Viking Waters VoIP for Business telephone service, Website development and optimization, custom programming

Since 1977

Problem Companies

Warning! FeaturePrice (website hosting) has reared it's ugly head again. After leaving it's customers in the lurch in June of 2003 and tying up their domain names, they have returned to the marketplace in an attempt to regain a customer base. To read more on FeaturePrice's misadventures and the lawsuits pending against them, do a search for "FeaturePrice" on Google to get 10,000 links on the subject. A good article with FP's rejoinder.

FeaturePrice may now be using "Mammoth" as a new name to shake their lousy reputation

Hint: Use a separate outfit to register your domain name. You'll be less likely to lose it if your host goes belly-up.

5/26/04

1QualityHost is totally messed up. Sites that registered though them are having trouble getting their names released.

Traffic Power, a "black hat" Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm that was recently banned by Google along with all of its over 10,000 clients. They switched their name to First Place, but that site is no longer up.

Pay Per Click Scam

Beware of advertising agencies that offer pay-per-click services. If they receive money for each click (in addition to that paid to the search engine), they might be running a scam.

The scam encourages people (many of them housewives in India) to click on the ads, stay 60 - 90 seconds, then do it again. The housewives are paid for the traffic. Some earn as much as $100 - $200 per month. An army of these people can drain your advertising budget in a big hurry.

Visiting Webmasters

If you would like to link to this site, be our guest. We allow deep links directly to the information you think would be of interest to your visitors. If you think you have some content that would be of interest to those who view this site, send an e-mail to our webmaster at:

We happily trade links with sites that have related content or interests.

Do you have a website that needs to be promoted? SelfPromotion has a bundle of resources to help prepare your pages for search engines. They have a url submission robot which will submit your site to several search engines and directories. They also have educational information about website promotion, submitting to yahoo, and much more. And the whole mess is free! If you pay him them a few sheckles, they'll open up some of their more advanced tools which are really worth the extra expense

Link Farms under attack. Kim Krause of Search Engine Guide has written a fine article on link trading via link farms. She points out that more is not always better. In fact, "more" can sometimes penalize your position in search engines such as Google. Since some sites violate this rule with seeming impunity, we asked her why this seeming dichotomy exists. Click here for her answer.

eMail SPAM: One way spammers get e-mail addresses is to spider the Internet looking for anything that looks like an e-mail address, such as webmaster@abcxyz33 address. One way to combat this practice is to encode e-mail addresses on your web site so that the relatively stupid spiders can't detect them, but your visitors more intelligent web browser can still use them. There are several schemes available, but the easiest of the lot is provided by West Bay Web. They provide a free screen that will encode your e-mail address so that you can put it anywhere, even in mouseover images (such as our mailbox above). Try it.

Another way is to make all emails into images. Your visitor will have to key it in manually, but the list bots can't read it.

If Traffic Power ever contacts you -- hang up immediately! They are like those evil Sirens in Homer's Odyssey. If you listen to them, you'll be sucked in by their spell. Many firms have been victimized by this outfit that claims they can boost your position in search engine listings.

What they actually due is to use techniques that are classified as "spam" by most search engines, including Google and Yahoo. For a few months, their victims do indeed enjoy a boost in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Then they're dropped and banned when the spam is identified.

NetMechanic, a producer of web tools, has a page of webmaster tips that they continually add to. Some of the tips are quite useful.