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It must be that time of year again. I just opened a suspiciously invoice-like “offering” from a company called “Domain Listings” that offers to add you to their “Annual Website Domain Listings on Internet Directory” for the low-low unreasonably-expensive price of $288 per year.
Please note that Google will do this for you for free. In fact, chances are Google will “list” your site unless you go out of your way to ask them not to.
I’d leave people like this “Domain Listings” company and the older but equally sketchy “Domain Authority” alone if they’d just advertise their expensive listing services the old-fashoned way. But they don’t. Instead they mail “window” envelopes containing “offerings” that look very, very much like invoices from domain registration companies.
Note: I get half a dozen calls a year from people asking why their website’s domain registration expired after they paid this company or one like it. Usually they’re very angry or very hurt. I’ll help recover their registration if I can — usually you get a grace period after your website disappears when you can recover it. But really the better deal would be if these companies grew a conscience and stopped running this… misleading… offer.
Extra funny. On the back of this letter, in very small print, they say “All Listings are final.” Because as soon as the average website owner gets a real invoice for their domain registration (usually for less than $20/year) they’re naturally going to ask these people for their money back.
Extra credit: their “domain listing” service looks very slick but since relatively few people fall for this kind of thing their actual listings are pretty sparse. For instance if you search for “lawyer” in tech-savvy Seattle you’ll find… exactly none have been dumb enough to list there. Or how about searching for a single webmaster, anywhere, who’s paid these guys?
Again, it’s your money, and if you want to get listed with them that’s totally fine. But don’t mistake their advertisement for an invoice. Don’t imagine you’re renewing your domain registration when you pay this.
Why aren’t website’s contact form messages showing up in my inbox? It’s a common problem. It’s a common question. Here’s an answer.
On a Reddit support forum for WordPress users, in a now-deleted post, someone said they were having trouble getting their contact forms and other email delivered when using 3rd-party email providers like Microsoft’s Office 365. They added that the “easy” answer, using an email plugin, is actually incredibly complicated. It’s a good question and common enough that I thought I should repost my answer here.
The problem isn’t with WordPress or even your hosting company. Other services (e.g. newsletter vendors, billing companies, cloud-based contact and project managers, etc.) that send email from your domain (e.g. info@mydomain.com) typically have the same problems.
And really? Really the problem is spammers and scammers that force mail providers to continuously tighten security screws to prevent random hackers from spoofing your email addresses.
From a customer’s perspective, MS365’s fanatical security is awesome. For site owners, web developers, and 3rd-party communications providers it’s a royal pain. But again, not WordPress’s fault.
Basically what’s going on is that your server sends email on your behalf, using some core PHP or server function to send email. The server dutifully sends a message to the client claiming to be from info@mydomain.com, right? But when the email provider’s server receives the email it goes “no, wait a minute, as far as I know I’m the only official server for all @mydomain.com email, so this has to be a forgery. So I’m rejecting it even before it goes into my user’s spam box.”
As email users that’s actually what we want to happen 99.9999% of the time, right? The alternative would be going back to the days when you’d get mail claiming to be from your aunt trying to sell you counterfeit watches.
The solution is to configure your DNS tables with records that will let Microsoft (or Gmail, SendMail, etc.) known that you’ve also authorized your web server to send mail on your behalf.
The main way you do that is by modifying the SPF record, but depending on how paranoid they’re feeling you may also have to have the correct DKIM, or DMARC records. You might even need to have text records with codes authenticating your account (e.g. ms=12345678)
If you’re using Microsoft Office 365 check with your account rep, or log into the 365 admin panel, then root around to find the correct records to use. (I think there may also be a way to specify your server and/or serve IP address for the SPF record.) If you use Gmail or another less-strict provider check with their support documentation.
