoyed by this incessant badgering -  all from people in one particular country.

Russian folks seem to love to spam my blog. I don’t know why.  But they just do. Most of the time Akismet catches the spam, but some get through. They have all these funky Russian characters in the comments. Again, I have to read them, and delete them, wasting my time.

I did a bit of quick research and learned that Russia was the third worst spammer country behind the US and China. Looking at the Click Fraud Index by Click Forensics, Russia also scores quite high, with India being medium. TrendMicro.com has Russia at #2 and India at #7 for worst spamming countries. So my personal experiences aren’t that much out of line with what’s going on out there in spammers and fraud world.

So today, I’ve decided to take Web-Stat up on it’s offer and block my countries of choice: India and Russia. Sure I’ll give up some of my traffic, and also give up the possibility of having a Indian or Russian client, but I think it’ a good trade-off to make to avoid the wasted time and aggravation. I’ll let you know how it goes!

First, a quick lesson in Google Maps. In order to get your small business listed in Google Maps, which is an excellent thing to do, you have to register your business and enter things like an address, a phone number, and a website address, as well as other information about your business. It is a directory of local businesses, linked to regular Google searches. When someone does a search for something, like “website design seattle” in Google, you will often see a section at the top of the organic listings that shows a map and a list of businesses. These businesses are from Google Maps.

Now, I often look at “website design seattle” because those are my keywords. I’ve watched my own position in the Google Maps listing move around. For a time, I was ranked #1, and was happy.

One day, I was doing some research for a client, and discovered that a competing company had developed multiple websites with duplicate content  (this is called “doorway” pages). Someone then registered all these “fake” companies in Google Maps. I looked up the web design company to see who does this sort of thing because I was curious. I refer people to other website design companies, and if another company is trying to cheat the search engines, I don’t refer folks to them. I made a mental note of the company name.

Later, when I Googled “website design seattle”, as I am prone to do, the name of this very company came up, one once, but TWICE in the Google Local listings. Here’s what it looks like:

See the listings for A. and B. ? See how the phone number is identical? I’ve blurred out the company name and all but the last two digits of the phone to protect their privacy, but the domain and phone are  identical. In order to add a duplicate listing, they’ve created a subdomain, “website.theirdomain.com”, and added it as if it were another unique business to Google Maps. Also notice the generic names of the business “Seattle Website Design Firm” and “Seattle Website Design” – note, this is not the name of the company, but rather the keywords. It’s interesting to note that this seems to be a common practice as C. has “Website Design and Web Design Company” as the name of the business, when it’s clearly not. Is it the reason they’re ranked ahead of me? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Now, I like Google Maps, and often use it with my iPhone. I wanted to find out what the official rules were regarding how businesses got ranked. Admittedly I was much happier when I was number one, and wanted to know how to get back there, but I also wanted to know why and how other companies were cheating the system. Remember I used to be a Quality Director for Motorola – and I think it’s important to follow good rules that are set up to benefit everyone.

Here’s the official answer to “How does Google Maps rank business listings?“. Here’s what it says:

All Google search results are based primarily on relevance, and Google Maps listings are no different. Google Maps ranks business listings based on their relevance to the search terms entered, along with geographic distance (where indicated) and other factors. Sometimes our search technology decides that a business that’s farther away from your location is more likely to have what you’re looking for than a business that’s closer.

Google Maps and the Local Business Center are a free service, so there’s no way to request or pay for a better ranking. We also can’t provide additional details about our ranking algorithm. We do our best to keep the details of the algorithm confidential in order to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone.

“…as fair as possible”…that sounds good. So Google wants it to be a fair system, that’s great.  Fairness is their product, after all – we use Google because it represents the most relevant search results, which money can’t buy and cheating can’t get.  In theory.

Next I went in search of help. I found the “Google Maps Help Group for Business Owners To Report Spam on Google Maps“. The instructions say that if you’ve found Google Maps Spam, to reply to the thread with the relevant information and they’ll address it. (UPDATE, I do NOT recommend using this forum because your reporting is public – and in the end, I got harassed. Use this new private form instead to report Google Map Spam)

So I did. I subscribed to the thread and posted a message about what I’d found. And I waited. And I started getting other folks complaints – around 3 a day were coming in – after a few days I unsubscribed. There are tons of folks complaining about Google Map Spam and honestly I have no idea whether these complaints are ever resolved. So far, mine hasn’t been, but I’ll keep Googling “website design seattle” and see if the duplicate listings for the same company disappear or not.  It will also be interesting to see if the business names get changed from keywords, to the actual business names. I believe in Google’s desire for fairness – let’s see what happens over time.

