| LED Digest 1875: The New Reality of Linking |
|
|
|
================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................... September 29, 2004 Issue #1875 ............................................... .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Alternatives to Authorize.Net ==-- ~ Lee Roberts "Verisign is a property I never recommend..." ~ Edward Wimmer "...don't be a victim of their downtime, solve the problem on your end." --== The Future of SEO ==-- ~ Aaron Wall "Link building has became increasingly important." ~ Steve Pronger "...you can't deny that 'new reality'..." --== Alternative Browsers & Design ==-- ~ Stephen Mareches "The thing to remember is there are people behind those browsers..." ~ Derek Andrews "I have been bullied into installing new software..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== The Web Hosting Thread ==-- ~ Charles Miesel ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Lee Roberts Subject: CC merchants > This article explains the DDoS attack that is ongoing against > Authorize.Net. http://snipurl.com/9dss [wired.com] > [I am] interested in finding an alternative arrangement > for [my] credit card payment processing. - Martha Retallick, LED 1874 There are many credit card gateway services out there and the majority are pretty good. Verisign is a property I never recommend due to their lack of professionalism and appreciation for their customers. I've simply had too many problems with them to enumerate them all here, but you don't want me to bore you with details. My choice is YourPay.com. It is a First Data company. The customer service is simply excellent. I've never had a problem with them. They even support Verified by Visa and MasterCard Secure Code. The amazing thing is the monthly price is fixed. No per transaction fees like with Verisign or other gateways. Sincerely, Lee Roberts http://www.applepiecart.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Edward Wimmer Subject: CC merchants My company has been using Authorize.net as our payment gateway since 1999. Since then, there have been numerous occasions where I have been completely livid over the quality of their service. In my opinion, they lack the necessary redundancies, workarounds, and qualified support staff. So, why am I still with them? Despite their problems, they provide a necessary service. And, I believe that all similar solutions (such as PayFlow) are exposed to similar problems. Therefore, changing companies didn't seem to be the answer. Until the internet is perfect, all payment gateways are going to have downtime. The real problem is that their technical issues cost us real money. So, during Authorize.net's last series of problems, I decided to implement my own solution. Instead of blaming (and becoming furious with) Authorize.net for their incompetencies, I finally decided to solve the problem on my end. I simply wrote a small script that bypassed Authorize.net's servers when a connection was not available. My customers weren't aware of any problem and were shown my receipt page as normal. All the data that is necessary to complete the transaction was stored in my database. So, when Authorize.net came back online, I simply processed the charges that were missed. My mind boggles when I think of the residual problems that occur when payment gateways go down... lost revenues, frustrated customers, damaged relationships, furious business owners, etc, etc. If your business relies on any payment gateway (such as Authorize.net, PayFlow, iBill, etc) don't be a victim of their downtime, solve the problem on your end. Cheers, Edward Wimmer, Co-Owner Road ID www.roadid.com edward, roadid.com ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Aaron Wall Subject: Future of SEO > ... search engines are interested only in serving up > CONTENT. They know that most of their users aren't > interested in backlinks, inbound links, or link popularity. - Michael Martinez, LED 1874 Right, but I have friends who can pump out tens of thousands of pages a day using automated software. The only way a search engine can get a definitive sense of quality is by looking at linkage data. > I have allowed my inbound links to DECREASE > because they are no longer important and have > NOT been important for at least two years. The concept that links are not important is a bit absurd IMHO. I view the web as a big city. I want lots of roads driving by my site / house. I have bought links that go through redirects that search engines do not follow EXCLUSIVELY FOR THE DIRECT TRAFFIC THE LINKS PROVIDE. I buy pay per click ads even though they do not provide any linkage data. To tell most people that they should stop building links into their sites would indicate a misconceptualization of what the web is about. If you dominate a particular market, have a great reputation, and are consistantly showing up for tons of search results and whatnot then there is a rich get richer feedback in current search algorithms which will help lock you into good rankings. Until last month I had not done much promotion for my site about search engine marketing for about 6 - 8 months and it has remained on the first page of Google for that search query this whole time. > People look for content in their searches. They don't look > for... which sites have the most links pointing to them. Similar to how directory editors approve content? People use search engines more frequently than they use directories because of better relevancy due to LINK ANALYSIS. > Anyone can flood a Web site with badly designed > pages and claim that content doesn't work. That statement almost implies that I create bad content to flood the search engines. Most content in and of itself is not remarkable... most content does not naturally inspire links. Please explain how a search engine can tell document quality without linkage data. You may naturally pick up links now because you have established a reputation for yourself, but most sites do not get a ton of natural linkage. > Effective SEO MINIMIZES link building. Link building was the thing > to do several years ago... Now, all the SEO gurus who preach what > I used to preach still don't get the fact that the search engines have > changed the way they do business. Link building has became increasingly important. Search engines as a business have a few main functions. For revenue they sell lots of pay per click ads. They provide free results to have content near those ads. They want people to spend money on the ads versus SEO services. As a business search engines want to make the ads look like an appealing marketing option. To do this they must make it appear hard or confusing to manipulate the regular search results. I can build thousands of pages via script... not that hard. Know many people who have done it. That is not very expensive or hard to do. Renting links is expensive. High quality link building is usually time consuming and / or expensive. Thus it makes more sense from a business perspective for search engines to place more weight on linkage data than on page copy. Yahoo! does have a paid inclusion program and thus does have more logical business reasons than Google does to make their search results easy to manipulate and can thus afford to place more emphasis on page copy than Google does. If you want to run a theory to practice test I currently have a page that shows on the first page of Google's search results for SEO. I will adjust the page to make it of low quality in your opinion and you can build a page of high quality content and we can see which one ranks better for SEO? aaron wall http://www.seobook.