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“Your mailbox quota is full” Scam

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One of my clients recently received the following email:

Your mailbox quota is full, This may cause a malfunction in your mailbox or you may not be able to receive more e-mail
Your mailbox quota is full,
This may cause a malfunction in your mailbox or you may not be able to receive more e-mail.

It’s clearly designed to panic the recipient into clicking the link by making them think their email will be cut off. I’m not sure what will happen if one clicks that link, but I’m quite sure it will not be good. This is either a spam or a scam, or possibly both.

Notice, when I hover my mouse over the link, where the link leads to. My client’s email is not hosted with filling.conwaydirect.net:

Notice where the link leads to when I hover my mouse over it.
Notice where the link leads to when I hover my mouse over it.

Be careful out there, folks. The internet is not always a friendly place.

Didjoo Vote?

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I voted. Had to hold my nose on some of my choices, but I did it. This would have been a good year to have NOTA as a choice.

Unbeknownst to me, my precinct moved since the last time I voted. I went to where I used to vote, but there was nothing there. Then I drove around aimlessly for a bit until I spotted the blue “Precinct 30” sign.

Here in Punta Gorda, we use old-fashioned pieces of paper and have to color in little ovals with a pen. I hate that — I never could color inside the lines. Also, I officially have middle-aged eyes, and I forgot to bring my reading glasses with me, so I had to squint painfully at the printing on the ballot to read it.

The election workers were, as always, pleasant and helpful. Around here, they’re always old, too. When I get old maybe I’ll have time to work elections.

Search vs. Direct Navigation

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So I have a client I’m developing a website for. The client has been great to work with, and we’ve made good progress on the new site. But there was a problem: The client kept complaining that he couldn’t reach his site — he was getting “not found” error messages. He told me that he could, at one point, get to the site without the “www” — which was particularly strange because one of the first things I do on a new site is implement a 301 permanent redirect from the non-www to the www version of the URL. [Read more…]

Phishing and Phishing Detection

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I recently had 2 diametrically opposite experiences with phishing. In the world of the Internet, “phishing” is when some entity (a scammer) — typically, a website or e-mail sender — pretends to be some organization that a user has a relationship with, and attempts to entice the user into providing personal and confidential information (such as passwords, bank account numbers, PIN numbers, etc.) to the scammer. eBay, PayPal, banks, and other similar sites are popular phishing targets.

PayPal Impersonators

Anyway, a client sent me a copy of an e-mail they had received, allegedly from PayPal, which contained “confirmation” of a purchase by the client using their PayPal account. The e-mail included a prominent link to “Dispute Transaction,” and the surrounding text instructed the recipient, “If you haven’t authorized this charge, click the link below to cancel the payment and get a full refund.”

Now, I understand that PayPal is good about chargebacks for fraudulant transactions, but I’ve never heard of them so openly inviting people to dispute a transaction. So that should have been a clue. Fortunately, when the client clicked the link to dispute the transaction, their antivirus program popped up with a warning message about it being a scam. The client then promptly contacted me to ask what they should do.

A PayPal Phishing Attempt
A PayPal Phishing Attempt

Undoubtedly, the link would have taken the client to a site that looked exactly like the PayPal site. There would have been instructions to log in to dispute the transaction. The client would have entered his PayPal account name and password, with the intention of disputing a fraudulent charge. Bingo! The scammer would have just got hold of the client’s PayPal login information — and there’s no telling what havoc would have been wreaked. Disaster averted — thank heaven the client had a security program installed and running on his computer.

Microsoft’s False Positive Phishing Warnings

And then there’s Microsoft. Internet Explorer 7, to be precise. With it’s much-vaunted “anti-phishing filter.” Bah, I say!

I recently started using an RSS feed from eBay to display live listings from eBay on an informational site. When I was testing the site in IE7, IE was giving me security warnings that this was a “suspicious site” and might be a “phishing site.” I know darn well it’s not — the site is clearly not eBay, it doesn’t pretend to be eBay, it’s clearly a separate site that doesn’t look anything like eBay — it merely displayed auction listings from eBay, with affiliate links to those listings on eBay.

IE7 offered me the option to submit a report to Microsoft, stating that I was the site’s owner and could verify that it wasn’t a phishing site. I did this, and the next day I got an e-mail from Microsoft that they had inspected the submitted URL, verified that it was not “phishing,” and removed the warning.

Then I discovered they had only removed the warning from one page of the site. In order to remove the warning from every page that used these listings, I would have to report every page individually.

This was first of all, much too time consuming, and second, far too annoying. I would have to submit that report for every single page on every single site where I wanted to use the eBay feed. So I set about looking for what the code might contain that caused IE to pop up the phishing warning.

Here’s what I learned:

  • Text links to the eBay listings didn’t trigger the warning.
  • The images, pulled in directly from eBay and displayed on my site, didn’t trigger the warning.
  • But the images, when linked to the eBay listings, did trigger the warning.