And yes, the alternative as the original poster mentioned is to set up an SMPT plugin and then jump through all the (enormous!) hoops to create the right configurations, administrative permissions, and app passwords and keys Microsoft and Google require since they (unfortunately but correctly) won’t just let you add your username and password since the information have to be stored in more or less plain text somewhere on your website or web server.
One final possibility: a small handful of hosting companies disable all outbound email by default, in order to prevent poorly designed or poorly secured customer sites from sending spam. They do this to prevent their servers from winding up on email blacklists. You may want to contact their technical support to have that “option” turned off.
Summary: Cool set of questions that Google looks for when ranking website content.
You’ll often hear people say the best way to boost your ranking with Google is to have great, useful, relevant content. Which to be honest ought to be pretty obvious… but isn’t, given the zillions of ways people come up with to try and game the SEO system.
So… what exactly does Google mean when they say it? I stumbled across an extremely helpful explanation from Google itself: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
Google’s automated ranking systems are designed to present helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings, in the top Search results. This page is designed to help creators evaluate if they’re producing such content.
From SEO Fundamentals, Google.com
The whole article is worth reading. Even better, the questions they ask are aimed at non-technical website owners.
Here are a couple of questions they recommend looking into when it comes to your content on your website or social media posts (sample questions are copied directly from the Google article)
Content and quality questions:
- Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
- Does the main heading or page title avoid exaggerating or being shocking in nature?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
Expertise questions
- If someone researched the site producing the content, would they come away with the impression that it is well-trusted or widely recognized as an authority on its topic?
Presentation and production questions
- Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
- Does content display well for mobile devices when viewed on them?
That’s still just a sample of the questions, so definitely go read the original. But the summary is the same as what I and most other internet old-timers are going to tell you: write for people first, avoid SEO “tactics” like stuffing keywords to try to make search-engine algorithms think your content is more interesting to people than it really is.
Have you received an email claiming you’ve infringed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) recently?
For people with screen readers here’s the relevant text from the screenshot
Cloudflare received a DMCA copyright infringement complaint regarding: realbasics.com
The information we received was the following:…
Work: I, XXXXXXXXXXX, would like to draw your attention towards https://www.realbasics.com/ this website owner who copied the content from our website !! I did not authorize or approve this website owner to post them here. …… Kindly act expeditiously to remove this infringing or unauthorized content post from this website ASAP.
…
Comments:
We have forwarded this complaint to your hosting provider.
Thanks,
The Cloudflare Team
I got one of those and turns out quite a few others have received similar notifications. I called the attorney listed on the complaint and they adamantly denied any involvement. (No surprise: the address used in the complaint is a vacant lot!). It looks like the lawyer may also be a victim of identity theft!
After reviewing the takedown request the lawyer informally (not legal advice!) told me that since he didn’t make the complaint the infringement notice is not actionable.
So what’s going on?
First of all, what they’re doing
It looks like the actors behind this behavior do this one neat trick
- Identifies a “controversial” or negative post about one of their clients
- Copies the contents and posts it on their own website…
- …using the names of attorneys (at least one) as the authors
- Manipulates the publication date to one day before the original’s published date
- Uses “no-index” methods to prevent search engines from indexing their bogus post
- Submits an infringement notification with the alleged lawyer’s name and a phony Gmail address
- …
- Make money
They’ve got a lot of !%# gall, right?
In my case I’ve got an iron-clad “alibi.” The original post they copied and complained is actually a follow-up to a previous post. The first sentence has a link back to that post.
Both posts have very similar contents and very similar images (since I created them myself using the same tools and formats.)
The back-dated copy doesn’t link back to anything — no surprise since they’ve just copied and pasted my content.
Second of all, a strong guess about why they’re doing it
I’ve been in contact with several other people who’s posts have been similarly copied, back-dated, and then hit with infringement notices.
In each case the subjects of the target posts call companies or individuals into question. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some people might like to see negative information about their enterprises scrubbed from the internet. And some of those people might hire an “aggressive” reputation management company to try and deal with it. And some of those companies might not be above pulling “black hat PR” moves… like hacking the DMCA infringement regulations by back-dating other people’s posts and claiming the original posters needed to be shut down.