UPDATE: Read what happened next.

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.

You can find out who owns a domain by using a domain name lookup tool. I looked up Aldebaran.com and emailed the owner who was listed. I simply asked if he was interested in selling the domain.

To my utter astonishment, he said he’d sell it for $50,000, that’s fifty-thousand dollars! Or he’d generously lease it to me for $400/month. I don’t know what the point of leasing a domain name would be – what a search engine optimization nightmare. But let’s get back to his price tag of $50,000: How do you know what a domain name is worth?

There are many free domain name appraisal tools out there on the web. One such tool is SwiftAppraisal.com. It said Aldebaran.com was worth under $100. It’s interesting to use one of these free tools to see what questions they ask to determine the worth. Things like number of words (fewer is better), whether the domain name is associated with the business/product, whether it was easy to spell/remember. Aldebaran.com failed all of these tests. So why would this fellow ask $50,000 for a worthless domain?

What is “Aldebaran” anyway? It’s a star; the brightest star in the constellation of Taurus. It has nothing to do with web design, or any other business for that matter. You can’t sell a star.

Needless to say, I turned down this ridiculous offer.

But what if I had somehow trademarked “Aldebaran”. Then I would call a trademark attorney and see if this guy was guilty of cybersquatting. I don’t know if I trademarked “Aldebaran Web Design” if that would be good enough, but it’s something to keep in mind.

In general, to avoid all of these headaches – I advise my clients, whenever possible, to get domain names directly from registrars that are available. You can use domain name checking tools to see if a particular domain name is available. If it’s available, it’s only $10 per year. What a bargin!

Now remember, I’m a web designer. And that what I’d be looking for was a link from a website that was about…oh, I dunno, website design. Remember that search engines evaluate links in context, meaning the content that surrounds the link to your site matters in how much this link will be counted towards getting your website ranked for your keywords. You want links from pages that have your keywords in them. This is link building 101. You want links from pages whose main topic matches your website’s keywords. Here’s the email I received:

Link Exchange Request for Discount-pet-superstore.com PR 1+

Dear Webmaster,

First of all let me introduce myself – I am,Rokshar Link Manager

I handle online marketing for my client http://www.discount-pet-superstore.com

To increase the link popularity of my client’s site , we are now looking for triangular Link swapping with some good quality sites. You are already aware that Triangular Link swapping is much more popular and beneficial than Reciprocal Link exchange . This way both the sites gets the benefited . I would request you to place my client’s link at your site.

Please add my links on minimum Page Rank 1+ (otherwise it will not acceptable by my client) and use the following code for linking to us

Here are details of my site :

Url : http://www.discount-pet-superstore.com
Title : Discount Pet SuperStore
Des : Buy PetSafe Wireless Dog Fence, Dog Doors, Dog Crates, PetSafe Electric Dog Fences, Pet Containment Fencing, and Discount Pet Supplies

Or you can simply use the following Linking code:
a href=”http://www.discount-pet-superstore.com” Discount Pet SuperStore /a Buy PetSafe Wireless Dog Fence, Dog Doors, Dog Crates, PetSafe Electric Dog Fences, Pet Containment Fencing, and Discount Pet Supplies

Your link will be added within 12 hours at
dogfence-shopping.com (PR3)
OR
horses-shiatsu.com Within 12 hours.

Please forward me your linking details along with confirmation where my link have been added by you .

Hoping an early and positive response from your side.

Have a nice day ahead

Bsest Regards
Rokshar
Rokshar.anjum@gmail.com

Let’s dissect this request:

1. Website Conflicts With My Values: First and foremost – I believe that electronic dog fences are completely inhumane.

2. It’s a form letter: Meaning to me that this person probably didn’t even visit my website, otherwise it would be “Dear Jill”. Call me crazy, but I just don’t respond to form letters. I think they’re spam and treat them as such.

3. Triangular Link Swapping Is “Black Hat”: This means that whenever you try something that tries to fool search engines, it’s bad news. This is just like reciprocal link swapping, which is better than nothing, but not good as one-way links. The best links are those that folks give you because your content is worthwhile, not because “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. Google is smarter than you may think.

4. No value to my website or my visitors. As previously mentioned, having a link to my website from a dog fence website or a shiatsu for horses website is of absolutely no value to me or the people who might be on my website. You should add links to your website because your customers will find the information useful. Other people will add links to you because they find your website information useful.

