| LED Digest 1528: Merchants Taking all the Risk? |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest ................................................. February 28, 2003 Issue #1528 ................................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Site Revamps and Search Engine Position ==-- ~ Richard Jastrzebski ~ Charles Oertel --== International Fraud Protection ==-- ~ Roy Williams ~ Dudley Dix ===== GEEK TIPS ================== --== Sub-domains ==-- ~ Peter Warnock ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Godaddy Gone? ==-- ~ Mark Van Patten ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Richard Jastrzebski Subject: site revamps > I have decided to redesign [our] website... I have set up > the page structure differently... will my ratings in the search > engines suddenly drop because some pages return a [404], > or that the link structure is different? - Dirk van der Werff, LED 1525 We have a similar problem to Dirk van der Werff but are considering moving our hosting from Freeserve to a paid host possibly 123-reg who host our domain name. There is absolutely no problem with the service from Freeserve their domain tag is added to the 'screen top'. It has been suggested to us that this is a marketing weakness and gives the impression that we are a start up company. I accept this but am concerned that we will lose the current search engine positions that we have. How is the best way to change from our current situation without losing search engine placements for the Freeserve site? If we have two sites the same will we be penalised by the search engines for spamming? Do we just redirect from Freeserve to the new host, again will we be penalised by the search engines? The other point is that Freeserve do not appear to have a bandwidth limit but the 123-reg/ WebFusion / Host Europe do. The firm that handles our brochure production suggests that we use their domain hosting for ?800 per year. Any help would be appreciated. Regards, Richard Jastrzebski, Sales Director Neptune Outdoor Furniture Ltd http://www.nofl.co.uk ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Charles Oertel Subject: Site revamps > I was recently asked for over US$17,000 to change > the design and revamp my long established website. - Dirk Vanderwerff, LED 1525 Sounds like a question of outsourcing ;-) I would've done it for a tenth of the price from South Africa. > ... will my ratings in the search engines suddenly > drop because some pages return a [404]...? The link structure may affect your ratings long-term, but it is hard to predict. Probably Google ignores links from the same domain in its popularity and relevance count. Avoid removing any old pages (or renaming them) at all costs. As you anticipated, these invalid links will lose you traffic, and eventually also links (because other webmasters will delete the broken link from their websites). To do this, you need to replace the contents of the old page with a note asking the user to update their bookmark / link. Then also put in a redirect to the new page, and set the robots meta-tag to "noindex,follow" (example code below). <.META name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> <.META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="5;URL=http://herbafrica.com/artwork.html"> <./head> <.body> <.p>This page has moved to <.a xhref="artwork.html">Artwork<./a><.br> Click the link above if your browser does not load it automatically within 5 seconds.<./p> I hope you are doing things differently in your new site. I noticed inline CSS on each page, too many tables for layout, missing meta-tags, use of browser-specific code, inefficient use of CSS and more. Have a look at www.alistapart.com for an eye-opener. regards Charles Oertel FineBushPeople.net ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Roy Williams Subject: Fraud protection I'm reading the credit card / fraud posting with GREAT interest. We no longer accept orders from Indonesia, and other areas are treated with great suspicion. David Driscol is wrong (issue 1526) about AMEX. I found out recently that they also operate a franchising system in Eastern Europe, and so cannot always check the address of the cardholder (however, usually they CAN and are damn quick, too). This came as a bit of a shock to me. We made the customer in question pay by cash for his first order, and now we accept his franchised AMEX card. They're not ALL bad guys in Eastern Euripe, but sadly, generations of 'all propery is theft' thinking cannot be erased overnight. The first six numbers of a card can give the issuing bank details, but obtaining this information is either hugely expensive or impossible. Years ago, one could by a 'bin-book' for the USA for a thousand Dollars. Our 'solution' has been to put the card numbers in a customer database. Then we check supicious orders against this database, and if the numbers match with numbers from another country, it looks problematic. As your database grows, this system gets better and better. Of course, some people