One of the other victims of this exploit contacted me and told me they’ve spoken with at least eight other site owners who’ve had the same experience. Two of them (including the one who contacted me) had not just the “offending” post but their entire websites taken offline as a result!
I’m not going to say any more about this at the moment, because other parties and possibly their lawyers seem to be getting involved.
Instead I’m just going to say if you get one of these takedown notices and you haven’t actually plagiarized someone else’s content it might be a good idea to do a little due diligence.
- Definitely push back.
- Get on a search engine to find the real lawyers who’s identities are being misrepresented in the infringement notices and get clarification that they’re not involved.
- And let your hosting company know, in no uncertain terms, that the notices are invalid.
Chances are very good that neither the black-hat PR companies nor the people who hire them are up to any good.
So, about the WordPress Ninja Forms plugin and missing forms.
If you use NinjaForms and got that forced security update in mid June, 2022, your forms may have disappeared from your Contact page or other places on your site. Chances are the site isn’t really broken. Instead the plugin may have disabled the forms by putting itself into “maintenance mode.”
Here’s how to fix it:
Follow these simple steps
- log in to your site’s dashboard
- visit NinjaForms -> Settings
- manually click the “Remove Mantenance Mode” button near the bottom of the settings page.
- don’t forget to clear any caches too
While this post is specifically about the forced update in June, 2022, you may also run into disappearing NinjaForms forms other times as well, especially after migrating a site to a new server, and possibly when an update requires changes to the database.
I found missing forms on around half the sites I manage that use NinjaForms! To be safe I went ahead and applied the fix on every site that uses NinjaForms. The steps, above, are very simple but when you’re talking about dozens of sites it… takes a while. (I’m posting this while taking a break from the chore!)
This seems like a really awful “feature.” I understand their reasoning, but contact forms and other forms are often the life’s blood of a working website. If those forms disappear it’s bad for your visitors and bad for the site’s owners as well!
I’ve discussed this issue before but a lot of my clients get this “Renewal Notice” from a company called Domain Authority. Looks like they’ve updated their stationery but they’ve been sending these things out for years.
Almost everything about the letter implies it’s an invoice to renew your domain name until you get to the “fine print” on the second page where they admit it’s just a solicitation to have your site listed in their “yellow pages” style directory.
As I mentioned in that previous post what they’re doing seems to be technically legal so I probably can’t legally say it’s a “scam.” But I can say without qualification that everyone should think twice ten times 100 times before you send 289 hard-earned dollars to some random directory listing in Hendersonville, North Carolina (the address on their solicitations) or possibly Sante Fe, New Mexico (the address on their website.)
If you go to their website you’ll see an even more clear disclaimer at the bottom of their home page:
Domain Networks is an online directory listings top websites from local businesses from around the world. We do not provide domain registration or domain renewal services.
https://domainnetworks.com/
Disclaimers in their FAQ are even more direct
Q: I received a mailer that looks like a bill.
https://domainnetworks.com/faq
A: What you received in the mail is not a bill. This is an advertisement for our domain listing services.
I’ll repeat: paying these guys will not renew your domain! You do that through your actual domain registrar.
Over at PostStatus David Bisset has a thoughtful post about brushing off the recent Facebook/Instagram/WeChat outage with quips about “own your own content.”
Time will tell if Facebook being down on Oct 4th will be the single greatest system failure in tech in 2021. There’s been some good writing explaining what went wrong (and the fact that mistakes happen), but predictably when sites and networks fail like this there are reactions on social media. Eventually, especially in the WordPress community, when it comes to corporate sites and social networks someone is there to wag a finger and say “See? Own Your Own Content.” Me included.
This time around — maybe because it was Facebook or I’m just showing my age — it felt different saying “Own your own content.” Yes, you should own your own content. But that’s not possible for many people today, and many were hit harder than you may realize.