Bottom line: If you are going to hire a company to perform link building for your new website, find out HOW they plan to do this. If they are going to send out terribly written cookie cutter emails to random website owners – take your money elsewhere. Real quality link building is much more than hiring someone to send out spam on your behalf.

(UPDATE: Due to the huge response to this post, I wanted to tell folks  how to check their domain name expiration date: Go to: http://whois.domaintools.com/ and enter your domain name. If someone tells you your domain name is going to expire, don’t take their word for it, verify this yourself with this free, easy tool.)

So I looked up this company, Domain Registry Rights, they had a website that was all about protecting domain registrations. I called the phone number 1-800-690-1269, and got a recording that oddly, didn’t even mention the company name, but simply told me the hours of operation and hung up.

I read the fax carefully again and also consulted with my favorite trademark attorney. It appears that this might be a legitmate company, however the way they attempt to confuse and trick folks into registering the .us version of their domain names is quite unethical, in my opinion.

There are many different domains available. Most of us have .com or .net or .org, and there many others out there as well. Apparently .us is one of them, and this company is trying very hard to scare folks into purchasing the .us version of their domain name, which is really not necessary for most small businesses.

So if you get one of these notices, rest assured it has nothing to do with the domain name you currently own. They’re simply trying to get you to buy “yourdomainname.us” and nothing more.

And if you’ve received one of these notices and were scared and confused, I’d love to hear from you too and what you think of this tactic.

If this whole domain name issue has you wanting to read more on the topic, please read “Crazy Domain Insane” by Josh over at DreamHost.com. It’s funny and enlightening and just a bit infuriating.

UPDATE: A reader of my blog alerted me to the existance of a law in Washington State that forbids sending spam by fax. The law is RCW 80.36.540 Telefacsimile messages – Unsolicited transmission – Penalties. The law states:

“No person, corporation, partnership, or association shall initiate the unsolicited transmission of telefacsimile messages promoting goods or services for purchase by the recipient.”

The law goes further to state:

A violation of this section is an unfair or deceptive act in trade or commerce for the purpose of applying the consumer protection act, chapter 19.86 RCW. Damages to the recipient of telefacsimile messages in violation of this section are five hundred dollars or actual damages, whichever is greater.

So for those of you in Washington State, here’s a link to the Attorney General. For those of you getting these faxes in other states, you may also have laws that prevent this kind of fax spam, and it might be worthwhile to keep your faxes and send them to your Attorney General. Wouldn’t be be great if, together, we could stop this practice?

UPDATE: A blog reader has given me a copy of the fax she received to post in my blog in order that others can easily identify this spam fax (click to enlarge to see details):

The “Internet Marketing Center” has a home page that is designed folks who want to make fast money online. While the home page changes over time, on the day I visited, it had this statement:

Wow, quite impressive.
“His online business brought in more than $90,000 – in the first six months!”

Sounds great doesn’t it?

So I looked around a bit more and noticed this tiny link in the footer of the website:

Hmmm. An “Earnings Disclaimer”. So I clicked on the link. Here’s what I found:

This was so incredible, I’ll repeat some of it here, adding my own emphasis:

“And you should also know, that the testimonials here illustrate extraordinary results and unique experiences which do not apply to most customers who use our products and which you should not expect to achieve. Also, we do not promise, guarantee or imply that you or your use of our products and services will improve your operation, raise your internet profile, or increase your revenues.”

I was dumbfounded. That on one part of a website, namely the home page, a company could put information like making $90,000 in 6 months, and then on another page, state that you should not expect to achieve this result. And then go further to state that they aren’t even trying to imply that you will have success. Not trying to imply? This is simply ridiculous. The definition of imply: to indicate or suggest without being explicitly stated. They explicitly state that others make tons of money – and then say they’re not at all trying to imply you will too. Then why is it on the home page? Why does it say “Learn how to be like David”? This doesn’t imply that if you follow their program you will be “like David”?

While I’m really glad that my client found the seminars that were given by this company useful, after seeing this company’s website claims and disclaimer, I can’t ethically recommend their services to others. Any company that makes incredible claims only to have a disclaimer that says “no we didn’t mean to imply any of that stuff we implied earlier” should be avoided like the plague.

I recently had to make a change to my website maintenance services because I was simply unable to keep up with the demand for changes to websites that I didn’t design myself. There apparently are many, many website designers out there who are willing to create a website for customers, but have no intention of maintaining it over the long haul. I get regular calls from folks – so many in fact that I typically no longer can handle these small change requests – primarily because I’m committed to making sure I can take care of my own clients.

