authorize.net down due to fire - ruins ecommerce sales

This morning tens of thousands of ecommerce retailers awoke to see that their credit card processing company (authorize.net) went down due to a fire in the Seattle office.


Unfortunately, going down means no credit cards can be processed by many merchants who rely on authorize.net for their sales. This shows you that you should always have a back-up plan ready to go, such as PayPal or Google Checkout. This can save you thousands of dollars in headaches.


I personally witnessed a company lose hundreds of orders and receive tons of phone calls from irate customers vowing to never shop at this ecommerce site again.


When will the site be back up? It’s been 10 hours so far and still no word of any expected recovery time. Hopefully, this will be resolved and everyone can process the orders they have been hand writing down for the past ten hours.

Mocrosofts New Bing Search Engine

Microsoft has recently released its brand new search engine in hopes f competing with the monster, Google. There has been major TV advertising and marketing in place to get people interested, but will it be enough? Currently there is the new screen interface that is not as simple as Google, but not as cluttered as Yahoo. Bing will be a hybrid of the two dominant search engines in hopes of obtaining a large market share.

Google Admits Page Rank is Inaccurate and Useless

It is often debated the accuracy and use of Google little green bar, infamously know as Page Rank. People constantly ask me and others the importance of Page Rank. We often give them the answer they do not want to hear, Page Rank is inaccurate and useless. Why would you judge the importance of a website by a four month old ranking? Page Rank is updated every 4 months, when Google updates their algorithm.

Sites that are new, or are down when the update happens will not have a good Page Rank. Sites that have interior pages will sometimes not even have a Page Rank, rather a grey line saying, “This page is not yet ranked by Google”. This just proves the point that people should stop relying on Page Rank for a sites value. Read what Google has to say below.

Google even admits that Page Rank is an old and outdated measurement of a websites performance according to its algorithm. A few years ago Google released a statement, "The Page Rank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for entertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers to access this data, Google updates the Page Rank data very infrequently because is it not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR of zero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn't been updated in the last update. The PR that is displayed by the Google Toolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank the web page results so there is no need to be concerned if your PR is displayed as zero. If a site is showing up in the search results, it doesn't not have a real Pr of zero, the Toolbar is just out of date"

Do Follow Blog Comments for Everyone

Changing your blog from nofollow to do follow can have a significant influence on the amount of traffic you receive. I recently switched my Blogger Account from NoFollow comments to Do follow comments.

Wordpress makes a widget you install to change the nofollow to follow. It is as easy as that.

It is easy to do from Blogger as well. Go to settings - layout - edit HTML. From here click "Expand Widget Template" and do a search (control +F) for "nofollow". Change the "nofollow" to "follow" to allow links posted in comments to have link juice. this will increase your readers and comments, but you have to be careful to make sure your spam guard is up and is being constantly moderated.

There are lots of lists that include dofollow blogs, making it easier to build traffic and increase user interaction.

Seems like a win-win situation to me. I hope more bloggers begin to turn off the "nofollow" tag and allow for link juice!

NoDoFollow Ad-on for Mozilla Firefox - Find Do Follow Links

There is a excellent ad-on for Firefox that allows shows you if links on a web page are "nofollow". To get the extension download the NoDoFollow program. To download this you must have Mozilla Firefox on your computer as an operating system. If you do not have Firefox you can download it here.

Once the ad-on has been downloaded you will need to activate the program. To activate the tool right clicking on the screen and click on DoNoFollow. This will highlight all the links on a page that are nofollow. It can be turned off the same way it was turned on. The blue highlighting means that the link is do follow and the red highlighting means that the link is no follow. Its as easy as that!

This is a huge time saver for webmasters trying to build link popularity through do follow comments in blogs, forums, wikis, social networking sites, article sites, etc. You can easily look to see if adding a link will count towards Google's link juice. Before you had to go to the navigation menu and click on view then select source. Once in the source code you had to search (control + F) to find out if the links are no follow. This is a long and tedious process that is now instantly done for you. The best part is that this is all free!

The one drawback to this ad-on is that most blogs are using an "external nofollow" tag on the page header and the script is still highlighting the links. Other than that drawback this is a great, convenient tool.

100 Free Ways to Increase Website Traffic

There are thousands of ways to increase website traffic. Most of these variables cost money, but there are many other methods that are free. Below is a list of over 100 free ways to increase traffic to your website.