are working overseas, so it's not always a solution. Recently, we've found that address checks overseas are getting progressively more difficult, due in part to data protection legilsation in Europe. As merchants, we are always left with the risk. This is not the case in Germany, so the card companies have retaliated by withdrawing 'cardholder not present' facilities! There's a lesson here for us all. We're ALWAYS going the be the ones taking the risk. And those chargebacks can be subject to a 'charge'. This means that it is possible for the card issuers to actually PROFIT from fraud... Lesson number two. It ain't gonna get better. We send EVERYTHING by Recorded Delivery. Since a signature is required, this chases away a lot of fraudsters. Of course, overseas postal services don't always honour the 'signature required', but without a signature, we can always claim on the British Post Office. We don't charge for this service, but we find it works well. There are a few countries where there is a cheap 'door -to-door' tracking service now, and this is very good. It behooves us to protect ourselves. We have to work out how credit card fraud works from the 'other side'. A quick search for 'carding' on a search engine (exclude 'wool' if you can) will reveal how the fraudsters try to do it. It can be quite revealing. Spend some time reading these sites (expect lots of broken links where the ISPs have 'pulled' the sites!) and thinking. Know thine enemy... Truth is that most of these people are pretty dumb, but some can be quite 'pushy' and persistent. Be nice to them though, don't make an enemy of a hacker.... The BEST piece of advice is in your merchant handbook: "If it looks too good to be true, it probably is". WRITE IT ON THE WALL! Finally, never, NEVER, keep credit card numbers on anything that can be deemed a 'server'. A friend in the upper echelons of one of the world's biggest telcos tells me that NOTHING is 100 per cent hackproof. And he KNOWS. Roy Williams ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Dudley Dix Subject: Fraud protection > In the US, VISA/MC offer the use of the CVV # or > CVV2# as verification of card being present. All > plastics in this country have that currently... - David Driscoll, LED 1526 We have been using the CVV# is South Africa from long before it came into regular use in USA. When I suggested using it in LED in the past there was little knowledge of it and some people were anti its use. We still sometimes have US based customers refusing to give it because they have been told by their card issuer that they must not give it to anyone under any circumstances. My contract with my merchant bank states that I cannot process a transaction without supplying the CVV#. I cannot order an airline ticket in South Africa without the agent also recording the CVV# on the transaction form, even when they have the card in their hands. When any customer refuses to supply the number we don't process the order. My business deals with customers worldwide, with sales into 57 countries. We seldom come across a card that does not have a CVV#, from any country. I work in a niche market that is not normally targeted by fraudsters the way that retail or software companies would be. We have had problems with chargebacks only 3 times in 4 years, luckily for relatively small amounts. One was from Brazil, the other two local, of which one was later reinstated because it was a bank error. However, we have found that the highest proportion of transactions rejected by the card companies are on the North American cards. Whether this is due to cards being maxed out or attempted fraudulent transactions I don't know. DD Dudley Dix Yacht Design http://dixdesign.com ===== GEEK TIPS =================================== From: Peter Warnock Subject: Sub-domains > I notice some sites have sub domains, for instance > http://www.shop.com has the sub domains > http://product1.shop.com and http://product2.shop.com. > How is this accomplished? - Toon Eppink, LED 1525 You need to add the subdomains to the DNS server and direct them to different hosts. If your server supports it, you can use a wildcard domain *.store.com No new domain name registration is necessary. Peter Warnock, technology webstructor webstruction.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Mark Van Patten Subject: Godaddy > I would not use [GoDaddy] nor do I recommend my > hosting clients use them but they still are operating > and registering domain names. - Ed Seward, LED 1527 Highly recommended for domain name registration. Low prices, free redirects, easy to manage multiple domain names. I don't use them for hosting... what's up, Ed Seward, that you wouldn't recommend them for hosting? Mark Van Patten BGDailyNews.com ------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1995-2003 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "When you say, 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows', people just stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, for free'." - Linus Torvalds |
