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A number of people have been scammed and their credit card details stolen on a fake site offering KFC home deliveries. The card details are taken, the food never arrives, and by then the card details have been on sold to the crooks who empty it out.
If ordering anything online make sure that you know that the site is legitimate and that any purchase forms are secure – ie have https: in the url and the padlock symbol.
By the way – KFC apparently do not deliver in NZ.
Because the core of our business (Net Action Ltd) is Search Engine Optimisation and other related web marketing services, it always concerns us how many spam emails we and others receive regarding SEO services. It confuses everyone about what they need..
There are one or two companies who are bad for that. I am constantly receiving similar looking emails from Brandroot Media PTY Ltd. Previously it was Page Port PTY Ltd, Booster Web Network and even Zeald (obviously pretending to be the NZ company of similar name).
They seem to have thousands of people working for them – Terry, Abigail, Tom, Ryan, Katie, Alan etc etc.. I get emails frrom many of them.
And they always say they have offices in Auckland and many other cities – Wellington, Hamilton, Hastings, Wellington, Dubai, London, New York etc etc. But try looking up the name or address in the companies office or on Google Maps etc and they obviously don’t exist, Or ask for their business domain name. You won’t get it from them!
So these guys are spammers clearly. Many of the others are quite probably legitimately looking for clients to do a good job for. But it is hard for you to see the ‘wood for the trees’ when you get so many emails.
So why do they bother? It is a numbers game. If you send enough emails out, someone, somewhere will respond.
Without doubt, every site needs SEO and the other services we provide. But the excess of spam pushing this just means information overload that turns some business owners from doing anything at all.
You probably receive a number of emails every day offering SEO services. While many of these are genuine companies vying for your business, some really are scammers who will take your money and do nothing.
Every website needs SEO services (and more). There are some good reputable companies in NZ who provide great SEO services, including us.
It is therefore galling when we see overseas scammers pretending to be NZ companies and giving good SEO companies here a bad rap.
We have recently received numerous emails from Creative Zeald Ltd who claim to have an office at
Level 4, 147 Parnell Road, Parnell 1052, Auckland.New Zealand
with other offices in Christchurch | Wellington | Hamilton | Tauranga & Dunedin
and a global presence in Hong Kong & China | USA | AUS | UAE | Singapore
This is almost identical to numerous emails previously received from Page Port NZ Ltd. They were apparently headquartered in Napier with offices in Northland, Auckland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Gisborne, Hawkes Bay, Taranaki, Manawatu-Whanganui, Wellington, Tasman, Nelson, Marlborough, West Coast, Canterbury, Otago, Southland. Wow! Such a busy company that no-one has heard of!
Both of these are overseas companies and do not have the NZ representation they claim. They are passing off as something that they are not. If not a total scam, it is certainly spam.
Don’t touch overseas SEO companies unless you know something about them. Get references if you can. Some will just take your money or lock you into long contracts.
In the past few newsletters we have been commenting on spam robots and Ghost referrers in Google Analytics.
Until now it has been a case of applying custom filters in an effort to remove these from Analytics reports.
Continue reading
Google Analytics is still being hit hard by robots and “ghost referrer” sites. This may be screwing your statistics data significantly. In the case of small sites, we have seen up to 80% of recorded traffic being from spam sites and robots. Larger sites are less affected proportionally.
To see if your stats are being affected:
Continue reading
School holidays have seen an increase in hacking attacks on websites – seemingly kids with good IT knowledge and lots of spare time attacking sites that annoy them or are high profile, or sometimes just “because they can” and have nothing better to do. Wellington Cricket and Christchurch Star are two sites that were attacked.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=11391699
We know of a surprising number of sites that have been hacked lately. Sites built using WordPress are the most commonly targeted as they have numerous “plug-ins” that may be vulnerable. But the hacking we have seen has been with a range of different Content Management Systems and different developers. No one is immune.
What really surprised us is the shocking response of several of the developers to being informed of it.
One large NZ developer who also host the clients’ sites has told at least 3 of their clients that it was their fault because their site was hosted on an out of date server. And that it would cost $500 to migrate their site plus the cost of fixing the hack. Continue reading
We have been concerned for some time about the huge push to use Google Adwords and the lack of transparency of reporting from some companies running Adwords campaigns for clients along with highly aggressive sales techniques.
We have always said that any 3rd party company running an Adwords campaign should fully disclose both the management cost of running the campaign and the cost per click that you are paying to Google.
So great news that Google have updated their third party policy. Continue reading
We received an email from a company called Domain Services offering to sell us
500 Facebook Likes= $30USD
1000 Facebook Likes= $50USD
2000 Facebook Likes= $90USD
5000 Facebook Likes= $200USD
They also offered us Twitter followers stating that “Followers will help you to make your page look more popular on social networking sites.”
Yes, followers will help, but buying likes, followers or reviews is against the terms and conditions of most social media sites and they actively police it. This practice could see you penalised by Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, Google and others.
Don’t be tempted by this!
Also don’t be tempted by sites or emails offering to submit you to many thousand search engines. Bad practice that can negatively impact your site traffic!
See our other articles on this at http://www.netaction.co.nz/may-2013-newsletter/
Following on from previous articles, what are the most common (and therefore also the least secure passwords?
Believe it or not they are