I changed my website maintenance offerings because I wanted to make sure there was adequate time in my work schedule to promptly (usually in 1 week) respond to maintenance requests from my clients. This is important to me because website code is easily changed, especially by the person who wrote the code in the first place – and service after sale is critical to customer satisfaction.

But I guess there are many less responsible web designers out there, who have figured out that doing website maintenance is less lucrative than doing new website design. Well, this is true. At least short term. I believe to build a successful long term business, you need to make customers happy. If they call you for changes and you tell them it will take you 3 months to do them, they won’t be quite as happy.

This is what happened recently. A fellow had his website designed by someone who was also doing the web hosting. (Note, this is one of those things I strongly recommend against – separate your web hosting company from your web designer). The web designer went on vacation, the website went down…and that was it. Phone calls went unreturned and the site stayed down for not days, but weeks.

The fellow then went on to tell me he moved his website to another web design/hosting firm. Now he wants to make some changes to his site, but this website company is telling him it will take 3 months to do these changes. Which sent him ballistic and looking for yet another web designer.

So this prospective client was spending today frantically calling web designers and unlike other companies, I answer my phone myself. I listened and told him what I services I offer and sympathized with his situation.

When you’re shopping for a web designer – look for someone who will not only do your initial website design, but who will support your website over time.

Small businesses undergo change and small business websites should change with them. Make sure your web designer supports their work AFTER your initial website work is finished – or you may wind up in a similar to this fellow – desperately calling one web designer after another looking for someone who will make changes to his existing website.

Here’s the first email:

Dear Website Owner,

70% of POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS searching the Internet will never find your web site unless you’re ranked on first page of Google, Yahoo, or MSN. If I assist you to achieve at least 4 times more INTERNET traffic to your website by getting you to the top of the search engines would you be interested?

Our internet marketing company is ranked on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search phrase “SEO Company.” We would like to do the same for your Company’s website so you can come up for your main keyword search phrases as well? All of our methodologies use the most ethical Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your site banned or penalized.

This proprietary SEO service includes:
• No setup costs
• Cancel at any time
• Guaranteed increase in traffic

Please reply to my email and I would be delighted to supply you a custom proposal
Warm Regards,
Don H.Ritz

5021 VERDUGO WAY, STE 105
CAMARILLO, CA 93012 – USA

Wow, this sounds pretty good doesn’t it? But wait, let’s look a little closer. Where’s the company name? Where’s the company website? Hmmm.

Let’s look at the email address: pencilling80370@gmail.com

Now, why would someone who has a legitimate SEO business use a junk email address from gmail, rather than a more professional email address, like Don@TheBestSEOCompany.com?

Because it’s fake. This is a good example of an SEO scam email. This person got my client’s email from her website and sent her this message, in an (weak) attempt to get her to pay him money for nothing.

Let’s look at another example. The same lucky client of mine got an email from Jen@bigwavetraffic.com. Here’s the email:

From: Jen Evans [mailto:jen@bigwavetraffic.com]
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 4:10 PM
To: Info
Subject: your website

I can get your site to the top of a search engines listings.
If you’re interested, reply with the web addresses you want to promote and
the best way to contact you with some options.

Thanks in advance,

Jen Evan

So I looked up BigWaveTraffic.com. What did I find when I looked it up?

Coming soon? The page title reads “Absolute Listings SEO SEM” so I know I’ve gotten the right website.

So the moral to the story is this: If you’re a small business owner and you get a email from someone you don’t know, claiming to be able to boost your website traffic – do a bit of research. Look at the website of the company. Put in the keywords they should be targeting and see if you can find them on the first, or second, or third page of Google. If you can’t, they are not a legitimate SEO company and it’s simply one of the many email scam attempts.

Be careful out there!

UPDATE: I just received the exact same email above that starts with “Dear Website Owner”…but this time, the return email is for “Barry Burn” and the email address is listed as fanciable44243@gmail.com – it’s a SEO email scam alright! And another one, this time from borneo90856@gmail.com with the name Joseph Samules.

ANOTHER UPDATE: My client just received another one, this time from “Blaze Web Design Inc”. Here’s the email:

Hello,

My name is Mark J. Blazick from Dade City, Florida and previously from Akron, Ohio and I think you have a great looking website.

I am an SEO that has been attaining and maintaining top search engine placement in Google, Yahoo, MSN and many other search engines for businesses across the USA.