1) Yahoo Answers
2) Myspace.com
3) Yahoo Groups
4) Stumbleupon.com
5) Post in Forums
6) Craigslist.org
7) Submit Site maps
8) Give out E-Books
9) Website Layout and Design
10) Directory Submissions
11) Tell a Friend (word of mouth)
12) Search Engine Optimization
13) Search Engine Marketing
14) Social bookmarking sites
15) Article Writing and Submission
16) Site Explorer
17) Epinion.com
18) Alexa.com
19) Newsletter Box
20) Scribd
21) Back Links from Relevant Sites
22) Add New Pages to your Site
22) Write and Submit Press Releases
23) Place Ads on Online Classified Ad Sites
24) Use SEO for Firefox Toolbar Plugin
25) Add a Forum to Your Site
26) Add a Blog to Your Site
27) Optimize Your Blog for The Search Engines
28) Comment on Other Blogs
29) MySpace News
30) Digg
31) Banner Exchanges
32) Traffic Exchanges
33) Squidoo.com
34) Technorati and ping it when your blog content changes
35) Use a ping service like pingomatic to ping RSS aggregators
36) Submit Blog to RSS Feed Directories
37) Link to other blogs in your posts
38) Use Stumbleupon to stumble your posts
39) Ask your readers to submit your posts to social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, etc.)
40) Start a group blog
41) Join SpicyPage and promote your blog
42) Join a webring
43) Sign up for BlogWoods and promote your blog
44) Exchange Ads (not blogroll links) with complementary blogs
45) Trade blog roll links with related blogs
46) Use Twitter
47) Publish Keyword Rich Videos on YouTube with your URL
48) Search and Add Wikis Related to your Site
49) Join Hub pages and post links to your blog from articles you write.
50) Web 2.0 Marketing
51) Create a MySpace Page. Put your blog on it, and get some friends.
52) Tell people you will link back to them if they review your blog
53) Most brands are not well established online, you review related content and it will rank well.
54) Review relevant products on Amazon.com.
55) Create product lists on Amazon.com
56) Review related sites on Alexa
57) Review products and services on shopping search engines.
58) Swap some links.
59) Try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages.
60) Sell items on eBay.
61) Target niche social news sites like DZone, Sphinn or Hugg
62) Whenever you send an email to someone, always add your website url as a signature.
63) Do email signature swaps
64) Tag blog posts at social bookmarking sites
65) Add photos to your blog with appropriate keywords - Google Images generates traffic too.
66) Tag blog photos at Flicker
67) Make a custom 404-error page for your website. You can provide a link back to your main website or even try to monetize it by offering a related affiliate program within your niche.
68) Outsource grunt work.
69) After someone orders from you offer a one-time offer that compliments your product.
70) Participate in Blog Carnivals
71) create a network of blogs in different niches, and then link them together
72) Give away stock images with a wee watermark of your URL
73) Find and discuss memes
74) Create a Yahoo Group in the niche your site sits.
75) Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and if you’re really keen, add a Del.icio.us button to your homepage.
76) Place a free ad for your company on Gumtree.
77) Syndicate your site’s content by using an RSS feeds.
78) Submit your RSS feeds to aggregator sites.
79) Don’t worry about PageRank - worrying about PageRank is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.*
80) Get a custom t-shirt made with your website URL on it, and wear it often.
81) Get a custom t-shirt made with your website URL on it, and wear it often.
82) Send out a newsletter!
83) Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.
84) Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.
85) Add a “Tell a Friend” function to your site, so people can easily recommend you to their mates.
86) Share your banners on banner exchange sites.
87) Create a “lens” for your site on Squidoo
88) Do you have really hot content on your site that geeks would love? If so Slashdot will bring you a mass of traffic.
89) upload a favicon.gif file so that your users have a nice icon when they bookmark your site.
90) Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search
91) Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.
92) Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.
93) Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts.
94) Increase the list you ping
95) Use Facebook
96) Social Networking
97) Micro
98) Email Marketing
99) RSS Feeds
100) Get outside links to internal pages
101) Use free hosting and build sites and link them back to your main site.

Mis-Spellings?

I have a spell checking tool for your website here.

Quite often a searcher will mistype the keywords they are searching for. This causes website's to lose money, as they are not getting the traffic they desire. New SEO tactics should include misspellings for popular keywords. It may look sloppy, but if your getting enough sales who cares! The reason you have a website is ultimately to make some source of income or to share your knowledge with the world. More often than not it is for the first reason, to make money.

If you have a small, unknown branded website and would like to compete with the major players go after misspelled keywords. This may sound strange, but actually this opens up a door for smaller websites to compete for competitive keywords. Those tough to get keywords have misspellings that are easy to top the search engine rankings for.

A good way to find misspellings is using a dictionary or thesaurus to look at words and see how they are spelled and pronounced. You can also use the Google Ad Words Tool to see how many search results and how many times searchers misspelled words.

Unfortunately Google has the problem resolved using the "Did you mean......" phrase. Some searchers are not aware of this or do not care enough and will click through the misspellings. These misspellings are not competitive, yet and can easily be optimized for the top page and for much lower costs.