| LED Digest 1877: Good Thieves Know More than You |
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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 ............................................... October 5, 2004 Issue #1877 ............................................... .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Alternatives to Authorize.Net ==-- ~ Brad Waller "I do like PayFlow, but I would also pay attention to what your bank may recommend." ~ Charles Bennett "The [US] senate... are aware of the ongoing assaults allegedly by terrorists..." --== The Future of SEO ==-- ~ Aaron Wall "Show me top Google rankings for a term as competitive as SEO without any link building." ~ David Yancey "...the future of SEO...depends on how successfully the crawler-based, 'free' search sites evolve." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Redirects for Different Browsers ==-- ~ Stephen Mareches ~ Richard Dudley ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Brad Waller 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 We have been using PayFlow Pro for a number of years now. We used to use CyberCash, but they went bust and were bought up by Verisign - and our bank uses them. Since we have switched, I have to say that we have had zero problems and I can't complain. I can't compare to others, but once this was set up, everything pretty much runs without fail. I do like PayFlow, but I would also pay attention to what your bank may recommend. Brad Waller Largest classifieds network: http://ep.com/ Manage & sell your banner space: http://adjungle.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Charles Bennett Subject: CC merchants One of the things to keep in mind with any credit card service provider, we have all known for over a year that these attacks were planned and coming. We just assume it will be the other guy that gets hit. The [US] senate, banking commissions and law enforcement are aware of the ongoing assaults allegedly by terrorists meant to break the banking system by crippling small businesses. The plan is not to obtain merchandise by fraud, but to hurt the business with chargebacks, fees, fines and lost merchandise. Yesterday I had five charges go through with completed charges, AVS authentication and CVV2 approval. When fulfilling the orders, those five were part of another group I called 'suspicious' and manually called each bank. Those five got through the system with erroneous card expiration dates and non-matching addresses. The customer service personnel were vaguely quiet. There is some way a coder has figured out a wild card or the systems are too busy to fully verify. One card could not be traced or verified but would take any amount (according to the service rep who patched me to security). Charges have ranged from US$10 to $1,800. Normally, the $10 would not have had a second look, but there were two red flags and I did. I'd rather give the $10 item away than pay the fine, service fee and charge back on it. I also recently had a charge back of over $1,500 on an item that was electronically and manually approved along with the service reps name, ID number, date and time. The person knew the rules better than I the merchant. Most good thieves do. There is a way I am sad to say. Just read your merchant agreement carefully. Charles Bennett (my site is not important and would only be targeted by this post) ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Aaron Wall Subject: Future of SEO > I have always emphasized the importance of internal > linkage. It is not necessary to build up inbound links > to thousands of automated pages. - Michael Martinez, LED 1875 Internal linkage does not matter unless the site itself has decent link popularity pointing into it. If you did not need a decent # of links pointing into the site and could rely exclusively on internal linkage then cloaking with good internal linkage would be THE ONLY WAY to do SEO. (disclosure: I currently do not use cloaking software.) > Most people aren't even aware of how the search > engines work, and they couldn't care less. Indeed most people do not know how search engines work. Most people know nothing about reverse indexes or term vector space models or latent semantic indexing or clustering... That is the beauty of search. Anybody can go and type something into a form box and hit enter and it works. > Google has steadfastly advised people over the past > several years NOT to assume that link analysis is all > that goes into their ranking algorithm. Google is a business that wants people to buy their ads instead of ranking good in the natural results. If you were them would you teach people accurately how to game YOUR business model FREE? > [Link building is only important] to people to > preach link building, who sell link building tools... Interesting concept there. By the way you talk about how useless link building is, people would think that you are a content SEO selling content SEO services. Show me top Google rankings for a term as competitive as SEO without any 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. Filtering out bad links would only mean that getting good links would be even more IMPORTANT. > 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. Like I said earlier ... if you establish your reputation there is a rich get richer feedback that will work at keeping you locked near the top of the rankings. If we look at the start of your body copy it states "Recognized around the world as one of the leading authorities on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Michael Martinez.." I am not telling everyone that they just need to build links. What I am telling everyone is that building brand and reputation is what is most important. You do not build a brand sitting under a rock working on your own site isolated from the rest of the web (just humming along building more content). The web is a social network. You need to work to meet other people and interact with people to build your brand...and in competitive fields that takes a ton of work