South Florida Web Marketing Blog

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I received the following information in an e-mail Newsletter from Stumble:

Back in February the collocation facility we leased server space from was raided by the FBI. All 10 of our servers were removed and still remain with the FBI. The owner of the collocation center that was hosting our servers is being investigated for some crime.

In speaking with the special agent assigned to the case we learned many things. I understand that they are there to catch the bad guys. But sometimes their wave of attrition can really hurt the little guys. Hurt the small businesses. The FBI received information that all the servers in the facility were owned and operated by their target. It wasn’st until after they raided the facility with guns drawn that they learned that the facility had over 100 clients. I asked the special agent why they did not check out the intel and he asked me the following question… “If you were with the FBI about to raid a building and you received intel that all the units were owned by the owner of the building, what would you do?”

I replied,”I would check public records to make sure that the information is accurate.”

I guess that reply struck a nerve because shortly thereafter he hung up on me.

I tried calling back but he let me go to voicemail.

Unfortunately the several hundred legitimate companies, like ourselves, have been left out in the cold while the FBI drags its feet in returning our servers to us. They are looking for some forensic evidence against the collocation facility. Unfortunately they do not have the manpower to go through each and every box in a timely manner. We have been promised that they will return them to us, but one special agent hinted it could be many months.

The good news is that neither us, nor any of the other clients are under any type of investigation, only the collocation facility. We are not waiting for the FBI. We have built a whole new look to our site and we will be releasing all new features over the coming months.

UPDATE: The FBI was able to get us images of our drives.

Again thanks to all those that stood by us and please use the contact us form located at: http://www.stumblehere.com/contact.php to report anything that will help our site and community grow.

Stumblehere Team

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More marketers use social networking to reach customers
By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Ford Motor has high hopes for Fiesta, a popular model abroad launching in the U.S. next year.

So how does it introduce the subcompact car to Americans? A massive ad blitz on TV? In-house promotions at dealers nationwide?

Nope.

In April, Ford tapped 100 top bloggers and gave them a Fiesta for six months. The catch: Once a month, they’re required to upload a video on YouTube about the car, and they’re encouraged to talk — no holds barred — about the Fiesta on their blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

Read more about the use of Social Networking…

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I know people want to get their websites into the search engines, but you have to think before you start this subbmission process.

The Website Optimization process can take a few days to do correctly, but it is well worth the  effort.

1. Look at the web content – what does your message say? Is it clear? Can it be easily followed?
2. Was the web page optimized? Titles,  Descriptions, Meta Tags, Properly Selected Keywords, Keyword Density, Images, etc.
3. Is the web page as close to W3C compliance?
4. Is your menu easy to follow?

Optimize your  web pages before submitting them to search engines. Taking the time to set the foundation for your marketing will make all the difference in being found in the search engines.

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Dear Advertiser,

As you know, when you advertise with Yahoo!, your traffic can come from both Yahoo! sites and partners’ sites in our distribution network. As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen our marketplace, Yahoo! plans to soon expand the adjustments we make to click charges based on our assessment of the performance of traffic coming from sources within our distribution network. This will include deeper discounts on click charges for lower-performing traffic, and potential premiums on click charges for higher-performing traffic. We expect to launch this enhancement in late August or early September 2009.

This change is designed to further align your click charges with the performance of the traffic that you receive.

How this Affects Your Account
These adjustments will be based on our assessment of the performance of the traffic source, and will not be affected by the quality of your ads. Based on our analysis, we expect that most advertisers will see click charges drop or remain unchanged, while a small fraction of advertisers may experience an increase in click charges.

As always, you will never pay more for a click than the amount you specify as your bid (including any bid adjustments you may make for desired audiences).

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

For more information…
Please visit our Help Center or click the “Customer Support” link within your account.

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Judge orders Microsoft to stop selling Word
By Byron Acohido, USA TODAY

SEATTLE — A federal district court judge has ordered Microsoft (MSFT) to stop selling Word in the U.S. — and the tiny company behind the lawsuit is digging in for a David vs. Goliath showdown.

Toronto-based i4i, which has 30 employees, claims that Microsoft violated an obscure patent related to Extensible Markup Language or XML. It’s a key software component of many websites and computer programs, including Word.

The complete story…

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Link Building is the corner stone of  marketing your website, by increasing the number of incoming links – you can increase your website’s popularity.

Search engines usually reward popularity from quality incoming links from other web sites with higher rankings.

If you increase the incoming number of links correctly, this will help increase traffic to the web site.

That increased traffic should result in increased leads and sales.

