Many websites are blacked out today to protest proposed U.S. legislation that threatens Internet freedom: the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). From personal blogs to Wikipedia, sites all over the web — including this one — are asking you to help stop this dangerous legislation from being passed. Please watch the video below to learn how this legislation will affect Internet freedom.

Why SOPA and PIPA are so dangerous:

Part of me wants to avoid free services online. Their usual aim is to get me hooked on something I find useful, and use it against me. And Google is Just.So.Big. Shouldn’t we be suspicious of these freebies it’s so liberally handing out just for the taking?

I have been such a holdback against the mighty G that I’m now behind the curve when it comes to expertise with Google Analytics, Google Docs, Webmaster Central, and goodness knows what else.

But just this week Google reared its giant head and administered the death knell for server logs vs. GoAn.

I’ve been on this bandwagon preaching the superior integrity of server logs vs. Google Analytics for several years. It seems like nearly every new client has a web host that needs to be asked to save server logs and not automatically delete them as has become the norm.

But Google now says it will be “protecting” its users who are logged in and happen to perform a search. To do that, it will no longer pass the search query to the site’s server logs. It will show up as “not provided” in place of a keyword.

Bad news for marketers who depend on server log keyword reports to give vital clues about what their organic visitors typed in Google to find them.

I guess you could say I have a love/hate relationship with Google. That company provides some of my bread and butter, after all (I set up pay-per-click advertising campaigns in Google, and use their keyword tool to work my keyword magic).

Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. So maybe I’ll spend this whole wet Western Washington weekend working my way through the Everything Google › Products page.

I sure hope Google doesn’t read my blog…

Facebook is beginning to show us how much of a challenge reputation management will be now that social media rules the day. And you thought it was bad when a negative website came up first in Google for your product’s or company’s name. There wasn’t much you could do in that situation beyond trying to SEO your “good” website to get it to outrank the bad site.

But what do you do when you’re being dissed on your own Facebook fan page?

Like too many other marketers are doing, I set up the client’s business Facebook fan page without thinking about consequences. It was just the newest thing to add to my services roster. The client didn’t even ask for this service; I used the opportunity as a guinea pig to teach myself to create Facebook business pages. I don’t mind eating the time in that circumstance.

Then somebody posted a negative comment on my client’s page.

Too late I see that if you throw reputation management concerns into the mix, my little pro bono freebie will end up costing me hours of unbillable time.

First, I had to spend time researching the options. I knew better than to just delete the comment. But this is uncharted territory to me, so I Googled to see if anyone else was battling with this dilemma. It turned out that many are discussing this issue. The consensus appears to be not to censor negatives and let “most” comments stand (unless they are just evil).

Next, I had to spend time on the phone with my client to discuss the situation. He rarely uses the Internet or Facebook so I couldn’t email him (and I thought the situation needed a VERY timely response).

My client confirmed that the customer received bad service, and I had to give him the bad news that there is absolutely no justification to censor her comments on the client’s Facebook business page. Damage control is about all we can do at this point. After we hung up, I logged in to Facebook and composed a careful response to the customer on behalf of my client.

If this happens a few times a month, I’ve just added an unbillable hour or more to my schedule. Obviously I’m not going to be creating Facebook business pages for clients in the future without an agreement that reputation management tasks are a billable service!

> I just spent time on the phone with comcast after seeing
> that another round of spam email was sent from my account.
> I thought that the anti-virus scan I ran had taken care of it.
> Comcast told me I just needed to reset my password.

That may not stop the virus from continuing to email spam to your contact list pretending to be you, and infecting their computers. You can rekey the locks on your house after a burglary but that doesn’t get your stolen items back.

Unfortunately, it’s extremely easy to pose as someone else when sending email. And who is more motivated to hide their true email address than a spammer?!

I wouldn’t be surprised if the only way to resolve this is to have Comcast delete the email address. Then you MUST tell all your contacts (call them if they don’t respond to your email) that any future mail coming from that address is spam and they need to set up a filter or just delete it. This is just like identity theft and almost as much hassle to fix. But you do need to fix it, if only to protect your contacts from those “I’m stranded in a foreign country and lost my wallet, so I need you to wire me some money” and other phishing emails.

And how are spam-scammers getting your address to begin with?

A lot of people’s email addresses are compromised when they access their account over a phony wi-fi connection. It’s pretty easy for a bad guy with a laptop at the next table to pretend to be an access point while they use packet sniffer software (freely available online) to view all your Internet accesses.

