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    Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

    At Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization we know that knowledge is power. That's the reason we started this SEO blog. We know that the better informed our visitors are, the better the decisions they will make for their websites and their online businesses. We hope you enjoy your stay and find the SEO news contained within this blog useful.

    February 4, 2013

    USA Up to Bat for Copyright Alert System

    On Wednesday, the New Zealand government convicted its first offender to fall under the "Three Strikes Law." The RIANZ http://www.rianz.org.nz/rianz/rianz_homepage.asp An unnamed offender was fined a total of $616.57 for the illegally downloaded material.
    Silly judges
    The amount required to prosecute the offender totaled $250,000; which leads to the question of whether or not it is really worth the expenditure to prosecute an individual for copyright infringement?

    Similar problems were occurred in France when HADOPI, when the socialist party spent 16 million Euros for 60 agents to dispatch 1 million email notifications to copyright infringers. RIANZ is not happy with the resulting figures and feels that the infringement fees should be dropped to $2 per notice, but this was rejected by the Government. RIANZ argues that if the fees were set at $2 per violation, it would be able to process 5000 notices per month. "We believe this level of notices would have more fully realized the aim of the law."

    This will be an important consideration as the Copyright Alert System will begin processing strikes notices in the United States very soon.

    SEO news blog post by @ 11:18 am

    Categories: copyright,Internet Law
    Tags: , , , , , —

     

    January 16, 2013

    Six Strikes and Yer Out!

    Things seem to have been quiet on the copyright-infringement front for the last few months, but things are about to heat up again. After more than a year of delays, US ISP Verizon, has released a document showing how they plan on implementing their "six strikes policy" to combat copyright infringements.

    untouchables pic

    Strike 1 & 2:
    • Verizon will email you and leave a voice mail message informing you that your account in involved with copyright infringement.

    Strike 3 & 4:
    • Verizon will automatically redirect your browser to a webpage that will require you to acknowledge that you have received the alerts regarding copyright infringements.
    • You will also be required to watch a video detailing the dangers of infringement.

    Strike 5 & 6: At this point you are given three options:
    • Verizon will greatly throttle your bandwidth for several days
    • Wait two weeks, and then throttle your connection
    • Or, file an appeal with an arbitration service for $35

    IF there are more than six infringements, "nothing" will happen. Subscribers can continue to use their internet connection at regular, full speed. What is not mentioned by Verizon is that the MPAA and the RIAA have been authorized to obtain the connection details via a subpoena for repeat offenders in order to take legal action against them.

    The potential for copyright holders to use the alert system as solid evidence gathering for lawsuits remains one of the most problematic aspects of the six-strike scheme.

    On the other side of the globe, tribunals will begin next month in New Zealand for those infringers that have received three strikes under the “Three Strikes Law.” Currently, eleven individuals will have their cases heard. One of the individuals being investigated, states that her internet connection was used without her knowledge. It has also been noted that there has been a long history of controversy over this law; from the internet blackout protests of 2008, to the CableGate leak which revealed that the US financed and pushed the law through.

    SEO news blog post by @ 11:04 am

    Categories: copyright,Internet Law,Privacy
    Tags: , , , —

     

    July 25, 2012

    Skynet Police – The Infringement Wars

    While the copyright infringement debate continues heating up in Canada and the United States, the "Skynet" copyright act has been in place for two months now which was passed by Parliament in an effort to combat piracy over peer-to-peer files sharing networks. Rights-holders estimate that the act has halved the number of instances of copyright infringements within the first month.

    skynet

    Telecom has received copyright infringement notices from the Recording Industry of New Zealand asking to notices to 42 customers accused of internet piracy and are in the process if validating them. Spokesperson Gary Bowering of TelstraClear stated that:

    If they are found to meet the criteria of the new file sharing regulations then we will pass on these allegations to the relevant customers in accordance with the obligations set out in the Copyright Amendment Act."

    terminator cop

    Regardless of the relative success with its implementation, holders are still concerned that over 40% of New Zealanders are continuing to download, pirate and otherwise infringe online.
    Rights-holders are clamoring to change the infringement notice processing fee payable to ISPs to be dropped from the current $25 to just a few dollars or cents, enabling them to send out thousands of notices every month.

    The ISPs want the fee to be increased to over four times the current amount. The submissions for the review of government notice fees are withheld by the government and are not made public.
    It will be interesting to see how the online piracy debate plays out elsewhere and if other countries will adopt the New Zealand process as an example of how to implement similar measures in their own countries.

    SEO news blog post by @ 11:22 am

    Categories: copyright,Internet Law,Net Neutrality
    Tags: , , —

     

    February 7, 2011

    The Web Hath no Fury Like a Woman Scorned

    It seems that an upset ex-girlfriend spammed the memegenerator.net site using her ex-boyfriend’s full name and adding unflattering captions to the images in the process. Google has cached the images and a search for the his name produces some specific results. I first read this on Slashdot this morning (which was a repost of an article from SEO Roundtable).

    From the original post:


    "You see, she knew to have the source site remove the images but Google still has them in their index. The issue is that although the images appear to be gone, the URLs they are sourced via are actually returning a 200 status code, which to Google means they are still there. They need to return a page not found status code, and they do not."

    The site in questions is likely Memegenerator as that’s where all the current images are located. Even if the mother did contact the site, it appears that they didn’t respond or that they are unable to keep up with the number of fresh submissions as the images are clearly still there and not JUST in Google’s cache.