or a ton of good ideas or both. After your reputation is established you do not need to work as hard. Off the start you need to work hard to build social (and hyper) links...of course that is easier if you have a site that people consider useful and would like to link to. aaron wall http://www.seobook.com/ ------- new post - same topic ------- From: David Yancey Subject: Future of SEO In LED #1870, Pat McCarthy raises important questions about search crawler efficiency and evolution. Specifically, he challenges some of my assumptions that lead to the prediction that directory-type search sites will tend to see most search-type traffic in the future. He argues that at least some of the millions of users who today are not regular users of Google and its competitors will gradually become more savvy with keyphrase-based searching. He also raised a new and excellent point in this debate, namely the steady improvement in *reach* of the crawling search engines, as they gradually include more and more types of web pages and file types. Why are these points important in assessing the future of the SEs and of SEO? Because in most respects, the future of SEO as a traffic-building tactic depends on how successfully the crawler-based, "free" search sites evolve. Let's examine both of Pat's new points, beginning with increasing user sophistication. Pat wonders if the currently un-savvy web users won't get used to keyword-based GUIs, and gradually become adept at making up complex search arguments. The intricacies and nuances of key phrase construction are, for most people, simply an unwanted chore. To be blunt, many cannot construct a search argument that will reliably produce the precise results they are looking for. This is more due to user impatience than to lack of brains. But even the smartest folks can have trouble with getting satisfactory, *comprehensive* results, due to the very real and inherent complexities of keyword-based matching algorithms. Why don't we hear more complaints about this? Because the crawlers typically produce a search results page (SERP) that proudly states that (for common key phrases) "millions" of matches were found. The page also implies that the first-page matches are the "best". Faced with these results, an ordinary user, even a highly intelligent one, assumes that Google or whomever has done all the work, and these results are, truly, the most relevant matches. In fact, of course, the first ten pages or so of results don't include at least half the content that directly matches the user's query. And for the portion the SERPs do show, the results are subject to a seemingly infinite variety of manipulative techniques, first by the SEO or page designer, and then by the search engine itself. But we can all agree with Pat that people get better at this stuff the longer they use the web. The question, IMO, is not if they *can* make up and use key phrases, but whether they will *want to expend the time and energy required to do so* - - especially if, in their growing search-savviness they perceive the crawler SERPs to be corrupted by commercial interest, or otherwise not relevant. As to Pat's suggestion that crawlers will come to include more of the possible matching choices to a query, I'll concede readily that, if the engines become more inclusive, *or are perceived to be by the ordinary users*, then we could expect a greater proportion of them to use the crawlers over time, and use the SEs more frequently. But this improvement in results reach and quality may not happen so easily. Site owners who are looking to crawler engines as the primary source for their future visitors need to be aware that there are at least a dozen major obstacles that can collectively prevent Google and its "free" competitors from ever indexing perhaps 75% of online content. (We can debate the most important barriers separately.) Still, there is no question that Google and the others are busily extending their indexing / spidering reach: Amazon's attempt to relate book content to queries is an example. Froogle was another, as was the inclusion of blogged updates by Google earlier this year. There were serious problems with both extensions, but we can look beyond the screw-ups, and assume all those PhDs at Google will work them out. We can therefore safely predict that the crawlers will "find" more and more kinds of pages, not less. But there is a catch... As Google and the other crawlers include more and more index entries, the typical user will have a problem. For example, if the crawler can index news stories, how many different versions of the same story does one really wish to see listed in the SERPs? Or, are we to trust Google or one of the others to "decide" which of the stories the user should be seeing? Sure, he or she can turn "off" news, but that defeats the whole idea of integrated search. Or, consider product-type searches. As specific product offers and catalog pages are spidered, then the SERPs for many keywords like, say, Chablis, will be overwhelmed by sale offers for bottles of the wine. The actual information *about* Chablis will be somewhere in the results, of course, but it could take scrolling through twenty pages to find much of it. Not convenient for the users. Ahhh, but we can segregate the "shopper" results in their own SERPs, right? Yes, but when we do that, then, again, we block the road to integrated search. From a bigger picture point of view, the crawlers thus face a never-ending problem of competing functionalities: Worse, *every time the crawler isolates a major function like news or shopping search, then it will need to compete head-on with engines that are dedicated to those functions.