Hmmm ….. I didn’t want to remove the links from the images. People are naturally inclined to click on the images. After some trial and error, I discovered that if I sent those links through a redirection script, it stopped the phishing warnings cold.

Yay me!

“Crawlability,” Web Design, and SEO

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So I got a gentle tweak from Zack Katkin at Unique ID Web Design because I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been busy working on projects for clients, but I know that’s no excuse. I’m breaking the Golden Rule of Blogging, which I drill into my clients when they want to start a blog, to wit: You must blog regularly! Thanks, Zack, for the nudge. šŸ˜‰

Okay, enough of that. Today I’m going to talk about crawlability and web design. I got to browsing the Unique ID blog and read Zack’s post “Straight From Google, The Four Biggest Search Rank Factors,” in which “crawlability” is listed as the very top, highest priority, most important search engine ranking ractor for a web site. This week I’ve also been following a discussion at the High Rankings forums about whether web designers have any SEO responsibility when designing a web site.

The discussion at High Rankings opened with the story of a businessman who hired someone to design a web site for his business. The site was built in Flash, and, as might be expected, the businessman’s web site didn’t do so very well in the search engines. When he sought professional SEO help, he was flabbergasted to learn that an all-Flash site is likely to rank poorly, if at all, in the search engines.

He asked the SEO pro, “Why did the designer use Flash when he knew I wanted search engine visibility?”

A better question would be, why do designers design “search-engine hostile” web sites when they know clients want search engine visibility?

As things stand in the world of web design, anyone with some elementary graphic design skills can get themselves a copy of Dreamweaver or FrontPage and hang out their “Web Designer” shingle, offering their services for a fee to all comers.

Some of these designers do indeed have a lot of artistic talent with respect to creating pretty, aesthetically pleasing, visually attractive web sites.

What these designers lack is a fundamental understanding of the underlying code and structure of web pages, and a fundamental understanding of how search engines crawl and index web pages, and a fundamental understanding of how a web site needs to be structured in order to have a chance of getting search engine traffic.

So these web designers make a “pretty design” in Photoshop or Fireworks or Flash, and use the built-in export features from those programs to auto-generate the code or the Flash file. The client ends up with a very pretty site that hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of doing well in organic searches.

The web is still relatively new as a commercial medium, and there is still some level of technical knowledge required in order to build a crawlable web site. Daily we see self-labeled “professional” web designers creating all-Flash sites, or using fancy javascript-based rollover images for global navigation, or relying on other artsy-fartsy features that doom a site to search engine purgatory — a site that is uncrawlable by search engine spiders, and generally invisible in the search engines.

The client doesn’t understand why his beautiful site gets little or no search engine traffic. The client eventually discovers, if he’s lucky or persistent, that he now has to pay for his site all over again, this time to have someone else tear apart his beautiful artsy-fartsy site and re-build it using underlying code and techniques that the search engines can crawl.

Does it have to be this way?

Should it be this way?

I say no, it shouldn’t. Some people might argue that a web designer’s responsibility is to design pretty stuff, not to perform search engine optimization. That’s true up to a point — I wouldn’t posit that it’s the web designer’s responsibility to do link building or write linkbait articles or do keyword research, unless those activities are explicitly included in the agreement.

But I do argue that anyone who holds himself out as a “professional web designer” should have a broad and fundamental understanding of the technology of the medium and the factors that are required for success in that medium. I do argue that the “professional web designer” is holding himself out as an expert, and the client is relying on the expert’s knowledge and experience.

The client shouldn’t have to have a specialist’s knowledge of the medium — that’s why the client hires a professional. When I hire a contractor to build a house, I shouldn’t have to become an expert on building houses, and I shouldn’t have to give the contractor explicit detailed instructions about how to run the wiring so it doesn’t burn the house down. I expect the contractor — ā€the professionalā€ — to have the knowledge and expertise to do that himself, even if the contract doesn’t explicitly state that the contractor will run the wiring so that it doesn’t burn the house down.

In an ideal world, building contractors would always run the wiring so that it doesn’t burn the house down, and in that same ideal world, web designers would always build crawlable web sites.

The only exception I would make to this general rule is when a client specifically requests features that will cause crawlability problems, and, after being educated by the web designer about the consequences of his request, the client insists that his aesthetic vision is more important than search engine visibility. The client is paying for the site, after all. But even then there are usually steps the web designer can take to mitigate and overcome the problems ā€” including text links in the footer to complement the pretty Flash buttons at the top of the page, for example.

Meanwhile, we live in an imperfect “buyer beware” world where the web designers who understand the medium are competing against the web designers who don’t. Clients have to educate themselves sufficiently, and ask lots of questions of potential designers, in order to be sure they end up with a crawlable web site.

