Transmitters of phishing have been manipulating users out of credit card numbers and other personal information since the mid 90s. The problem has been brought to light more recently as users have become more knowledgeable of the Internet and the methods that phishing uses to lure people into revealing sensitive information to unreliable sources. However, the problem has still managed to spike recently.

Today, Google and Yahoo have teamed up to combat the perpetrators of phishing through DMARC.org – Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. The two search engine powerhouses are working with Bank of America and Fidelity Investments to create this technical specification that will provide reliable authentication results to Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL users.

What’s To Blame For The Increase In Phishing?

DMARC’s group of search engines and financial services blame social media for the spike in phishing because of the readily available user accounts and personal information across social media platforms and e-commerce sites. Well-known brands are easily targeted in emails because users naturally find them more authoritative.

The following is an excerpt DMARC’s site explaining why spammers target email: “Email is easy to spoof and criminals have found spoofing to be a proven way to exploit user trust of well-known brands. Simply inserting the logo of a well known brand into an email gives it instant legitimacy with many users.”

There are already two existing authentication screening mechanisms – SPF and DKIM – that will become standards in the industry with the implementation of DMARC. The fact is that most phishing emails are already intercepted and sent to the user’s spam folder. The goal of DMARC is to remove those emails from the spam folder altogether. Inexperienced users are still easy targets for phishing emails to trick them out of their personal information.

How can you avoid being the target of spammers? Avoid clicking on URLs within emails and be aware of popular scams that are infiltrating the Internet.

With the rapid growth and technological advancements made through the Internet, eMarketers are estimating $39.5 billion will be generated in sales in the year 2012. According to a study by eMarketer, online advertising will continue to prove its worth in this time of economic hardships with a 23.3% increase in spending from 2011. This is nearly six billion more advertising dollars that will be spent in comparison to print ads in newspapers and magazines.

David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst, states “Advertisers’ comfort level with integrated marketing is greater than ever, and this is helping more advertisers – and more large brands – put a greater share of dollars online.” This is great news for us in the internet marketing industry, in which we only plan to expand our knowledge and skills in services such as search engine optimization and pay per click advertising as the demand for such services increases.

US online spending is expected to continue to grow in the next half a decade, with a mark of $62 billion anticipated by 2016. Displayed below, is a chart of the estimated spending numbers along with the percent change from the year prior.

With so much emphasis on the Internet and online advertising, those in the traditional industry of newspapers and magazines should pay close attention to this transformation. In 2011, total print ad spending was still approximately $4 billion ahead of online spending; but, displayed in the chart below you can see online spending will pull further and further ahead of the traditional channels of advertising in the years to come.

How do you feel about this Internet revolution? And how will this affect how we reach our target consumers if less and less people are reacting to the traditional means of communication [newspapers, magazines]?

As blackouts roll across the web this week, some sites opposed to SOPA/PIPA legislation have kept the lights on in order to maintain their search engine rankings. As one of many tech sites to openly protest the bills facing Congress that would censor the web, Google first offered advice to webmasters on how to close or limit access to their sites without medium-term effects. Now taking it a step further, Google has slowed their web crawlers in an effort to support sites eager to participate in the online demonstration.

Google’s Pierre Far posted instructions on Google+ detailing how to update your site to join the protest of these bills. One such way is using a 503 HTTP status, telling spiders that the site is only temporarily unavailable. By using this code, the content is not designated as “real,” and will not be indexed. Googlebot’s crawlers are automatically slowed when there is a significant spike in 503 statuses. Paired with the manual configuration on Google’s end to reduce the crawl rate, more sites will be protected.

Mr. Far later emphasizes the importance of not altering the robots.txt file on your site  to block any crawlers, as this could affect the recovery of the crawl rate post-blackout. By keeping it simple and avoiding any drastic changes in coding, websites can be involved without severely adverse effects.

Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Reddit are among the list of prominent sites behind the massive social media effort protesting the proposed censorship of Internet data and policing by the Department of Justice. While Bing and Yahoo have not expressed any involvement, search results on these sites may still be influenced.

What do you think of Google’s actions in protest of these bills?

Google’s latest tool  involves revamping the search algorithm to allow for a search, verbatim. A normal search on Google will auto correct misspelled words, and substitute synonyms (for example, automobiles to cars), but Google Verbatim will do neither. This will allow for you to search for your exact terms without all the fluff.

“We’ve been listening, and starting today you’ll be able to do just that through verbatim search. With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered,” says Google.

The Google Verbatim search tool will be located under the “more search tools” on the left side of the Google search results page. Check it out!

Google’s search ranking, evaluation and algorithmic processes are ever changing, keeping Internet marketers on their toes when deciding the most efficient optimizing methods to employ. Google often gives a glimpse inside some of their changes, but does not entirely delve into the more than 500 changes they make in a given year. Just yesterday, Google gave some insight into several improvements of the last couple of weeks.

For users making search queries in languages where limited content is available (including Slovak, Afrikaans, Malay and Swahili among others), Google will now translate relevant English pages and display the translated titles beneath the English titles.

