The United States FTC (Federal Trade Commission), in coordination with the Better Business Bureau, has charged nine people and corporations based in Canada and the United States with operating a company that made unsolicited telephone calls to small businesses and other organizations demanding that they pay for unordered directory listings, SEO services, or website design and hosting services. [Read more…]

The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has charged three people and nine businesses with bilking over $125 million from thousands of consumers. The internet marketing scheme, called MOBE (My Online Business Education) aka My Own Business Empire, claimed that the business education program would enable people to start their own online businesses and earn substantial income. The defendants claimed to have a proven 21-step system for making substantial sums of money quickly and easily from internet marketing, which they promised to provide to those who join their program. [Read more…]

What exactly is GDPR, and if you have a US-based business with a website, why should you care about the upcoming deadline of May 25, 2018? I recently talked to a few businesses, and they didn’t know anything about it. And, they’ve never heard of it. As someone who is involved daily with digital marketing and search engine optimization of websites, I have to tell you that if you’re an EU-based business then you’ll need to comply with the new GDPR regulations by May 25, 2018. If you’re not in the EU, then you actually should care about it, as it will have an affect on your website–at a minimum, your Google Analytics data. [Read more…]

Gravityscan, the website security scanner service, is shutting down. Scheduled scans will continue to run on a set schedule and Gravityscan badges will continue to show on Pro websites through March 8, 2018. [Read more…]

Author Jon Bishop, former Director of Growth at Heap, has published 18 hours of Digital Marketing training over at Springboard. This appears to be a great way to learn the basics of digital marketing if you haven’t had any formal digital marketing training. [Read more…]

I am currently working on a unique project with domain names that requires me to crawl hundreds of thousands of URLs. Essentially, in this particular project, I have a list of domain names. Let’s say, around 100,000 domain names. What I want to know, for this project, is which domain names are actually being used for live websites, which domain names are being redirected, and which domain names are registered only (they don’t have hosting set up). [Read more…]