We help companies get ranked at the top of the search engines so that they can spend less on sponsored links and Google AdWords. Our prices are very affordable and we have references as well as 12 years experience in Search Engine Submission and Website Optimization.

Did you know that only 20% of people searching will click on a sponsored link or Google AdWord while 80% will click on a ranked listing in a search engine?

You can bring in much more business via your website by getting your site ranked at the top of the search engines in their ranked listings. Google is always our main target followed by Yahoo, MSN and Ask but we do submit to many other search engines as well.

Your site has meta tags but they are not optimized strongly. We code strong page specific meta tags so that the title, description and keywords meta tags for a specific page work together. The title, description and keywords meta tags are coded so that they have a synergy with each other in order to give very strong emphasis to your most important keyword phrases.

We also work with you to get a synergy between the page specific meta tags and the page specific text content of your websites pages. We assist in getting pages to support other pages as well so that the site can rank well when ranked as an entire website.

Please phone me at 352-458-9217 and we can talk about your site and how to make it much more of an asset to your business.

Thank you.

Best regards,
Mark J. Blazick
President
Blaze Web Design, Inc.
352-458-9217
blazeman@tampabay.rr.com

Notice the similarity? A website designer without a website? So I googled “Blaze Web Design” and found a website and looked at their “Promotion” page. A long list of mostly extremely minor search engines that they’ll submit your website to – nothing more specific. And by the way, submitting your site to different search engines is FREE, you don’t need to pay anyone for this.

So here’s a test you can do to see how good a company is at SEO. Start with their home page. See what their title is. The title is visible at the very top of your browser window.

My title starts with “Aldebaran Website Design Seattle”. So just Google “Website Design Seattle” and see where my home page is ranked. As of the writing of this post entry, I’m ranked on the first page at #3. Not too shabby.

Do the same with this company. The title on the home page is “Search Engine Optimization”. Let’s see where the home page is ranked. I use a tool on GoogleRankings.com to search for where a website is ranked for their keywords because it can search the top 1000 automatically. The result? This website is not within the first 1000 results for the very keywords they should have optimized their own website for.

Now, perhaps it’s harsh of me to pick on this particular company. But they sent one of my clients a unsolicited email. So this blog article is fair play I figure. I’m protective of my clients, and of all small business owners who may not know much about SEO and respond to emails such as these.

So if you get one of these emails, just do what I do. Look up the website, if there is one listed. Look at the home page title and Google it. If they’re not on the first page, delete the email and forget about them.

UPDATE 8/20/08: I just got another SEO Scam Email:

Dear Business Owner,

75% of POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS searching the Internet will never find your web site unless you’re on the first page of Google, Yahoo, or MSN. If I could get as much as 4 times more INTERNET traffic to your website by promoting you to the top of the search engines would you be interested?

Our company is consistently on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search term “SEO Company.” We would like to do the same for your Company’s website so you can rank for your main keyword terms as well? All of our techniques use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization methods that will not get your website banned or penalized.

This search engine optimization program includes:
• No upfront fees
• A month to month program (no long term contracts)
• Guaranteed increase in traffic

Simply reply to this email and I would be delighted to send you a custom proposal
_________________________________________________________

Warm Regards,
Erroll

2060 AVENIDA DE LOS ARBOLES, STE D
THOUSAND OAKS, CA 91362-1361 – USA

I guess they never learn. They keep sending me spam SEO emails, I will keep posting them to my blog to help warn other folks.

UPDATE: 11/10/08

I’ve just received another email, same words, different name: Neal SamulesDear Business Owner,

75% of POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS searching the Internet will never find your web site unless you’re on the first page of Google, Yahoo, or MSN. If I could get as much as 4 times more INTERNET traffic to your website by promoting you to the top of the search engines would you be interested?

Our company is consistently on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search term “SEO Company.” We would like to do the same for your Company’s website so you can rank for your main keyword terms as well? All of our techniques use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization methods that will not get your website banned or penalized.

This search engine optimization program includes:
• No upfront fees
• A month to month program (no long term contracts)
• Guaranteed increase in traffic

Simply reply to this email and I would be delighted to send you a custom proposal
_________________________________________________________

Warm Regards,
Neal Samules

2060 AVENIDA DE LOS ARBOLES, STE D
THOUSAND OAKS, CA 91362-1361 – USA

They never learn. I guess they don’t read my blog

UPDATE: 1/02/09

Just got another one last night:

Dear Website Owner,

65% of people searching the Internet will never find your web site unless you’re ranked on first page of Google, MSN, or Yahoo. If I help you obtain as much as 4 times more WEB traffic to your online business by promoting you to the first page of the search engines would you be interested?

