[svlug] Domain solicitations (warning to domain owners)

[Don Marti]

begin Rick Moen quotation of Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 09:43:18PM -0800:

> $75/year for the usual worthless link-farming rubbish.  But I still say it
> seems to be designed to panic inattentive domain owners into paying under
> the mistaken impression that their domains are about to expire.

I got it too.  Totally unnecessary.  To make sure
your site is showing up correctly in search engines,
webmasters can use their tools directly, free of
charge:

  Google Webmaster Tools
  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

  Bing Webmaster Tools
  http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

It's useful to sign up -- at least the Google one
will give you notifications if they find something
seriously wrong.  And the Bing one is giving a $100
credit for their ad network.

More from the "online marketing is a racket"
department:

  http://www.adexchanger.com/the-sell-sider/the-publishers-guide-to-domain-spoofing/

   "When you’re a publisher working with an
   exchange, the exchange gives you an ad tag that
   contains code to identify the domain the user is
   on. Exchanges trust that their markup is accurate
   but the code can be deleted and replaced with a
   static domain identifier, enabling bad actors to
   impersonate anyone. All they need to do is alter
   a bit of code and start trading."

No wonder I'm getting so much less email spam these
days.  Everyone who's any good at it has switched over
to ad fraud.  The big ad networks probably have the
web skills to catch this kind of thing, but the game is
based on whether the smartest fraud site can beat the
dumbest ad network.

(The good news is that (1) Marketing fashion is being
drawn away from web and toward mobile ads, and (2)
good tracking protection, now available for all the
common browsers, can make web ads work more like
magazine ads.  More: http://ad.aloodo.com/ )

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org