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: Future of SEO > People look for content in their searches. They don't look for (or > care about) which sites have the most links pointing to them. - Michael Martinez, LED 1874 Agreed. Absolutely. I certainly don't care when I'm searching for content. Problem is, Google do care. The evidence is everywhere, and indisputable. As Dirk Johnson quite rightly puts it, that is the "new reality". I wish it wasn't the case. I really do. I would rather write new content, review products or do a whole swag of other stuff than spend time seeking out, responding to and adding links. It's tedious, and hard work. But I do it for the same reason that all those other webmasters, i.e. your competitors, do it. It pays dividends. Do you honestly think they would continue to do it if it wasn't so? By and large, webmasters aren't stupid. If they figure out that a link from a relevant, good quality, PR 5 page with their targeted keywords in the link text propels their site up the Google rankings for those keywords, then they will continue on that path. If it was all a giant waste of time they would stop. I know I would. If you, like Michael, find that REDUCING your incoming links and having no regard for PageRank improves your business results, then go for it. Ditto if you find that putting your URL on the back of your car is more effective than driving targeted traffic to your site via the search engines. I'll continue to do what works for me, thanks very much. I'll bet you will too. We all should be focusing on content, and what our visitors care about. No argument whatsoever. But at the same time, you can't deny that "new reality". Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Stephen Mareches Subject: Alternative browsers > Then there is Netscape. In looking at my stats, and talking > to my clients, it appears that many prefer Netscape 4.7 to > any other version! - John Smart, LED 1874 I have to agree with John here. The thing to remember is there are people behind those browsers, and it's always struck me as very important to test development in different browsers, then once you have things figured out you'll know what works and what doesn't and can build accordingly. I still run Netscape 4.7 and Explorer 5.0 for those reasons. About three years ago I had built a site with some cool CSS and JavaScript stuff on the home page, but had to script a different page for users with Netscape. Two weeks later when I was at the client's place of business to review the site, to my surprise when they went to the site I noticed they were on the Netscape page. Had I not provided for this the owner, who fell into that minority of Netscape users, would have seen a mess that would have been pretty hard to explain. Somehow "O, just get a different browser" would have not gone over too well as they had just gotten an account set up with good old AOL and Netscape was the browser used. Later I figured out what was upsetting Netscape and straightened things out, but having provided the alternative home page did save the day. You never know who will fall into those .03% categories. And given Murphy's Law, we can bet it will happen when we can least afford it. Stephen Mareches, Web Consultant Sophia Solutions www.sophiasolutions.net ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Derek Andrews Subject: Alternative browsers Until recently my prefered browser was Netscape 4.76. I also had IE 5.0, and a more recent version of Opera, but Netscape was what I used for nearly all my browsing. I'll list some of the reasons I stuck with it for so long: - it is a good platform for testing my own websites. It is not as error tolerant as IE, and therefore makes a good test bed. - DSL is not available in my area, bi-directional satellite is too expensive, so I am on dial-up. Downloading the latest browser or all those service packs from Microsoft is not something I want to do on anything like a regular basis. - IE always seems to have security issues. Again, I just don't want the hassle of keeping on top of all that. - my PC is 5 years old and newer browsers seem to take longer to load or bring up from the taskbar. Keeping up with the latest technology has serious environmental consequences, so I want to keep this old clunker running for as long as I can. So I have made do with NN4.76 until a couple of months ago. But with time I found more and more websites that either wouldn't render or crashed the browser / PC. Some of these I actually really needed to visit. And so I have been bullied into installing new software, and apart from the long wait while it fires up, I seem to be getting on reasonably well with Firefox and Thunderbird. And yes, I do feel that I was bullied into this upgrade. As a user I can't say I notice any big benefit to me in the newer technolgies that have been forced upon me. There may of course be many benefits to the website owners in terms of development time, conversion rates, advertising opportunities, gathering marketing information, search engine optimization etc, but not much from my point of view. As webmasters I think it is important to remember that not all our visitors are geeks who have the latest browsers, fastest computers and high-speed internet connections. I am sure I am not the only internet user that does not keep up with technology, whether for reasons of cost, motivation, environmental considerations or other factors. Derek Andrews, woodturner Wedding Favors ~ Artisan Crafted Gifts ~ One-of-a-Kind Woodturning http://www.seafoamwoodturning.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Charles Miesel Subject: Hosting > What I'd like to find is a host that offers reliable up-time, > plenty of disk space, shopping cart with secure processing, > tracking, e-mail accounts with autoresponders... - Tom Anson, LED 1871 While I pride myself as a hosting reseller who would bend over backwards for my clients... In the spirit of being fair and unselfish (as well as not being allowed to have an outright ad, lol) I present to you the "other" host that I use is 1and1.com . They have PHP5, upgraded CGI memory, Linux and Windows hosting, and US$49.95 /mo dedicated, pre-configured servers. Charles Miesel ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "A poet is someone who is astonished by everything." -Anon. |
