Happy Birthday to Work At Home Joe!

Joe’s a great guy – he really is. He’s online every day, working out ways to run a legitimate work at home business, and he’s a big (read: huge, tremendous, loyal) supporter of other home-based businesses. If you’re curious, please check out his site, Working At Home on The Internet… but first, please go wish him a Happy Birthday!

Article Checker – Free Plagiarism Check Tool

I just love when my readers send me cool stuff to check out! This one comes from Garry Egan (sorry, he didn’t give me a URL to link to) and it’s a great tool for checking if anyone’s ripping your articles without your permission or giving you credit. It’s called Article Checker.

You can check simply by entering your URL (or the URL of the article) or by copying and pasting the text from the article into a search box. The thing I like is that it grabs your content in sentences or sections and checks against that, so if you’re wondering if someone’s ripping even partial content, you can find out this way.

The only thing I don’t see is a way to FIND the duplicated content elsewhere. Am I missing something?

Note: I’ve disabled comments on this post because people who can’t read are using it to submit their piece to check for plagiarism… *sigh*. I’m tired of deleting them – one woman called me from China ELEVEN TIMES to ask me to remove her piece.

If you have something to say on this subject, please contact me and I’ll post it for you.

SEOMoz: Rand Goes Sailing

Just a quick post to direct you all to something Rand (SEOMoz) laid out more explicitly than I’ve seen before. I’ve tried to explain this to people over the past few years, and it’s quite difficult sometimes to do without graphical support. It’s now been taken care of, and this post of his will sit high in my list of resources to use when explaining the “right” way to develop a linking plan.

The premise of “The Rising Tide Lifts All Ships” is that it “pays” to have your incoming links pointing to relevant, internal pages of your site, and not just all pointing to your top level domain (www.yoursite.com). In the same breath, he explains why it’s better to have just one top level domain, and not 5 of them for 5 different “parts” of your company.

Example: I see a lot of companies doing this by having one site for their “company info” and one separate domain for a company blog, or if a company’s specialties are blue widgets, green widgets, and red widgets, they’ll have separate “dot coms” for each division. This has even happened with companies like Anubis Marketing (though Anubis isn’t one of the companies to have done this), having one domain for design, another for SEO/Marketing, and still another for a blog. Not a good move.

So there you have it. Go now, and revamp your linking plans, your site structures, and your train of thought. Call us if you need help.

Death to Email Hijackers!!

Okay, so Joe talked about it a few weeks ago, and now (a former employer of mine ) Jim Boykin is raving about it as well. Chances are such that if you have any kind of website, you’ve fallen victim to it, as have I. I call it “email hijacking” and it happens when someone sends out their spam email campaign using your domain name in the “Reply-to” section.

It doesn’t even have to be YOUR email address. I’ve had it happen to me with addresses like ‘jpc4029dnmgal@anubismarketing.com”. What happens is typically that your real email address has been set up as a “catch all” account, and you wake up one morning to 400+ “returned mail: unknown recipient” emails. Greaaaaat, you say! Well, I’d like to share some of the things I’ve done in an attempt to stop it, and why.

First I’ll touch on the “why” – It’s because inevitably, your domain is going to end up on some company’s “spammer” list (or two, or twenty companies’ lists), and could eventually wind up banned by some ISPs or other email hosts that use spam filters and blockers. Then, in the event that you do get one of those people who WANTS to be on your email list, they probably won’t receive it.

Now, for your sheer entertainment, here are a few things I’ve been known to do when this has happened to me. I’m not saying that these are GOOD ideas, mind you. Most of them kind of just happened out of pure anger and frustration the first few times this happened to me!

• I’ve checked the whois on the domain for the site/link that’s included in the spam message. Unbelievably, these people rarely get private registrations. Not so unbelievable is the fact that they’re typically from other countries.
• After checking the domain name, I find out who’s hosting that site, and report them to their hosting company for partaking in email spam behavior. Sometimes this works, other times it doesn’t. Depends on if the IP addresses match with the emails usually.
• The registration information. I’ve gone so far as to call the phone number (yep, paid the international toll), and ask for the registrar by name. Only once did I get said person on the phone (during a call to Costa Rica), and let’s just say they got an earful of English profanity, peppered with demands to stop, etc. I’m sure I said something about “taking legal action”, at which the guy probably laughed after hanging up the phone.
• Slightly more reasonable, yet not quite effective in terms of stopping the act itself, is turning the “catch all” option off. This only works if you’re not using one email address to catch others that you’ve put out there, like sales@domain.com, info@domain.com – without actually creating those emails as accounts. Simple fix – create them, and then turn the catch all off.
• Definitely send an email to your own email hosting provider, explaining the situation. Ward off unexpected account terminations this way. They won’t be able to do anything to stop it, but they’ll appreciate the heads up.
• Try using a javascript to display your email address, as opposed to the traditional way to code it in there. Much like the way you see people posting them so they don’t receive spam (lara [at] anubismarketing [dot] com) except, they can scan and find that stuff as far as using it to send out spam so that it appears to be coming from you. They don’t even need to do that… I think they typically just pick a word they like and check for already registered domains. In this case, the javascript thing or the disguise won’t help you much. But since I’m not a spammer, I wouldn’t know exactly what they’re doing, so any little bit helps.
• When all else fails, and you’ve already removed a significant percentage of hair from your head, gone through a whole pack of smokes in the course of 2 hours, and lost your voice from yelling at the spammers – let it go. It typically only happens over a 12-24 hour period, and then it’s over, they’ve moved on. They’re only doing it so THEY don’t get the returned mail… it’s silly, it’s ridiculous (wouldn’t you want to know if the email list you paid for was worth the dough?) and it’ll drive you crazy – take the precautions with your ISP/email host and move along…

Note: I’ve seen a few people talking about SPF, or Sender Policy Framework. I really know nothing about this, nor how to implement/request it. If anyone has any experience with SPF, please let us all know!

Quick, Fun Newsletters – Free!

LetterPop is a free online newsletter creation service that makes “drag-n-drop” an understatement!

It’s free, whether you sign up or not, but signing up has its advantages. You can have up to 10 newsletters published at a time, for one thing. The newsletters are hosted by LetterPop, and you’re given a URL once you publish your newsletter (for posting on a website or email) and the option to email the newsletter out right from the site by creating or uploading a mailing list.

Right now, they’re in beta – which means everything’s kind of limited. As quoted from the site:

Coming soon, you will be able to upgrade your account to a premium membership that lifts many of the limits of your free account and adds a lot of useful features. Need to send more newsletters? Need a bigger address book? Want access to a wider selection of templates? It’s all coming.

It’s not a new concept in terms of creating newsletters online – however it’s really easy to do, and if you’re not too picky about templates (as of right now, there are only 14 available, and there aren’t many fonts to choose from either) or photos (the site doesn’t allow you to resize or crop them, so you have to have them done up the right way beforehand), it’s a good way to get started writing newsletters for your site visitors. It’s a habit that’s not always easy to get into, but is definitely a good practice to put in place!

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