Ozdachs

Double Trouble

One new client bought two domain names, one for their business and one for their family and personal life. Let’s say one domain is www.ozdachs.biz (for business) and the other is www.ozdachs.com (for personal).

He started his business web site and took advantage of the offer of the hosting company to point the address of his future family web to the business site. That is, you see the same pages whether you go to www.ozdachs.biz or www.ozdachs.com . “Great!” he thought. His business will get double listings in Google and other search engines until he’s ready to put up family photos and whatever on his personal site.

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t give double listings to content it finds at different addresses on the Internet.

In fact, if Google notices the duplication of content, it will take one of these three bad actions:

1. In the worse case, Google will suspect that the two sites are both sleazy cheats. Google will see the duplicated material as the work of lazy webmasters up to no good. Google hates copied pages, and it may ban both sites completely from its result pages. That means neither site will show up in any search results.

2. Google will decide that one of the duplicated sites is real and the other is a cheat. How Google picks the “real” one is not known. Google will then ban the one they identified as a cheat. There’s a 50-50 chance that Google will ban the business site and decide that the placeholder family site is the one that should show up in search results.

3. In the best bad case, Google will DIVIDE the ranking of each duplicated page. If the home page would normally show up as #1 for a search of “blue widgets”, Google would adjust the importance of both sites’ home pages and will display them in position #30 or worse. In addition, in the search results for SOME phrases, the business’ site page will show up higher than the duplicated content on the personal site. For other phrases, the personal site’s pages will show up above the exact same business page. It’s a genuine mash-up.

Basically, this “free” pointing of the home site to the business site is a serious problem for someone interested in getting traffic from Google.

Apparently the hosting service thinks it’s doing my client a service by letting people access the one set of web pages by using either site address. In reality, they’re hurting the client’s chance of showing up in a good position in Google.

I have no fancy workarounds to talk about or options to suggest. Simply, if you’re offered the chance to point two domains to the same content, just don’t do it!

By Ozdachs|2009-11-30T16:31:07-08:00November 30th, 2009|Google, Search Engine Optimization|3 Comments

How to Twitter Like a Teenage Girl

“I don’t want to use Twitter. I don’t care that some starlet is buying socks at Walmart.” If you’ve made this comment about using Twitter — or let loose another, similar slam — let us old-timers suggest 4 scenarios where you can get useful information from Twitter and no place else.

Scenario 1 — We were driving north on I5 a few miles north of Corning, California. Suddenly the traffic stopped. Dead. We joined a very slow crawling line of traffic that was solid as far as we could see. The passenger picked up his iPhone and searched Twitter for “I5”. Within seconds he located a raft of Tweets from other cars on the same stretch of road. Scrolling through these, he read several that referred to an overturned truck off the side of the road about a mile ahead. We inched ahead for the next mile, until we saw the truck, Highway Patrol, and the whole accident scene. What Twitter provided: an accurate traffic report in the middle of nowhere, in a spot far away from media coverage. During the holidays you can also search Twitter for reports on shopping center parking lots and other micro-traffic matters.

Scenario 2 — A client’s telephone system blew a power supply. Incoming calls were not being answered, even though the staff was in the office available to meet with clients. The client posted a Tweet about their problem and invited his customers to email or drop in. This Twitter message was picked up by a feed and reposted to his Facebook page. What Twitter provided: an alternative path to keep communications going when the phones were out.

Scenario 3 — We follow (which means that we automatically get copies of the postings) only a few people. People who post things we want to see flash in front of us when we’re already busy. We follow:
* ASavvyConsumer who posts interesting tips on buying things and, right now, surviving the holidays.
* San Francisco accountants an Ozdachs client whose Tweets often tell us new information on handling our money.
* A software supplier who announces fixes, new products, and tips
… and other organizations we belong to and industry gurus .
What Twitter provided: quick updates and links to more information on topics we’ve already selected.

Scenario 4 — We attended a business conference with competing break-out seminars, many of which were repeated at different times over the three-day convention. Other participants posted on Twitter comments on some of the hot presentations, and we altered our schedule to catch later sections of the topic or other classes by good presenters. What Twitter provided: Real-time user evaluations which helped us get the most from our business event.

These real-world adult (and mostly business) Twitter benefits don’t involve monitoring the sports stars’ progression through bars, the shopping habits of the glitterati, nor the momentary angst of our friends. The Twitter posts we read relate to our adult world just as the Tweets monitored by teenagers relate to their current concerns.

Twitter accommodates young adult and other adult equally. It’s a neutral media that serves up a banquet of information of our own selection. Older people join in just as enthusiastically as a wide-eyed youth.

We each will probably pick different information to extract from the social news cloud. But, don’t we do that anyway in our choice of TV networks to watch, newspapers to subscribe to, or blogs to read?

By Ozdachs|2010-11-21T16:03:46-08:00November 28th, 2009|Social Media|0 Comments

Stupid Web Hosting Tricks

A new client approached me today and asked for help updating her site and solving her email dilemma. The changes to web pages were not problem.

However, I couldn’t solve her email issue. She complained that she had to log on to each email account on her system every 33 days or else the hosting service would delete the email box.

I’d never heard of this before.

I have heard of hosting services limiting the amount of stored mail each mailbox could save, and I’ve heard of limits on the total amount of email stored for all accounts. But, I have never heard of an activity requirement for an email account.