Our company is on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search term “SEO Company.” We would like to do the same for your web site so you can come up for your main keywords as well? All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.

This special SEO program includes:
• No upfront fees
• A month-to-month program
• More traffic guaranteed

Please reply to my email and I would be happy to send you a proposal.
______________________________________________________________________
Sincerely,
Deave Leave

501 VERDUGO WAY
WESTLAKE VILLAGE , CA
91362 – USA

When you’re looking in a web designer’s portfolio, don’t just rely on the images they provide. Click in the URL (web address) of the websites they claim to have designed. (If you find a lot of broken links, this is not a good sign). Take a good look at the URL, it’s at the very top of your browser and begins with “http://”.

First, let me explain what these three things are and how to tell them apart.

1. Domains: These look like “http://www.yourbusiness.com” or “http://yourbusiness.com”. Domains are registered and owned by YOU, the small business owner.

2. SubDomains: These look like “http://www.yourbusiness.yourwebdesigner.com”. Once someone buys a domain, they can make all the subdomains they want, for free. Sometimes web designers will create subdomains for their clients – but they are not owned by the business owner – they are owned by the web designer. You as a small business owner have no rights to a subdomain on some else’s website.

3. Directory: These look like: “http://www.yourwebdesigner.com/yourbusiness/”. These are simply directories that the web designer has created to put your files in.

You want to see a web design portfolio where everyone has their own domain name, like #1 above. This is the only professional, and in my opinion, ethical way, to do website design for other people. Since domain registrations are so inexpensive ($10 per year), and hosting is also inexpensive ($10 per month) there is just no reason why a small business owner couldn’t afford to get their own domain name and their website files living right on that domain.

Why do some web designers use subdomains and directories? Laziness? Ignorance? For profit? Since it costs them nothing to create a subdomain or directory, maybe they’re charging folks for “web hosting”. Maybe they don’t know search engines work. Either way, this practice is NOT in the best interests of the small business owner who wants a website that will perform well over time in search engines. Let’s talk about that next…

How important is search engine traffic to small business websites? Super duper critical. Google knows the difference between domains and directories. In order to rank well, you want to have all of your content be just about your business, not mixed in with who knows how many other small businesses on who knows how many other directories. Domain age is another factor in ranking, and the sooner you get your own domain the better. Eventually, if you’re a serious business, you’ll get your own domain, and all that time you’ve spent living on someone else’s domain won’t count.

Don’t you want control over your own website? I can’t even begin to count how many people contact me with “my website designer has disappeared” stories. Over and over again. The only way to have complete control over your website, is to own your own domain.

And the same goes for web hosting: You will also want to control your website hosting (read this article on how to select a website hosting company) and I don’t recommend that you let your website designer do your website hosting. These are really very different skills – and you can get very good website hosting for very low rates ($10 per month). Would you let your housing contractor own the land that your home is built on? Of course not. Don’t do the same with your website.

Be Independent! By following this advice, your website designer can disappear, and your small business website will be just fine. You just need to find another person to make modifications, but your website will remain up and running in the meantime, and no one will be able to steal your website files or your domain name.

Take Home Message: When shopping for a web designer, look at their portfolio. Visit the websites they claim to have designed. Look at the URL and make sure the business owns their own domain (not a sub-domain of the designer, not a sub-directory of the designer’s site). Pick a web designer who is ethical and responsible enough to allow the small business owner maximum control of their website. In the end, if that web designer disappears, you’ll be glad you did.

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.

I went to a website recently that asked me some personal information, namely, my social security number. This request surprised me, especially given the nature of what I was trying to accomplish. So I looked at the website, and here’s a screenshot of what I saw (note, I’ve tried to hide the identity of the actual website, that’s why some parts are blurry):

Notice the nice “Welcome to our secure online loan application” and the Verisign secure seal? But look again. There’s no padlock icon in the upper right hand corner of the browser. And the website is not secure at all, because the URL is “http” and not “https”. If it’s not “https”, it’s NOT secure.

Needless to say, I wasn’t going to put in my social security number.

But I did some investigation, because I’m curious and quality minded. I thought, well, maybe the web designer just forgot to put the “s” in the URL. So I typed it in. Here’s what I got:

This is a warning from my browser telling me that the SSL certificate belongs to “secure1.valueweb.com” and that it doesn’t match the website that I’m on. Not looking good.