David Bisset, PostStatus
I agree there’s a certain amount of “first-world problem” elitism when small (and large) web publishing advocates say “own your content.” And as you say, in some parts of the world Facebook and its messaging properties are the only available media for business and government (and also, evidently, human trafficking and organized crime!)
But the point of “own your own content” isn’t necessarily to have your own bespoke WordPress website. Instead it’s to… well… own your content. Preferably across a range of platforms.
In my experience as a WordPress support specialist, Facebook (or Amazon, or Google, etc.) outages are very rare compared to even very well-run individual websites. 99.9% uptime still means about 8 hours of downtime per year, right? So it would be risky to publish only on WordPress as well!
I still recommend that people have their own websites, not because they’re more reliable or more popular but because it’s a great foundation for the COPE/CORE publishing strategy: Create Once Post/Repost Everywhere.
It doesn’t necessarily matter where you create your content. Twitter is great for short messaging. Tumblr and Tiktok are surprisingly usable. Matt Mullenweg’s commercial but largely free WordPress.com is fine too. Even Facebook can be ok if you’re able to finesse their algorithms and/or pay to boost your posts, though unlike any of the above it’s harder to get a reliable permalink for cross-posting. Same with Weibo, Zhihu, Pinterest, Wix, etc.
But mostly it’s a good idea to cross-post your content to multiple platforms. Create your content somewhere and paste links elsewhere so they won’t get lost. Or filtered. Or censored. Or “shadowbanned.” WordPress is quite good for all of that that but as I’ve said it doesn’t have to be the only place.
Finally, as far as affordability goes, the WordPress Hosting group on Facebook (ironic I know) is filled with discussions of people using and troubleshooting $1/month hosting in places where SiteGround or Cloudways are extravagant luxuries. So it’s not as though WordPress is completely out of reach.
I definitely get your point, but I think it’s still ok to say own your own content. Even if sometimes that only means control your own content.
We were approached to help a remote client recover their website after their in-house servers crashed. They had all the files and a recent database backup, which is great! We routinely reload websites from files and databases, so we didn’t see any problem walking the client through the steps over Zoom.
But what could have been a very quick repair turned into several hours of digging around because the database backup kept throwing errors when they tried to import it into the new MySQL server.
To be perfectly honest, the error message that showed when we tried to re-import the backup didn’t seem terribly helpful.
Syntax error near 'order, preferred, type, number, visibility) VALUES ( 1, 1, 0, 1, 'workphone', 82' at line 1Turns out a plugin vendor had chosen a perfectly sensible name, “order,” for a field that happened to also be a reserved keyword in the SQL database programming language. In day-to-day use this probably wasn’t a problem, but the standard MySQL archiving tool didn’t check while exporting the database.
The import tool, on the other hand, definitely did check. And didn’t like it!
It took quite a while to notice that the word “order” in this code snippet wasn’t being used as a reserved word but as the name of a field in a database table. It took a while because very few WordPress users know SQL. Or need to know it! One of the best things about WordPress is that it takes care of that sort of thing for you!
But as luck would have it, back before WordPress was a thing I used to have to hand-code SQL all the time. That was quite a while ago so I’ve gotten a little rusty. But after about the sixth try enough of it had come back for me to remember that the reserved word “order” needs to be enclosed in back-quotes, like this `order` if it’s going to be used as a name.
The good news is that we were able to tell the client what to do, they added the backquotes where needed, and the import ran fine. Easy peasey, right? 😂 As the old joke goes, SQL is completely intuitive once you understand it really well.
It’s not every day you run into problems like these with WordPress. In fact this is the first time I’ve seen this particular problem in years and years. But it’s good to have a deep enough background to be able to remember how it’s done… even if you hope you don’t have to do it very often.