Why choose us?
The answer is simple! We provide very quality link building service. It’s not the same as what most SEO companies do:

We hand submit all our linking requests.

Top 16 Benefits of Our Link Building Service:

1. Securing “unidirectional” or only-Incoming (non-reciprocal) links
2. Links with relevant “Keywords” in the Anchor Text
3. Links from industry-relevant pages
4. Links from avergage to well ranked web sites
5. Links to your site should not be through a “redirect” script
6. No JavaScript links
7. No links from “framed” pages
8. No “flash” embedded links
9. No paid links
10. No email spam used to solicit links.
11. No links from Link Farms
12. No links from FFA (Free-For-All) link networks
13. No links from pornographic and other sites containing offensive content
14. Full report of links created at the end of each month
15. All links that were attempted are included in the report
16. No “no follow” links

You will receive a monthly Link Building Report containing all submitted links, with submitted information including date and url

During your Link Building Campaign, you’ll always be able easily track the progress of your campaign with our ranking reports and optional Google Analytics Reporting

Our link building services are very simple and affordable.

Contact us today.

Smitty’s Holdings, Inc.
(954) 423-2785

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Top 10 Search Providers for April 2009 (U.S)

Ranked by Searches (U.S.)

RANK	Provider	Searches (000)	YOY Growth	% of all Searches
	All Search	8,608,488	4.40%	100.00%
1	Google Search	5,510,366	7.80%	64.0%
2	Yahoo! Search	1,406,416	-2.80%	16.3%
3	MSN/Windows Live Search	852,998	7.20%	9.9%
4	AOL Search	321,205	-8.80%	3.7%
5	Ask.com Search	181,617	5.90%	2.1%
6	My Web Search Search	59,110	3.60%	0.70%
7	Comcast Search	45,338	-1.80%	0.50%
8	Yellow Pages Search	37,160	N/A*	0.40%
9	NexTag Search	22,845	3.90%	0.30%
10	Dogpile.com Search	17,010	3.10%	0.20%
Source: Nielsen MegaView Search * A year-over-year comparison is not possible because of a definitional change to Yellow Pages Search.

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By Denise Lavoie, Associated Press

BOSTON — A federal jury on Friday ordered a Boston University graduate student who admitted illegally downloading and sharing music online to pay $675,000 to four record labels.

Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, admitted in court that he downloaded and distributed 30 songs. The only issue for the jury to decide was how much in damages to award the record labels.

The complete story – read it closely…
Jury awards $675K in Boston music downloading case

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Hello Everyone,

I have just moved my website from another hosting company. I found that the older hosting company kept making changes to their security and OS that caused changes in my website due to programming issues that worked fine when I implemented them. A nice e-mail notifying clients of changes would have been extremely helpful.

When I found a problem – like  one of my RSS feeds not working and  asked if anything was changed – the standard answer was  “everything is working on our end”.  Without taking the time to ask the other engineers if the OS configuration was updated or modified. It turns out that they implemented a security feature to block incoming RSS feeds to my website. And to top that off – they also blocked my own RSS feed from my WordPress to my Home page – ON THE SAME DOMAIN!

Needless to say – I have been displeased by all this extra time I had to spend trying to figure things out and forced to deal with these issues that were brought on by the hosting company. I know no hosting company is perfect, but after a couple of years and the recent unexplained changes – I had enough.

I spent time looking at many other hosting companies out there and there are some good companies, I made a choice.

I went with Host gator – I like their support, pricing and features.

http://www.hostgator.com

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Several other positive things came out of this which I shall add to this story. There are a few useful website tools – that can help figure things out.

Albertra.com – allows you to check (from multiple locations) the access and current status of your website. You can see if your website is up or if you are having a problem with your local ISP.

http://www.alertra.com/spotcheck.php

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Another useful tool is Proxify.net.  Proxify.net is a web-based anonymous proxy service which allows anyone to surf the Web privately and securely. I use it to test to see if my website is working.

http://proxify.net/

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I also use Network-tools.com

http://network-tools.com/

This is a great tool to check:

• Ping
• Lookup
• Trace
• Whois (IDN Conversion Tool)
• Express – (runs mulitple tests in one shot)
• DNS Records (Advanced Tool)
• Network Lookup
• Spam Blacklist Check
• URL Decode
• URL Encode
• HTTP Headers SSL
• Email Verification

Even if you have the best optimized website in the world, website hosting can ruin your rankings. If your web hosting is problematic, slow or offline on a regular basis, it can effect your rankings.

Monitor your website, check all the web pages, especially if you are using programming, feeds and blogs.

Good Luck.