Aldebaran Web Design's Blog

If you, or your a member of your family uses a file sharing program to share things like music, with others - better watch this video from MSNBC. Apparently it’s easy for identity thieves to get into your computer via these programs and get access to all kinds of person info, like tax returns. Very scary stuff - I highly recommend you watch the video I’ve embedded.

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Can you trust online stores you are doing business with? Lately I’ve been on a mission to get my business certified as a green web design company. As part of that effort, I have been doing research online into how exactly to accomplish this. I wound up on one online store that looked legitimate and I started to purchase carbon offsets. I quickly lost trust in the online store and wanted to share with you the red flags I found.

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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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Prospective clients often don’t understand the difference between domain name registration and website hosting. It is a confusing system, and hopefully this article will remove some of the mystery of website design basics.

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When is a link worthless from a search engine perspective? I was recently working on checking how many backlinks one of my clients had, and we found some surprising results. He’s a therapist in Seattle, and thought he had backlinks from several major online therapy directories that would contribute to his search engine ranking. What we found surprised him and just might surprise you.

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Every once in a while, a prospective client asks me if I’d create a bunch of domains that are in essense, fake, and have them direct traffic to their real domain. I always say no, because this is in direct violation of Google’s quality guidelines. If you’re thinking about doing this, or if you’ve found a competitor who does this and want to know what to do, please read on.

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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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I recently did an experiment in Google AdWords with one of my client’s accounts to see whether we could lower her CPC (cost-per-click) bid and actually generate more traffic. She was hitting her daily budget limit and couldn’t afford to increase her budget. So we tried an experiment to see if lowering her CPC bids could increase clicks. Read more to see the actual results.

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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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