But, PowWeb.com indeed has a requirement that each email account be regularly accessed or its suspended and then deleted. Their FAQ says they do this because inactive mail accounts attract spam. When we asked that our client’s account be set up to escape this requirement, tech support said:

On our platform, the mailboxes which are inactive for 90 days or more are disabled automatically. This is an automated process which is done from the backend. Please note that this is being done to provide our customers with the better services and smooth flow of emails on our servers. This is the reason, we suggest our customers to access their mailboxes via WebMail. This is the only option we provide our customers.

Say what? This policy is nuts!

Inactive accounts don’t attract spam — publicly known email addresses attract spam. Besides, PowWeb already has a limit on the amount of disk space each email account can use, so even an inactive spam magnet will fill quickly and not hog additional resources.

More importantly, my client says that this policy is enforced even on email accounts that forward all incoming mail to other addresses hosted elsewhere. Email addresses such as [email protected] forward to the owner’s personal email account where she retrieves all her mail. Those forwarded accounts take no disk space. Yet, PowWeb is insisting that she log on to the phantom [email protected] account every 90 days.

Note: the policy says the email accounts must be accesses every 90 days. My client accessed her email addresses October 8, and she received 5-day deactivation warnings on November 5. That’s more like 33 days.

My client now wants to move hosting services to a place that doesn’t have such an email policy. I recommend Webmasters.com, and they don’t have a policy like that. But, aside from personal experience, I don’t know how I would tell that a hosting service is free from such a squirrelly access requirement.

What are you supposed to do when you’re shopping for hosting services? Ask, “Do you have any incredibly stupid rules that I should know about?”

By Ozdachs|2009-11-10T07:54:41-08:00November 10th, 2009|Professional Services, Web Design|1 Comment

Facebook and The 440

Facebook’s asks creators of public pages for businesses to mark if the page is somehow alcohol related. Since I was making a page for a local bar, selecting the “alcohol related” choice in a drop-down menu seemed the fair thing to do.

That confession, I’ve discovered, blocks the page from being accessed by the masses.

When I am not signed on to Facebook and try to go to the 440 Castro page, I get a screen asking me to log on to Facebook first.

On the other hand, when I go to a church’s Facebook page, say the one for the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco, the page comes up just fine.

Apparently, there’s an alcohol taboo that will keep my client’s Facebook page from being crawled by Google or by being seen by any Internet dinosaur who doesn’t have a Facebook account.

Sigh!

Restricting the general public from viewing a page that is for a legit business that serves alcohol seems pointless. I’ve gotten information about a lot more offensive products emailed to me directly. More importantly, your average net surfer has developed a pretty good internal filter by the time they’ve reached 13. Besides, they can go to the 440’s website (or many, many bars’ websites) directly.

I’ll report this Facebook oddity to my client to see what, if anything, they want to do about their social media page.

In the meantime, we can all sleep easier knowing that little Johnny can learn online how to build a bomb but he cannot learn where he’ll be able to drink when he’s 21.

By Ozdachs|2010-11-21T16:04:27-08:00November 7th, 2009|Social Media|0 Comments

Today's Phishing Trips

Two phishing attacks are hitting my in-box hard today.

One tries to trick you into logging into your Facebook account to see the new features available to you. This is a really clever angle since earlier this week Facebook unleashed a site redesign which has been widely panned in part because Facebook didn’t pre-announce the changes or explain them.

This phishing email sounds like Facebook is responding to criticism by telling you of changes and inviting you to learn more about them.

Of course, if you do click on the link, you’ll go to a site that looks like Facebook but is, in fact, a fraudulent site somewhere in the European Union. The crooks want you to give up your Facebook user name and password. From there they’ll have access to your Facebook account and can post and send messages coming from “you” to trick your friends into giving up more information. Or worse.

The second attack is an email supposedly from the FDIC telling me that my bank has been taken over. According to a warning I heard on the radio, if you click on the link to the phony FDIC site, you’re asked to put in your bank account number and other identifying information. Guess what happens after you do this?

Practicing Safer Computing

Here’s how I quickly spotted these messages as phony:

I hovered my cursor over the links. Microsoft Outlook pops up a message showing the real destination of any link when the cursor is held over it. In these cases the destination started out with “www.Facebook.com” or “www.FDIC.gov”, but the location kept going and in both emails ended with a “.eu”. This means I’d be taken to crooked sites in the European Union and not to a business or government site in the US. (Check out an earlier post about a phishing attack for more information on uncovering where a link is really going to take you.)
The FDIC mail was sent to an email address that I don’t use for banking. [email protected] simply is not used for those activities, so why would I get messages in that inbox?
I wasn’t expecting email from either organization. I don’t click on links in email when I am not expecting the message. Even when I do get a notice from my real credit card companies or bank, I don’t click on their link. Instead I type the address in myself (or use my bookmarked location).
I am getting multiple copies of each message. They’re being sent to every email address I have displayed on the Internet, and I think I am getting multiple copies to the same email account. No real sender would be so unselectively spammy.

Yeah, I could wind up falling for tomorrow’s phishing attack. I know no one is immune. But, these two didn’t get me. Don’t let them get you!

By Ozdachs|2009-10-28T12:22:49-07:00October 28th, 2009|Scams|0 Comments

About Ozdachs

Double Trouble

How to Twitter Like a Teenage Girl

Stupid Web Hosting Tricks

Facebook and The 440

Today's Phishing Trips

Practicing Safer Computing