| LED Digest 1876: The Great Debate - Link Popularity |
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================================================== 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 30, 2004 Issue #1876 ............................................... .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Alternatives to Authorize.Net ==-- ~ Scott Marino "I am keeping my Authorize.net gateway as a back-up." ~ Joel Lesser "...we will see a decline in Internet gateway products from companies such as Authorize.net..." ~ Alex Hughart "One would think that Authorize.net has a slight advantage now: they've learned their lesson." --== The Future of SEO ==-- ~ Michael Martinez "The fact is that link building has become increasingly unimportant..." ~ Pat McCarthy "Do you have concrete evidence that inbound links are not important?" ~ Donald Nelson "...the more theme related content that you have, the more targeted traffic that you receive." --== Alternative Browsers & Design ==-- ~ Susan Reid-Pfau "Can you please tell me how [to detect the user's browser]?" ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== The Web Hosting Thread ==-- ~ Dejan Bizinger ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Scott Marino 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 I jumped ship and went to Verisign. I could not continue with the outages and lost sales from the Authorize.net DDoS attacks. Our transaction volume had grown to the point where it made financial sense anyway because of the different fee structures. This was the spark I needed to make the move. What bothers me most is that a short duration DDoS attack happened about 1 month before this last wave. They had a month to prepare for another attack and did a poor job of doing it. They also did a terrible job of communicating with their merchants. I had been using Authorize.net for almost 5 years, and none of this really surprised me. They have always been a poor communicator and seem to have 1 or 2 substantial outages a year. Comparing Authorize.net to Verisign: Authorize.net's merchant interface and reporting are easier to use (my opinion) and they support batch file processing that Verisign does not. Verisign's use of AVS and CVV2 codes is clearer. I do seem to have fewer declines with Verisign, but that is only a gut feeling, I don't have hard numbers. I signed up for Verisign through American Express ( http://www.americanexpress.com/onlinepayment ). The monthly fees are a little lower for the same Verisign service. Food for thought: I am keeping my Authorize.net gateway as a back-up. If it can happen to Authorize.net, it can happen to Verisign. With a small change, I can switch processing between the 2. It costs a little more, but will give me peace of mind... Scott Marino www.webundies.com It's not just underwear, It's fun to wear! ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Joel Lesser Subject: CC merchants Martha, Nova Networks ( http://www.novainfo.com ) is one of the largest processors for corporate banking in the United States. Nova recently announced a new product called VIAKLIX ( http://www.viaklix.com ) which combines a traditional merchant service account with a robust Internet gateway. The result is a robust and reliable gateway product, at a fraction of the cost that most website operators are currently paying for both a traditional merchant account, and an Internet gateway account such as authorize.net. We do not work for Nova or Viaklix, we're just satisfied Nova / Viaklix customers. It is my opinion that as more website operators learn about large processors such as Nova who are bundling all merchant products into a one stop shop product, we will see a decline in Internet gateway products from companies such as Authorize.net, Skipjack.com, and the like. Best Regards, Joel Lesser LinksManager.com http://linksmanager.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Alex Hughart Subject: CC merchants I, too, use Authorize.net (for a number of years now). They had some problems but, for the most part, they are reliable enough. I agree that changing gateway companies every time something happens is not helping much. It's often like changing to a shorter grocery store checkout lane just to find out that the person in front you has tons of coupons and is writing a check! One would think that Authorize.net has a slight advantage now: they've learned their lesson (hopefully). Having an alternate way of collecting and storing CC data is definitely a must but, it's time consuming and poses a security risk as well. It should only be used when the system is down, unless you are very diligent in purging those data. What infuriates me the most in instances like this is that no one at Auth.net bothered to send a warning email to merchants once they discovered the problem. We had to find out on our own, usually thanks to complaining customers. By then, sales were lost. Alex Hughart http://www.bonsavon.com ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Future of SEO > ... 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. - Aaron Wall, LED 1875 I have always emphasized the importance of internal linkage. It is not necessary to build up inbound links to thousands of automated pages. I still find plenty of pages from forum discussions through Google every day. No one is seeking inbound links for those discussion threads. Google is serving up the content based on my searches. > 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. Which, of course, has no effect on search engine rankings. And that is what I have been discussing. I have also emphasized building alternative bases for producing traffic. > People use search engines more frequently than they use > directories because of better relevancy due to LINK ANALYSIS. That assertion is absolute nonsense. Most people aren't even aware of how the search engines work, and they couldn't care less. Furthermore, the most popular engine, Google, has steadfastly advised people over the past several years NOT to assume that link analysis is all that goes into their ranking algorithm. Anyone who wants to be taken credibly in the field needs to pay attention to what Google is REALLY doing. They are taking into consideration dozens of factors OTHER than linkage. > Link building has became increasingly important. Only to people to preach link building, who sell link building tools, and who don't know any better than to listen to the people who are making money off of link building. The fact is that link building has become increasingly UNimportant because the search engines have devoted a great deal of effort to filtering out inbound links they feel are not justified. The vast majority of people who are following the link building philosophy continue to do so out of the misguided notion that it is helping them. They believe that because