I try another tactic. I click on the Verisign seal. Here’s what I get:

When you click on these security seals, you are checking back with the company that issued the seal to see if indeed it matches the website that you’re on. In this case, I was on a mortgage site in Washington, and the seal belonged to a software company in California.

I clicked on the “Report Seal Misuse”, emailed the webmaster, and emailed the mortgage company. While I never heard back from Verisign or the webmaster, the mortgage company did contact me. Hopefully they’ll get it fixed soon.

So there’s a big lesson here. If you hire someone to build a website and you need a SSL installed, verify for yourself that it’s working. If it’s done correctly you should see a little padlock in the upper right hand corner of your browser. The URL should be “https”. You should get no browser warnings. And if you click on the SSL seal, it should match the website perfectly.

Without these things, consumer confidence will disappear, like mine did, and your customers will leave, just like I did.

Be careful out there!

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?

Ok, so I’m biased because I’m an engineer. Not just someone who calls themselves an engineer, but a real one with an engineering degree. I’ve created concepts, designs, prototypes, tests, and finally production quality products. Engineers might not be the most aesthetically driven sort of folks, but they sure do care about how things work. And websites are not just static pictures that you look at like a painting. They are dynamic. They are part of a living, breathing organic network called the Internet.

Now I agree that websites should be pleasing to look at, after all it’s a visual medium for the most part. They should also be easy for people to use. But the purpose of the internet is the sharing of information.

I typically design websites for small business owners. Not artists, musicians, entertainers or media companies. Small business owners are not in the entertainment industry. Their websites have one main purpose: to get more paying customers. They do this by communicating information about their products and services in a compelling and clear manner.

Artists create art to convey messages, stir emotions and inspire us. They are experts at creating beautiful things. But, they are not driven to create things that DO something. Websites must do many tasks. They need to capture your attention, lead you to perform certain behaviors (like checkout out a shopping cart or filling out a contact form). They must run and get content from a database and serve it to your visitors at lightening fast speeds. They must process credit cards securely. They allow you to create virtual communities by utilizing blogs or forums. They are very, very busy, and anything but static.

And they must be designed in such a way that other people can find them. Do you want your website to be a piece of art that hangs in a museum that no one knows the address of? Or do you want your website to be available to the entire world? Focusing exclusively on what your website looks like, and constructing it entirely of images or Flash, makes your website appear to search engines like a blank page.

Remember what “HTML” stands for? Hyper TEXT Markup Language. TEXT, TEXT, TEXT…it’s about written words. This is how search engines “see” the content on your website. They can’t “see” images, they can’t “see” Flash movies…but boy can they read text!

See how many times this is mentioned on the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Note they said text links, not images.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.

Again…Google is telling you to use text, not images.

If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

And again…the more plain, regular, standard text, the better.

Still not convinced? Read this article from Google on “Working with Flash, images and other non-text files“. Here’s the very first few sentences (the bold is added by me):

In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.

Why then, given this clearly stated rule, do some web designers still create websites who have literally no content in text? Why do they make websites that are 100% flash, like the one my friend asked me to review?

Perhaps they simply don’t understand how the internet works and have never cared to learn. They are artists at heart and like to make eye candy. Or maybe they know and simply don’t care about whether or not their website customers EVER get any traffic.

Either way, as I’m sure you can tell by now, this annoys me to no end. How someone can call themselves a web designer and take people’s money and then give a 100% flash website that is completely invisible to search engines, not to mention people with visual impairments who rely on text readers, is simply beyond me.

So before you hire your website designer, figure out whether they’re more like an artist, or like an engineer. Do they focus on appearance to the exclusion of functionality? Are they knowledgeable about even the most basic search engine principles? Ask them, and look at the sites in their portfolio. Is there more to it that just shallow surface flashiness? Do their websites WORK for their clients?

Use this handy tool to check out their portfolio – it will show you how a website looks to a Search Engine

1. Enter the exact website address of the page you want to view. (eg. www.iwebtool.com)
2. Enter keywords you want to search for.
3. Click the “Show Me Search Engine Spider View” button.
The results will be displayed the the box below.

Powered by iWEBTOOL

Look at what’s in the window above. (If it’s not working, you may have to come back later and try it, the iwebtool.com site that provides this tool is very busy!) What you see is exactly how the page looks to search engine spiders as they crawl over your website. If your website has no or little visible text in this box, then you need to add content that is text…simple as that.