This week I started receiving the first of many “Copyright Infringement Notifications” at an email address I alone monitor. (Because it occasionally gets spam due to being easily harvested from my client’s website.)

It turned out not to be spam, but a bona fide infringement warning for my client!

Apparently, someone piggybacked on my client’s Internet connection to download movies on BitTorrent, and the copyright owner was somehow able to grab my client’s IP address. When you share a wi-fi connection, you share the IP as well, and there’s no telling which computer sent or received which packets.

The copyright owner then traced the IP address to the Internet Service Provider, who was required by law to notify the customer. Somehow (they claim because they are an upstream provider or some such) they don’t have my client’s phone number but did have his business name. So they Googled his website and sent their notice to my spam-catcher emailbox.

The fine mentioned was $100 each — nearly $500!

So there you have it, a reason to finally read the manual or help files that came with your wireless router. Or call someone. Or send out a tweet asking for help. Unplug the router. Whatever you choose, do something before it winds up costing you!

Nowadays it’s critical for business owners to protect your reputation online. Once your company’s name or your own name gets an unfavorable mention in Facebook, someone’s blog, a forum, or on some website it can wind up at the top of search results in Google, and there’s not a lot you can do about it.

But doing as much damage control as possible depends on how soon you find out. The proactive way to monitor your online reputation is to use a free alerting service such as Google Alerts. Yes, the same search engine that can bring your company’s good name to its knees can help you nip the damage in the bud. After all, you can’t begin to defend your online reputation if you don’t know it’s been compromised.

When you set up your alerts, you have to be very specific and cover all bases. If your company name is 1 word but might be typed as 2 words, add it in quotation marks. Use every spelling variant you can think of. Keep in mind that Google Alerts are exact match, not broad match, and to keep false positives to a minimum you can add negative match by adding a word preceded by a hyphen.

That was probably as clear as mud, so how about some examples?

I have alerts set up on my name. This is how I discovered that my “unique” name is shared by at least 2 others. Unless you have a very common name, you’ll want to stay apprised of what your name-sharers are up to in the online world! That way, if a customer or prospect mentions something they found by Googling you, you can head them off at the pass with “Yes, that’s another person/company with the same name.”

In this alert, I’ve used my name with and without my middle initial:

In this next alert, I include a negative match. MentalRAM.com is one of my websites and I like to be aware of anyone else using the term, if only to monitor its entry into our modern lexicon. But if the word “horns” appears in the results (meaning it’s related to male sheep), I don’t want Google to include it in the alert notice it sends.

Unfortunately hyphens are ignored in the phrase itself, which I found out when I wanted to be alerted if my new company name, LOR-L, gets mentioned online. There are a bunch of results for “LORL” which make this alert a waste of time.

You may prefer different settings than what I selected in the screenshots. For “type,” you can choose News, Blogs, Realtime, Video, or Discussions. To be safe, I choose “Everything.”

For “how often,” you can choose As-it-happens, Once a day, or Once a week. It depends on how many false positives you get. My alert for my first name gets a lot of results (mainly for the Lorelle who is one of the WordPress pioneers) so I have that one set up to be aggregated once a week.

By the way, if you already have Google Alerts set up, you should delete and re-enter them, because there’s now a beta version that allows you to filter (or not) by volume. (For some reason the Manage Alerts page doesn’t show this field, and I don’t know what the default is.)

There’s also a preview button on the screen where you enter a new alert. But don’t rely on it to show the same results as a regular search at Google, since each new Google Alert you set up is looking forward, not backward. Do be sure to conduct a search at all the major search engines and social networking sites to see what comes up before setting up your alerts.

Your ultimate goals should be having good business practices to keep disgruntled customers to a minimum, and constant monitoring of your reputation so you know when people are mentioning you or your company.

To survive and thrive in the online world, the key is staying alert!

Today I was searching a client’s host’s website (Drizzle.com) for information on which version of php they’re using. Not only was this info nowhere “in site” (pun intended, haha), but when I clicked their prominent Support button, the page was nothing but a long list of drop-down menus. Thinking they might post server upgrade info on their News page, I clicked through only to find that it hasn’t been updated SINCE 2009. As the client just went through a server migration this year, I happen to know that page is way out of date.

Doesn’t exactly inspire me to recommend Drizzle, no sir, no way!

…to include in a website that sells a product? You guessed it: PRICES!

Last night I visited a beautifully done, modern website. Nice, clean layout with easy-on-the-eyes colors. And that’s all well and good, because they sell premium themes for WordPress. But they seem to have left something out.