Can your site be tweaked?

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Many of my clients already have an existing web site when they contact me. Often they’re unhappy with their site’s visual design, or its functionality, or its performance in the search engines. I hate — I really hate — telling a potential client that their site needs to be completely re-developed from the ground up in order achieve the level of performance they’re looking for. Yes, I can charge more for a complete redevelopment, and I like that part, but it always feels sort of “snake oil salesman” to me. I’d rather tell the client, “Yes, we can work with your existing site. We can make these changes, and add this functionality, and we can do this, that and the other thing.”

But sometimes that’s simply not possible. Particularly when the potential client is looking for improved search engine performance or better usability.

Sometimes a site can be improved dramatically by minor tweaks: Add unique, custom title tags to each page, add alt text to images where needed, add text-based site navigation, beef up the content, and a few other improvements. Bang, I’m done, and the client can look for improved performance whenever the search engines see fit to recognize the changes to the site. (That might take days, it might be weeks, it might be months — I try to make sure the client is aware that I have no control over what the search engines do in that regard.)

But all too often the site is constructed so badly that nothing but a total redeveloment will do:

  • Frames — frames-based sites are not only less usable for human visitors, but they still throw roadblocks in the path of the search engines trying to index the site.
  • Frames Part Two — Even worse is sites that frame content from other sites. The framing site gets no credit in the SEs for the framed off-site content.
  • All-Flash Sites — The search engines are working on their ability to index Flash sites, but your all-Flash site is unlikely to be the breakthrough. Flash elements should be used sparingly to add to the visitor’s experience, but Flash should not be the site.
  • Search-engine-hostile Dynamic URLs— There are so many ways to go wrong here that it’s hard to list them all. Session IDs in URLs. Meaningless long numbers and section ids and category ids. URLs that display all the site’s content on the same page (using formats like “index.php?page=thispage”).It’s so easy to use the magic of server-side technology to write user-friendly and search-engine-friendly URLs, and to keep session IDs out of URLs. Which type of URL do you like better:
    • http://www.example.com/products/red-widgets.html, OR
    • http://www.example.com/index.php?cat=52 &section=355&prodid=125
      &_trksid=p0.m570.l1313&hash=2394087lasmn8&sess_id=5348725987ofdj30487590fjglkae098t87q34085uofilajg

    Yeah, I thought so. Me too. The search engines like the first one better too.

  • Lack of content — if there’s little or nothing for the search engines to spider, there’s little or no likelihood of any of the pages turning up in searches.
  • Sites that requires the user to submit a form before seeing the content — Hey, search engine spiders don’t submit forms; they’ll never see all that great content on your site.
  • Invalid tag soup — Badly coded sites with such badly formed html that it’s darn near impossible to work with the code. When I’m optimizing a site, I need to get down-and-dirty in the code, and pages with invalidly nested tables, invalidly nested divs, incomprehensible, invalid code everywhere — well, I just can’t work with it. It’s hard to even touch the code in a site like that, because you just don’t know what will happen.
  • Rigid, inflexible design and code — This usually results from so-called “designers” who design a pretty image in Photoshop or Fireworks and then slice it up and export the entire thing from their image-editing program. The code for these sites is so rigid that you can’t make a single change without breaking the entire thing.
  • Template sites based on some badly designed content management system — There are too many big companies out there who have built half-baked content management systems that allow anyone to “build their web site” with a few clicks of their mouse. Nice concept, but usually badly implemented. These sites are usually required to be hosted with the “big company” and runs off their database on their servers. These template sites often don’t allow custom title tags or custom descriptions for each page. They also don’t allow any access to the underlying code. This means I can’t make search-engine friendly URLs, and I can’t set up a 301 redirect, and I can’t eliminate the appearance of duplicate content, and I can’t do any of the easy tweaks that are needed.

All too often, I see sites that suffer from most or all of the above problems. I may be able to work around one or two of the above items, but when a site presents numerous serious technical problems, there’s just no point in attempting to patch the old wineskin.

It’s a shame when someone has paid good money for a site that is so badly constructed that it can’t be improved. But there are times that it makes more sense to throw out the old and build anew.

Missing images

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For about the umpteenth time, this morning I responded to a question on a newsgroup by some poor soul who didn’t understand why the images weren’t showing up on his web page. The links were correct. The images were uploaded to the correct directory. But when he viewed his page in his browser, the images were just …. not there. As if they had never existed.

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Web site development, SEO, and Hippocrates

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What do web site development, search engine optimization and Hippocrates have in common? A line from the Hippocratic Oath comes to mind: First, do no harm. In a previous post, I touched on how the technological factors underlying a web site are important to the site’s search engine optimization.

These factors aren’t important so much for their ability to rank a site highly, as they are for avoiding problems that can harm a site’s ranking.

[Read more…]

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