there are still plenty of people spouting the same outdated advice in SEO fora across the Net. Not coincidentally, there are many people who continue to post complaints about their poor rankings in those fora despite their following all the advice about building links. I don't harrass other Webmasters into giving me links. I don't pay for links. I don't have problems with my rankings. I DO create new content. Michael Martinez http://www.michael-martinez.com/ ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Pat McCarthy Subject: Future of SEO > The big picture... is that the 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 Just because a user isn't interested in the number of back links does not mean that search engines will not take it into account. That really doesn't make much sense to base their algorithms strictly on the user's interest. It'd be nice if it could solely work that way, but that isn't reality. > I have allowed my inbound links to DECREASE because they are no > longer important and have NOT been important for at least two years. Really? Do you have concrete evidence that inbound links are not important? First, they are obviously important for traffic coming from those links. Second, they still are important in search. I've seen time and time again recently that as my sites increase in links their search engine positions get better and better. It's not a coincidence. > You need a few links to validate your site as part of the Web. > After that, you're into overkill and will benefit more from > focusing your resources on other areas of promotion. Possibly. This depends on what other methods of promotion you have at your disposal. In some cases finding links for your site may have the best long term benefit. In other situations, there may be lots of better ways to spend your time. It's not a clear "always true" decision. > People look for content in their searches. They don't look for (or > care about) which sites have the most links pointing to them. No, people don't care, but search engines MUST have a way to differentiate between sites. Let me pose a question. Let's say we have site A and site B. They have virtually identical title tags, body text, anchor text, meta tags, etc. How does the search engine determine which site is more relevant? They have no way at this point except to turn to link popularity. While it may not be as important as it once was, it still must be a big part of most crawlers relevancy algorithms. Don't get the searcher's interests confused with what an engine must use to evaluate the pages. > Effective SEO MINIMIZES link building. Link building was the thing > to do several years ago when it had a real effect on Google and > Inktomi. I would imagine the algorithm has changed, but I've yet so see any concrete information that points to links not being important anymore. And no, a couple of examples of sites with low link totals ranking high for unpopular search terms won't prove it's the case. > I don't have a problem getting my new content to rank well for my > targeted search phrases. That's because I don't waste my time by > looking at PR or building link popularity. Don't confuse the situation. You're creating good content for targeted search phrases, which is a great plan, and should definitely be the first step in acquiring good search rankings. The key is that your phrases are targetted so link popularity won't matter that much because you aren't competing with a huge number of sites. I invite you to try and compete for the term 'business plans' without worrying about links. If creating some good content is all it takes, then all my competitors should have no problem unseating me from #1 (bplans.com is our content site). However, for the last few years they've been unable to do so... I wonder if having way more links helps? > You don't need it. What you need is good, well-designed > content. Fresh content. Of course, a great first step is having good well-designed content. And really, I agree that people probably worry TOO much about pagerank, link popularity, or inbound links. However, saying it's meaningless and people don't need it just doesn't seem to have any basis in reality. If you're trying to target the phrase "black and white zebras with horizontal stripes", then don't worry about links. If you're trying to compete with something that others may be trying to rank well for, you're going to need links to compete. Pat McCarthy http://www.paloalto.com/ ------- new post - same topic ------- From: D. Nelson Subject: Future of SEO Dear All, In LED 1872 and 1873 there has been some discussion on the role of content in search engine optimization. Without getting into the debate on links, it is my experience that the more theme related content that you have, the more targeted traffic that you receive. If you try to optimize a few pages of your website for what you think are the various keyword phrases people use when searching for your product or service you will not be able to include or emphasize all the possible phrase combinations within those few pages. However, if you write ten, twenty or thirty informative articles about your offerings, your website will be able to answer a multitude of questions that people have when they think about your product. Your site's content pages will turn up more often in searches related to your products. You can verify this by looking at your website logs or statistics service. As you add more content, the list of keyword phrases that people use in search engine queries leading to a click-through to your site will grow larger. If your content is well written then you will be getting the kind of traffic that you need to generate sales. Sincerely, Donald Nelson www.a1-optimization.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Susan Reid-Pfau Subject: Alternative browsers I've heard about creating separate pages depending on which browser the person is using; I believe this may solve some problems we've been experiencing. Can you please tell me how - or perhaps point me to some documentation - to check which browser a person is using when they try to go to your home page and then "redirect" them to another page, depending on the browser identified? Thank you! Susan Reid-Pfau ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Dejan Bizinger 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 Hi, Tom. In my opinion, at www.ev1servers.net you can find one of the best hosting plans on the Net. They offer great services at a very decent price, both for web hosting and for domain registration. If you can't find there what you are looking for, I'm sure that you will find at http://webhost.thelist.com/ HTH, Best regards, Dejan Bizinger, Web Producer My CV: http://dejan.bizinger.biz ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. 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