Bottom Top line: Never, ever host a public website on your personal or business network. Pardon the mild profanity in the screenshot but this video by network engineer Serena from @serenashenetworks explains why very well.
The explanation might be a little more technical than you’re used to, but basically she’s describing the computer equivalent of someone breaking into a minor bank employee’s garage and finding the combination to the bank’s main vault. It would be a bad idea to keep such important information in an easily-accessed office, right? Turns out It’s just as bad an idea to keep important information on the same network as a public website.
(We won’t even talk about the perils of someone getting into your public website and, oh, say, infecting your entire home or corporate infrastructure with ransomware.)
LinkedIn was breached because an employee had an easily hacked website on a home computer. Similarly, the infamous “Panama Papers” scandal happened because a bank that provided secret offshore money-laundering accounts hosted its website on the same network as their internal financial documents.
Please don’t get me wrong — a well-maintained WordPress website on a credible provider’s server is going to be pretty darn secure. The problem is that do-it-yourselfers rarely take all the routine steps needed to keep their servers and websites secure, monitored, and up to date.
A public website is just that, a public website! A private network can have multiple, interlocking layers controlling who can access what and when. A website has to be visible to the world, and as a result it can be accessed continuously not only from actual people but bots, hackers, “researchers,” and other questionable actors.
Call your website the “front desk” your business. You wouldn’t keep the combination to your vault behind the front desk, and for the same reasons you shouldn’t keep your website inside your network.
If you or someone you care about is still hosting their website on a home computer or business network, have a talk with them about moving it out of their network and into a credible, off-site hosting company. There are hundreds of affordable, secure, and actively maintained companies out there — SiteGround, MDDHosting, HostWinds, Cloudways are all great, affordable offerings for smaller companies, and Pantheon, Pagely, ServeBolt, and others are awesome for large, mission-critical hosting.
But here’s the deal: even really, really bad hosting is still infinitely more secure than running your website on your personal or business networks.
Of course we’d be happy to help you chose the right hosting, help you move your site far away from of your personal or business network, and help make sure your WordPress website stays updated, backed up, and locked down tight. But there are plenty of other web professionals who can also help. It’s the right thing to do.
The short answer is “you probably should.” A number of larger industries like lumber and car-rental agencies are said to have been caught off guard by a resumption of demand as the COVID-19 pandemic is finally beginning to wind down. The problem seems to be more that they weren’t prepared than that there isn’t enough wood to turn into lumber or cars to turn into rentals. The question we should be asking ourselves is “can we learn from their mistakes.” And “how can we prepare our own businesses ready for a return to business as (more or less) normal?”
Via statistics-nerd blogger Kevin Drum, it looks like e-commerce sales are doing that “reversion to the mean” thing as things start to normalize after the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown storefronts and pretty much all non-essential shopping went online.
Drum says “This strikes me as evidence that, generally speaking, people want to get back to their old habits, rather than sticking to those learned during the pandemic.”
That sounds about right to me. As business people we all spent a lot of time in 2020 dealing… and sometimes reeling… from the consequences of the pandemic and people’s responses to it. Many people pivoted to online sales. Others started working from home. Still others started taking online orders. And almost everybody who did face-to-face business — from restaurants to hospitals to photographers to home-service and contractors — at least put a “our response to COVID-19” banner on their websites.
Looking at increasing rates of vaccinations and “openings” here in the U.S., and at decreasing rates of hospitalizations and fatalities, it’s looking extremely likely that business is going to start going back to normal.
The question is are you going to be prepared if (probably not when) it does?
Every web developer I know was absolutely swamped last year by requests to revise and sometimes rebuild website. We all worked as hard as we could to help people communicate with their customers.
As with the lumber and rental industries we may find ourselves swamped again as customers begin returning to businesses, and as businesses discover their websites are out of date yet again.
One last question to ask yourself: If my customers start coming back will my website be ready?
If you’re not sure please get back in touch with your friendly neighborhood web-support person before the rush.