    In a statement from the mother:

    "My minor son’s ex-girlfriend took a copyrighted picture of him (we own copyright) and uploaded it more than 60 times to a website. On each image she wrote slanderous, defamatory and pornographic captions. The webmaster of the site states he removed the images 6 weeks ago, but Google Search still shows all the images. My son is so stressed out and embarrassed and we’ve done everything we can to get images off of Google including URL removal tool, a letter to Google Legal with all the URLs because of copyright infringement, and nothing has worked!"

    So the images are going viral despite the best efforts of the offended ex-boyfriend and his mom to clear his name and image from the web. After doing a quick image search, it seems that the images of the victimized ex-boyfriend are continuing to be uploaded and are still propagating across the net (http://i.imgur.com/WIhTx.jpg) and have given birth to a new meme.

    The fact of the matter is that anyone is pretty much powerless to stop the spread of any data or image once it’s on the net. I think the lesson here is that SEO techniques should be used for good practices and not for petty revenge.

    SEO news blog post by @ 7:21 pm

    Categories: Privacy,Uncategorized
    Tags: —

     

    November 20, 2007

    Is Duplicate Content Sp@m?

    I’ve got to go with a big “Y – E – S” on this one but apparently the engines don’t all agree. When I reported the first in the list below I expected that it might take a bit but the duplication was so obvious (and from a MUCH newer site) that they couldn’t help but take it down. As of today, none of the engines have penalized the site and I’ve received no response from the site owner (surprise surprise).

    So that got me thinking, I wonder who else I taking our content? And thus was born a short list of sites that have stolen our content (short only because I’m only counting some limited homepage content – our articles and blog posts are likely the most stolen). Note, links are to the Archives.org pages just to make sure you can see what we see. :)

    Now that’s just from some phrases on the homepage and without listing proxies. Eventually I’m going to have to just set aside a couple weeks of one of my guy’s time to ransack the net and find all the offenders. Thanks thieves, it’s only going to cost us lost productivity and a couple thousand dollars in employee time.

    SEO news blog post by @ 6:55 pm

    Categories: Uncategorized
    Tags: —

     

    August 27, 2007

    Softbean Immitation

    Reputation management is an important part of running any business and to that end I like to periodically search the web for mentions of our company, my name personally (lost in many mentions of the Kinks let me tell you) and and what we’ve been doing. In a search over the weekend for references to my speaking engagement at SES on personalization I found the site SEOBEAN (owned by SoftBean). Admittedly I can’t recall the phrase I’d used however that’s besides the point.

    I found a few similarities between our services and theirs. Let’s take a couple examples:

    From the Softbean property (SEOBEAN.com):
    “SEOBEAN Search Engine Positioning ranks your website in the top positions on the major search engines. We know that your business needs success to survive in today’s competitive economy, that’s why we offer a 100% money back guarantee on our guaranteed seo and search engine positioning services.”

    From the Beanstalk site:
    “Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning ranks your website in the top positions on the major search engines with our GUARANTEED SEO services. We know that your business or firm needs success to survive in today’s competitive economy, that’s why we offer a 100% money back guarantee on our guaranteed seo and search engine optimization services.”

    Hmmmmmmmmm.

    And there’s more

    From the Softbean property (SEOBEAN.com):
    • You will attain a minimum of 5 top 20 rankings on the major search engines across all of your targeted keyword phrases.

    • Your primary targeted phrase will appear on the first page of one or more of the major search engines.

    • You will attain a minimum of 3 top 10 rankings on the major search engines across all of your selected keyword phrases.

    From The Beanstalk site:

    • Your primary targeted phrase will appear on the first page of one or more of the major search engines.
    • You will attain a minimum of 3 top 10 rankings on the major search engines across all of your selected keyword phrases.
    • You will attain a minimum of 5 top 20 rankings on the major search engines across all of your targeted keyword phrases.

    And just a pet-peeve, the claim to be “Keeping Promises Since 4 Years” and yet a simple whois shows that neither SEOBEAN nor SOFTBEAN have been around that long (both registered last year).

    So a warning to SOFTBEAN, you’ve been reported to all the major search engines, we’ve contacted the directories you’re listed in, and we’ll be contacting the article directories you’ve submitted bastardized versions of our articles to. Oh, and this blog post will likely rank #1 or #2 for your name.

    As a note, we are not malicious people. We just put in a LOT of hard work writing quality and educational content (we hope you agree). Copyright is a big issue for us and I certainly don’t want the likes of SEOBEAN or SOFTBEAN (or whatever other properties they might own) benefiting from that.

    SEO news blog post by @ 4:47 pm

    Categories: Uncategorized
    Tags: , , —

     

    March 13, 2007

    Matthew Rankin: Yer Tickin’ Me Off

    It’s not too often I use our blog as a public whipping post but today is such a day. And today’s target, Webmaster and owner of PPC engine SearchPronto.com (URL purposly not hyperlinked for obvious reasons) Matthew Rankin.

    Now, why would I come out and name a person and a site that are ticking me off? Because he’s stealing from us, that’s why. Basically since the time we first started publishing articles and I’ve been tracking where they’re being picked up I’ve seen the name Matthew Rankin noted as the writer of our works. Today I again came across an article titled, “Choosing Effective Keywords” and when I visited it I found that it was exactly the same as the first of our 10-part SEO series “Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website: Step One – Choosing The Right Keywords“.

    I’ve emailed the publishers in the past and many have changed the reference or removed the article(s) however it’s just become too big a job to keep up with. I’m sure he’s stolen from others too. I can’t be that special. ;)

    So Matthew Rankin: you’ve managed to tick me off and get yourself a special, personal mention in our blog. Unfortunately it’s more in line with Steve Wilson than Jim Hedger.

    SEO news blog post by @ 1:16 pm

    Categories: Uncategorized
    Tags: , , —

     

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