Articles
How to Block Referrer Spam and Ghost Traffic from Google Analytics
In a nutshell, referral spam is when bogus referral traffic is sent to a website or product. There are two main categories of referral spam; web crawlers (bots) and ghost referral traffic. Web crawlers are robots that visit your website with the sole aim of indexing the content. Your Google Analytics account will catch most […]
Why Flash Design is Crippling Your Website and Driving Away Customers
It Gets in Your Customer’s Way Your customers come to your website with a problem in need of solving. They are looking for information, contact details, a price quote, description of services, and so on. But if they have to sit and wait for a 4-minute flash presentation to load and run, then you are […]
Aaron Swartz Scholarship by Vandelay Web
June 1 – The competition was fierce, but at the end two essays rose above the rest to win the 2015 Aaron Swartz Scholarship. I’d like to give a big congratulations to Justin Camden and Tara Clifford. They both made strong arguments as to why Swartz was justified in his actions to free information that […]
Robinhood Invite Code Giveaway
It took almost a year, but we were finally called off the waiting list to try the new Robinhood brokerage service. So what is Robinhood? It is basically commission less trading. Without pricy branches and account managers, they can streamline their service price to zero. The investment company is FDIC insured and seems to have […]
Hack Cleanup: Pharma Link Spam Embedded in WordPress
A client called us today saying Cialis had taken over his website. Well not literally, but the keeping-it-up drug was suddenly getting prominent ad space in the header of his website just below the search bar. Our client didn’t wake up one morning and decide to start spreading the word about the cure for a […]
How Not to Get a Job on Craigslist
Over the past few years, we’ve looked to Craigslist to find potential employees. We’ve also leaned heavily on eLance, but each channel caters more effectively to different jobs. Our latest ad was looking to add a few sharp sales people to do B2B outreach. We posted ads across several major markets in an attempt to […]
Using .htaccess & .htpasswd to Defend WordPress Against Brute Force Attacks
So how scummy are spammers? What kind of low rent individual decides to devote their life to the pursuit of spamming websites? Yesterday, like countless days before it, some scum sucking individual decided to point a botnet at one of our sites and effectively tried to hammer it open with an absolute flood of traffic, […]
How Google’s New Quality Rating Guidelines Will Shape the Web in 2014 and Beyond
Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the magic curtain at Google? The modern day Wizard of Oz is shrouded in mystery surrounding how they develop their world conquering search algorithm. Most web marketers are left reading the tea leaves, trying to discern which quality signals to focus on this month. That’s why Jennifer […]
How to Spot a Future Google Penalty Lurking on Flippa
Thank you for calling the Google Penalty Hotline servicing your Panda, Penguin and Manual Penalty needs. How can I help you? This is how I feel sometimes when I answer the phone. Diagnosing and fixing Google penalties is becoming a larger part of our business and affected owners are reaching out to us in an […]
Can a Natural Link from Huffington Post Spawn a Google Penalty?
We have a client we are assisting in getting out from under a partial matches manual action penalty assessed by Google’s webspam team. Our client had not setup an account in Google Webmaster Tools until very recently so wasn’t aware of this issue until a couple weeks ago. The Webmaster Tools manual action section denoted […]