From the home page, their conversion funnel steers me toward 2 pages: “Learn more” and “View Themes.” The former is the link for just about every button on this page, so I guess they REALLY want me to go there! So I do. Still, I can’t find a way to buy. Oh wait, here’s a link but it’s to their premium product. I’m not sure I want premium. Where’s the regular size?

It used to be said that if you have to ask how much something is, you can’t afford it. But it hasn’t been that way for a very long while. I think the Web changed that.

One rarity I’ve learned to appreciate in this world is well-written instructions, especially when dealing with a techy product. I once returned a high-tech purchase because the manual was written so poorly. So maybe I’m being overly critical but since they goofed on such a major issue I have to wonder whether they’ve left out anything in their product manual or help files that’s vitally important. Ultimately I may be taking my business to this site’s major competitor. Their site features a huge button right on the home page so you can’t miss it: SEE PLANS & PRICING.

I did write to alert the site to the problem I’m having trying to buy their product. A few days later they emailed me to say that the prices were listed on individual themes, but you can’t see them until you click on a theme you’re interested in. Pathetic answer, don’t you think? I guess they want to keep their prices secret, and steer people to the mondo-size product only. (Ironically, in her email she revealed, “Most people start off with the [brand-name] + the Child theme they want to try.”)

I’m always amused when it’s the MOST IMPORTANT THING that gets neglected, while minor details get taken care of. Like a gigantic typo in 24-point typeface in a headline above thrice-edited copy.

Or forgetting to give customers an easy way to buy from your website!

Every few years I find it necessary to revisit topics as advances in technology render previous workarounds useless.

Many years ago on this very website, long before the CAN-SPAM Act went into effect, I wrote about the importance of keeping spam-spiders from harvesting email addresses in web pages.

Recently I was asked whether I have seen a decrease in this type of harvesting, in the 13 years since I’ve been a webmaster.

Yes, I have, but only a slight decline. That makes sense, when you think about how cheap email harvesting software must be by now (probably free). Leaving email addresses unencrypted in a web page is like leaving the door to your house wide open — too easy to pass up. (Before CAN-SPAM was passed, spammers said that email addresses revealed in html source code were public domain; for the public’s use, whatever that might be. An open invitation to receive broadcast emails.

How to combat it?

Most small-biz people use the same email address everywhere — on their biz cards, in their social media profiles, etc. Not smart. If it gets compromised, it’s a huge ordeal to change addresses, especially if you’re in business and don’t want to miss potential sales. So keep one address pristine for business, and use a throwaway address anytime you have to risk it passing into the hands of spammers.

If you have your email on your website’s Contact page, I recommend using a dedicated (throwaway) address so you can disable it if it gets picked up by spammers. And/or they use a dumb one like “info@domain.com.” In addition to using a dedicated address, I use JavaScript anti-spam scripts. (I also use an image to show the email address.)

Another place I recommend using dedicated addresses is in forms on your website. I don’t know about other form software, but when you set up a FrontPage form to send by email, it puts the address right there in the code. So for years I’ve been using throwaway form-to addresses. Early on I started using a date in the To address so I could see how quickly it gets compromised.

Just recently, to test the waters, I added an email address on a contact page with a “mailto” link and within one week started getting spam.

I have seen a decline of email address harvesting, but there’s still plenty of spammers going this route, so it’s never going to stop completely. Also, the quality of the spam seems to have risen, making it harder to weed out. For example, I’m getting spam from The CEO Sales Solution [info@targettrainingonline.com]. At first it looked as legit as most of the newsletters I’m signed up for. But when I tried to unsubscribe, I realized it’s addressed to the form address, which is used only to sign up for my client’s newsletter. And it’s never been used nor been visible anywhere online EVER except in the source code.

I don’t use any spam-filtering software on my pc, and always decline any junk filters when setting up a new email address on the server. It’s only through diligently using throwaway email addresses that I’ve been able to avoid a spam problem all these years. But nowadays, between email hijacking and spammers infecting computers with virii to send spam to everyone in its address book or sent file, I’m seeing a lot of “friendly spam.”

In fact I just received an email with the subject of “Sup” in the subject line from a very conservative friend that made me realize immediately that her MSN account has been hijacked.

The hijackers usually send short emails consisting of a link, and sometimes a short line of explanation. They know how irresistible it is to click that link — people love mystery and intrigue. And it’s coming from a friend, so it must be safe, right?

It seems to me that we’re going to have to educate people to never send a link in email without a full explanation, and to never click a link in email, especially html mail. In fact the latter might make a good follow-up blog post…

It’s too bad the blog spammers have to ruin it for everyone!

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