* (FYI, Nielsen/NetRatings just released some new data findings that demonstrate how crawler-based search is beginning to fragment along functional lines. See http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_042009_1.pdf ) We could list more examples to demonstrate that with the most frequent queries, it will be easy to overwhelm the user with a massive array of "matches", every single one of which is truly "relevant" according to the crawler's ranking algorithm, but only perhaps 2% to 5% of which are seen as relevant in the *mind of the searcher*. Faced with the need to scroll past hundreds and, in time, thousands of "matches" to find the few that may actually be useful, sooner or later, the ordinary consumer - - who, let's remember, we have agreed is constantly getting more sophisticated - - is going to look for search venues and tools that they perceive to be more in synch with their interests, life-style, demographic, or professional background. But wait! Won't "personalization" allow the search tools to make smarter guesses at which *sub-set* of "matching" results will be perceived as more relevant by a specific user? Yes, IF the user can be cajoled into providing more and more parameters that can be used to cull out the "best" results. But no, IF the crawlers really get good at including many more pages, since the bigger the database, the more potential "false-positive" matches there will be for any given argument. The above causes me to conclude that, even if the crawlers could someday include most of the potentially useful sites and pages, to do so would make them even more unwieldy for most users - - especially the busy grownups needing a product or service or specific answer to a question. Lumping all possible results together will simply be another case of the messy, un-targeted, "all things to all users" approach which was taken back in the misty past by the portals sites - - and which spawned Google. Sorry if the above seems overly complex, but I feel website owners and e-commerce operators need to have at least a minimum level of understanding of the limitations of crawler-based search before they invest a large proportion of their time or resources in SEs and SEO. Don't get me wrong, please: crawler engines and free search are not dead, and never will be. They have a useful role to play, especially for non-commercial searches - - assuming they can prevent the paid-listings and sponsored ads from overwhelming the SERPs. My point is that site owners will want to identify with their visitors, and then, trying to think the way their customers do, anticipate the *alternative* search paths these often confused folks will seek out, such as special-interest directories and related-content sites. These paths are where you want to make sure you have placed the road-signs to your site. David Yancey http://www.vivante.com "Web searching *your* way" ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Stephen Mareches Subject: Redirect for different browsers > Can you please tell me how... 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? - Susan Reid-Pfau, LED 1876 Susan, this is a little JavaScript that we've used successfully to detect the user's browser, then redirect to a home page that was built with that specific browser in mind. For example where you see the line location.href = 'netscape.htm'; you'll want to change netscape.htm to whatever you name the page you've prepared for the netscape browser. Put this script between the <.HEAD> and <./HEAD> sections of your home page because you want this script to run before the page fully loads. --------------------- <.script language="JavaScript" type="text/Javascript"> <!-- if (navigator.appName == 'Netscape') location.href = 'netscape.htm'; else { if (navigator.appName == 'Microsoft Internet Explorer') location.href = 'explorer.htm'; else if (navigator.appName == '*') location.href = 'other.htm'; } //--><./script> --------------------- You may also wish to include a script for users who have JavaScript turned off on their browser. Since this script is going to write to the page if the users has JavaScript disabled, put this script just after the <.BODY> tag in your home page like this: <.body> <.noscript> Sorry, you do not have JavaScript enabled in your browser. <.br> For best results, please enable JavaScript. <./noscript> You could provide a link to a page that did not rely on JavaScript, and is perhaps a generic HTML page that will display in all browsers the same like this <.noscript> Sorry, you do not have JavaScript enabled in your browser. <.br> <.a xhref="basic_html.htm">Please click here to continue<./a> <./noscript> Here you'll change basic_html.htm to the name of your generic home page. Hope this helps, Stephen Mareches, Web Consultant Sophia Solutions www.sophiasolutions.net stephen, sophiasolutions.net ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Richard Dudley Subject: Alternative browsers There are a lot of ways -- do a Google search for "browser sniffer", and you'll find hundreds of examples. There is even a commercial product that sniffs browsers and so much more -- BrowserHawk at www.browserhawk.com. If you're in the DIY mode, be wary of "simple" browser sniffers. For a large part, people write the logic upside-down, so that a version 6 browser is detected as a version 4 browser. This happens with some lines of logic like: if (browser.majorVersion>=4) { ... } if (browser.majerVersion>=5) { ... } A version 5 browser won't procedd past the first 'if' statement. Given the variety of today's browsers, I don't like to use the browser's name and version in a series of 'if' statements, then branch the logic accordingly. You'll spend your life wading through compatibility charts and keeping track of major and minor versions of browsers. I think it's better to test a browser for its capabilities, a process called 'object sniffing'. I have a short discussion on my blog ( http://www.rjdudley.com/blog... ), but the best example is the article I link to at http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/objectdetection.html ). In this article, there is a good explanation of why object sniffing is better, and how to do it. Richard Dudley www.bloomeryweddings.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "This life's dim windows of the soul Distorts the heavens from pole to pole And leads you to believe a lie When you see with, not through, the eye." - William Blake |