ADDENDUM: To Folks With Flash Sites Who Are Paying For Clicks

For some reason, I’ve been recently contacted by several folks who have 100% Flash websites who are looking for Google AdWords (Pay-Per-Click) consulting. I sent them this article in the hopes that they will understand that while I’m more than happy to help them with AdWords, I also feel that ethically I should tell them about how poorly their websites are performing in Search Engines.

There’s absolutely no reason that people should have to pay for all of their website traffic – search engines like Google are continually trying to find websites that are relevant to what people are searching for. Why have a website that’s designed to be invisible to Google and then turn around and pay Google for traffic? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

So if you have a website that’s Flash, and you’re thinking about Google AdWords or another Pay-Per-Click service, please take a moment to learn/read about Search Engine Optimization – I think it will be well worth your time and possibly enable you to ween yourself off of Pay-Per-Click and attract some free traffic that your competition, who doesn’t have a Flash website, has been getting.

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.)

Signing up for an account was easy, although I was a little worried about the minimum monthly budget of $99. I’m a very small business with a very small advertising budget. Given that I was to be charged $1 per click, and given that my own search engine optimization efforts brought around 250 visitors to my website monthly, it seemed odd that Citysearch could bring me that much traffic. But since Citysearch reassured me I could delete my account at any time, I signed up. (Go here to read about search engine optimization and how it differs from pay-per-click.)

Since I’m a former engineer turned website designer, I love data. So I track my own website traffic meticulously. (Click here to find out how to track your website’s traffic – super important if you’re in a pay-per-click agreement!) For the first three days, nothing happened. But then strange traffic started appearing on my website tracking tool. Clicks from websites like “folksfound.net” “attpx.com” “redirect.clickshield.net” “folksfound.com” “seek4results.com” “bigapple.contextuads.com” “ppc.burnsearch.net” “arcadepod.com” “adrogo.com” “piqw.com” “dpxml.infospace.com” “peakc.com” “netquesting.com” for words unrelated to my website like “financial planning” and “MSN”. Every day, the number of these strange visitors increased. To my horror, the total number of these visits were exactly correlated to the clicks that Citysearch was charging me $1 per click for. After several days of this junk traffic, my account totaled $45, halfway to my preset $100 limit. The number of fraudulent clicks was increasing on a daily basis. At this rate, I would hit my $100 limit in a few more days! (Again, I wouldn’t have known this if I wasn’t tracking my website traffic…please go here to read about how to track the traffic on YOUR website)

Perhaps I was naive about click fraud or just curious, but I set about the task of going into some of these sites and trying to find what possible search or listing had directed people to my website. Although the number of junk visits and charges from Citysearch matched, I was still looking for proof that these junk visits had something to do with my Citysearch pay-per-click ad. What I found was awful. Many of these sites that visitors had come from were simply garbage directories and I was unable to find any listing that matched mine. However on a few, I was able to find the exact text that I had used in my Citysearch description….and so I knew without a doubt, that this junk traffic was related to my Citysearch ad. I now had the proof I needed to confront Citysearch. (Remember, you need to independently track your website traffic if you’re using a pay-per-click campaign to see if you’re getting your money’s worth…click here to learn how to track your website traffic.)

Three phone calls to Citysearch customer service resulted in nothing but frustration. They were unimpressed about my complaints of click-fraud even though their website said they had a whole Click Fraud organization. I offered to fax logs of my website traffic to their Click Fraud folks, but they weren’t interested. I was left no recourse but to close my account and argue for a refund, which I obtained.

All in all it was a horrible experience for me and I’ll certainly steer all of my clients away from Citysearch. I’ll also insist that they track their own traffic carefully when embarking on any online advertising scheme, especially pay-per-click. Remember to set up your own website traffic analysis tool before you embark on any online marketing venture to make sure you’re getting what you’re paying for! It costs less than $10 per month to sign up with Web-Stat and usually takes me about an hour to install it on a client’s website. If you’re paying hundreds of dollars each month for pay-per-click traffic, please contact me about installing a website traffic tracking tool on your website.

Addendum: Read Daniel Krieger’s experience with Citysearch Pay Per Click Advertising, another unhappy customer.

Another Addendum: Read Jeff Cheap’s blog article Citysearch Click Fraud Warning.

Yet Another: Read “The Middlemen of Paid Search” – Which views SuperPages and Citysearch as middlemen in the pay-per-click foodchain. He recommends that small businesses avoid these middlemen and go straight to the source, Google Adwords (and I agree).

If you have a similar story, contact me and I’d be happy to link to it.