California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra has filed extortion and money laundering charges against the owners of MugShots.com, the website that gathers mugshots of people who have been arrested and posts them online. Mugshots.com charges the individuals whose mugshots are posted on their website a fee to remove the mugshot photos from their website. The defendants named in the complaint are Sahar Sarid, Kishore Vidya Bhavnanie, Thomas Keesee, and David Usdan. [Read more…]
We all know that SEOs and us digital marketers spend a lot of time sitting in our offices, in front of our laptop or monitors. Sure, we do occasionally answer the phone, but to make the day go by faster and make it more enjoyable we absolutely have to have our tunes going. Most of the time, especially when I’m writing or even reviewing a client’s backlinks, I’ve got some music on. [Read more…]
eBay is voluntarily removing about 500,000 pages from their web site, possibly giving up what some estimate to be one billion page views. According to a Seeking Alpha report, eBay has hundreds of thousands of buying guides that were created in order to bring free organic search traffic to their web site. [Read more…]
Recently I wrote about how there was a bug in Grammarly’s Google Chrome extension. The bug allowed virtually any website to essentially get ahold of your login credentials and gain access to the Grammarly documents in your user account. As I mentioned in my post, Grammarly did fix the bug. [Read more…]
SEMrush, one of my go-tools for Keyword Research and a whole lot of other SEO and SEM tools, has launched Keyword Kombat Winter Sports Edition [Read more…]
As someone who started doing SEO back in 1996 for my own business and my affiliate websites, well before there even was an industry called the “search industry” or “digital marketing”, I’ve never thought of myself as being one who was an innovator. Well, over the years I’ve come to the realization that I’ve innovated lots of things over the years.
Hint:My latest innovation? The first-ever SEO to be accepting Bitcoin for payment of SEO services.
There is a class action settlement, OPPERMAN, ET AL. v. KONG TECHNOLOGIES, INC., ET AL, that has been between the plaintiffs and an app developer. Kong Technologies created apps for Foodspotting, Foursquare, Gowalla, Instagram, KIK, Twitter, and Yelp. Kong Technologies was formerly known as Path, Inc.. Essentially, certain apps obtained contact data from users’ devices (their iPhones), in violation of their privacy rights. If you used one of these apps in your iPhone between 2009 and 2012 and allowed those apps to access your contacts, you may be entitled to money. You can claim it through iosappsettlement dot com. [Read more…]
Beware of scam apps that are in the Apple App Store that have been submitted by rogue developers. There are developers that are scamming Apple users, and making money from apps that don’t work. Dishonest app developers are creating apps that don’t work as described—and are linked to other innocent websites. [Read more…]
Matt Cutts, former head of the web spam team at Google, has officially resigned from Google. His last official day at Google was December 31, 2016, he announced on his blog. [Read more…]
Yelp logo. (PRNewsFoto)
Update
May 16, 2016: 12:01pm Yelp is now back up and running, it appears that the site was down for several hours today, May 16, 2016. While it was down, they were displaying this message:
Previous blog post below, as I initially reported it:
It appears that the Yelp website is down. This is the first time in many years that I have seen this website go down, and it’s certainly newsworthy. So many people rely on reviews from Yelp, good or bad, and many businesses rely on having good reviews on Yelp. [Read more…]