Tag Archives: spam

Don’t Be Scammed By SEO Scammers

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On a daily basis my inbox is filled with SEO and web design scams and cons. A client just forwarded the following to me asking if I thought this was a legit company and whether or not they needed their services. I got the same one six times in the past three weeks. I’d like to rip into this one as an example to all on how NOT to take these things seriously.

I hope you’re doing well!

After looking through your site: , we found that neither it was making visitors attract towards your site and nor to your business/services.

If you are interested we want to increase the number of visitors to your website as it is important that you have a top position in search-engines.

Our search-engine-optimization experts will run a ranking report showing you exactly where your website currently stands in all the major search engines. Then we will email you our analysis report along with the recommendations of how we can increase your ranking, and improve your websites traffic dramatically.

We strictly work on performance basis and can assure you of getting quality links with a proper reporting format for your site as well.

We wish you the best of luck and looking forward to a long and healthy business relationship with you and your company.

Please do let me know if you have any questions.

Note the colon and comma without a site name in the second sentence. That’s a clue that this is a form letter, not personal, and worth dismissing or marking as spam immediately. I usually mark these as spam. I recommend you do the same to add these to the filters that keep this crap out of your inbox.

…we want to increase the number of visitors to your website as it is important that you have a top position in search-engines.

Sorry, the only way you can increase the number of visitors to my site in regards to search engines is to rewrite or write new content on my site. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all the SEO games over the years and trust me, content works. This is my site, my content, and I don’t want you touching it. That’s my job.

I also don’t want to be in the top position on search engines. Think about this a moment. I want to be in the top for the things I want to be known for and the matching content I have on my site, but not necessarily at the very top. Others are wiser than I, so they deserve top ranking. If I write the answers they need to the questions they ask, they’ll find me, usually after a bit of digging, but they’ll find me if they need me. Continue reading →

Dear Google Plus, Things I Want From You for Christmas

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Dear Google+:

Here is my holiday wish list.

  1. The ability to mark a plus post as read so I don’t see it again unless there is new activity. Mute doesn’t cut it.
  2. Get past the +9 thing. Give us +10.
  3. The ability to add more than one photograph within a post, not just as a gallery.
  4. Give us some HTML characters beyond bold and italic. I want strikeout, HTML Anchor Tags (link dumps are so ugly as are link shortener links), and headings.
  5. The ability to use HTML character entities so I could write URLs as examples and not have them turn into clickable useless links, and other things that character entities are good for.
  6. The ability to write math, scientific, and coding formulas and formats with ease.
  7. A better understanding of what “people in common” means in circle notifications. I still don’t get it.
  8. Stop on auto scrolling. While auto updating and scrolling are nice, I’m constantly fighting to read or watch something in my stream. I have to click through and wait for another page load to just view that post. Give me a pause button, please.
  9. You got the goo.gl shortener so please incorporate it into Google+.
  10. A skin or layout option that would put active conversations I’m involved with on one side of the screen (for larger monitors) and my stream on the other so I don’t have to wait the long load times to view notifications.
  11. If you are serious about penalizing folks not using their “real” names or legal names, then be serious about it. I’m getting tired of finding clearly spammy names in my comments and circle notifications.
  12. Blogspot and Blogger suffered because of Google’s permissive policy on hosting (and profiting) on spam/scam/scraper blogs. We, especially Google, is wiser now. Let not the same thing happen with Google+. I’m seeing the edges fray already.
  13. When I want to share something and write a bit, please don’t make me hunt for the share overlay as it scrolls out from under my fingers as I’m typing. I just spent 30 minutes 50 minutes trying to find the share window when it scrolled away. I don’t want to lose what I’ve written, so damn you, please stop the auto scrolling when I’m sharing something. Update: I lost my post and had to rewrite it. I’m sure it’s not as good the second time around.
  14. Give us a draft option. Sometimes it takes me a few minutes, or I’m distracted with a phone call or something and I want to save what I’m writing on Google+. If I share it with myself in a closed circle, I can’t edit it and add in an image or video as that is locked down, and it looks strange me sharing a post that I wrote when I do share it. Sometimes I hit share and didn’t notice the link wasn’t added or forgot the video, so give us the option for drafts and for adding media after publishing.

I ask these things because I adore Google+ and want to see it grow and thrive.

Thank you,

Lorelle
The Tech Nag
Original post on Google+ used with my permission