Snippets will now include more page content and less header/menu content. This seems like a pretty straightforward concept: more content allows Google to choose more relevant text in snippets. Also, Google is extending application rich snippets, which offer more detailed information like cost, customer reviews and other relevant details for people searching for software applications.

Google tweaked their algorithm, which they say makes a significant improvement on ranking content freshness. This is quite possibly the most important change for Internet marketers. The change impacts about 35% of total searches—6 to 10% of search results in a significant way. It will detect a level of freshness for each query, in addition to another change that detects which pages are official to provide users with more relevant, authoritative results. Google says that this change will rank official sites even higher in the search ranking. Finally, for users who specify a certain date range in their search query, Google is helping to ensure that the results are most relevant to the date range specified.

Site Owners Stay Put

Google provides a disclaimer that these are by no means all of the algorithmic changes, nor will they work precisely as you may imagine. In that case, how helpful are these tips? These changes emphasize what a lot of marketers already know: relevant, natural and authoritative content is the key to success. Do you think Google’s insight provides marketers with enough information to reevaluate search ranking and evaluation processes?

The changing world of internet marketing is constantly strengthening and developing new avenues for lead generation. This year, SEO takes the prize as the number one source for generating leads. Out of the 500 U.S. online marketers surveyed by the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report, two-thirds identified themselves as business-to-business marketers.

Social media marketing, PPC and SEO were among the categories considered to have the largest impact on lead generation. B2B marketers accredited 57.4% of their lead generation to SEO, while B2C marketers credit 41%. Although SEO was the number one generator of leads, marketers are planning to increase their social media budgets in 2012 even more than their SEO budgets.

PPC, social media and SEO are all essential aspects of  internet marketing for businesses, but each year we will see those numbers shift with new developments in online marketing efforts. It will be interesting to see how marketers spend their internet marketing budgets in 2012.

The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has declared that SEO is not spam in a newly released interview. The 4-minute video discusses everything from white hat and black hat SEO, to the advantages and abuses of SEO.

Matt Cutts points out that SEO can be extremely useful when employed correctly and ethically. Specifically, that white hat tactics can be an ideal method to increase search engine ranking through the use of high-quality content and overall site usability.

Ultimately, while there are numerous people who employ black hat tactics, there are  more who use white hat tactics that create value for the web. So there you have it, SEO is not spam. Take a look at our search engine optimization techniques to see some white hat seo tactics to use to boost rankings in Google.

Google recently announced that they are hiding keywords used by searchers that are signed into their Google accounts to protect their privacy. When a Google user is signed in and they visit your site from an organic search, Google Analytics will recognize this organic search but now they will not report the keywords that the user had searched to arrive at the site.  Google’s goal is to provide user privacy by not giving out any search information to the sites that users click through to.

However, Google isn’t removing all keyword data, only a sub-set. This has less of an effect on SEO because we can still see current trends in analytics and we can still see the higher traffic keywords. The keywords we see are larger, we no longer see the minority. If there is a specific site that the majority of the visits happen when people are signed in to Google, then there could be a large effect from this loss of ability to see the general keyword trends. Google has said that”an aggregated list of the top 1000 search queries that drove traffic to a site for each of the past 30 days will be available through Webmaster Tools.”

It seems as if there is a bit of a double standard here. Google is saying that this change will have a small impact on only about 10 percent of its searchers, however that is still a good amount of keyword referral information that is kept from the websites owners. But, if those same searchers click on a Google ad, this information is not hidden because Google says  “its advertisers need to be able to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.” What do you think about this change?

 Losers of the Google Panda Update

• aceshowbiz.com        -93%
• businesswire.com    -69%
• entrepreneur.com    -68%
• starpulse.com              -61%

In a move that seemed to be a long time coming, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz was fired recently after less than three years as head of the company. Although she performed well at times for Yahoo!, her approval rating had fallen to dismal levels recently and many people were calling for her termination. Bartz received a 90% approval rating in her first quarter, but it declined from there. In her last quarter she received a 33% approval rating, and dipped as low as 24% at one point.

Bartz began her tenure as CEO with the task of bringing Yahoo! back to relevance after the failure of Yahoo! Co-founder Jerry Yang’s experiment at CEO. With such high expectations, the initial support and grace she received quickly turned to disappointment. As such, it seemed to be only a matter of time before she was fired and the news of her termination caused Yahoo!’s stock price to increase.

Now that Bartz is gone, Yahoo! is left with an important choice on what to do next. Rumors of Yahoo! selling parts or all of its company are being circulated around, but it seems much more likely that they will instead try to find a game-changing CEO to run the company. What Yahoo! needs is a Steve Jobs as their CEO. Jobs, the former CEO of Apple, is seen as one of the greatest CEO’s of our time. He effectively saved Apple from the brink of bankruptcy and morphed it into one of the most successful companies in the world with a revenue of over $60 billion, in a little over 10 years.

Although it is unlikely that Yahoo! can find another Steve Jobs, there are a lot of options for the company going forward. Should Yahoo! cut its losses and sell the company? Or should they go after a game-changing CEO? If so, who?