Yelp is an influential site but also tends to continually stir up controversy and disillusionment among business owners.

Love it or hate it - Yelp has the potential to be a force for good but sometimes ends up being one of the worst things that has happened to small business in the last few years. Both reviewers and businesses complain about the filtering algorithm which often hides good reviews while showing every bad one. There have been to accusations of extortion by Yelp, if you pay they claim they will remove competitor’s listings that normally appear alongside your business.

According to Yelp:

“Every Yelp review is automatically evaluated by Yelp’s recommendation software based on quality, reliability, and user activity on Yelp. More often than not, those useful reviews come from active members of the Yelp community.”

Yelp usually puts more weight on reviews left by people who have a lot of friends, and who have left many reviews for businesses. Could it be possible that some customers find if they want to promote businesses they like, they must leave bad reviews for other businesses to make their good reviews look legit. Is it possible that these people will leave much harsher reviews than they normally would, or even leave unnecessarily bad reviews for businesses they have never patronized?

Anyone you will ever talk to at Yelp has no real clue what is going on in their own company, is never of any help if you have a questions and cannot explain how their filtering algorithm works.

 Yelp can be bad for restaurants – especially smaller mom and pop establishments who are trying to keep their doors open. A bad review could potentially cost a small business thousands of dollars. And now that everyone thinks they are a food critic, even the best restaurants are victims to sadly pathetic whiny people who don’t feel their waitress was pleasant enough, or don’t think their truffle fries were cooked perfectly the way it’s done on Food Network.

A couple years ago someone left a bad review for one of our restaurant clients saying the Creme Brulee came out and had “dirt” on the top. Well if a delicious crackly sugar top is considered dirt – then I must love dirt.
If everyone was made to work in the restaurant industry at some point in their lives – even for just a year, then these so called foodies would be a lot more forgiving and understand how much work goes into operating a restaurant.

Recently it seems Yelp is running into problems of its own when they cratered as much as 32% as advertisers continue to abandon the site.

Yelp is clearly ramping up their sales teams as a lot of our clients have been getting calls from sales reps. Business owners are getting bombarded with calls because they didn’t meet their sales estimates last year. I had one client who claimed a Yelp salesperson tried to sell them PPC and claimed it would only cost $1.00 per click when their actual website says otherwise. According to the Yelp website “The price you pay per click is based on competition and relevance”. Are Yelp Salespeople just saying anything to sign someone up and get a commission?

They offer different PPC packages and each of the packages has a click budget per month ( if you read the fine print you find that the first $100 every month goes to Administrative costs). They want you to sign a contract for at least 6 months.

If you advertise with Yelp, they want to drive people to your Yelp listing. If you advertise using Google Adwords people are directly visiting your site. So if you are going to spend money on PPC, Google is the better choice. A quick search on Google will show many articles explaining Yelp Advertising and why it’s a bad idea so I won’t go into more details here.

You Don’t Need to Pay for Yelp, and nobody in their right mind would want to.

Business owners can get free Yelp review pages and those rank (from a search engine optimization perspective) just as well as the paid for pages.

"You may not know me and you are probably wondering why you are getting this e mail, right?  I’m a hacker who cracked your email and devices a few months ago."

If you have received this email, chances are there is no reason to worry. This is just another scam used to trick people into paying a Cyber criminal.

Think of these emails like the daily horoscope. Thousands of people can read the same horoscope and think it applies to them directly. This is because horoscopes are so vague and general enough to be somewhat meaningful to a good percentage of people who believe in that kind of stuff.

So the Cyber criminal knows that a certain percentage of computer users aren’t all that savvy, may not be all that up to date on technology, maybe don’t have anti-virus installed, and are very likely doing something on their computer that could be embarrassing if someone else found out.

Like so many other spam email campaigns, "Hacker who cracked your email and device Email Scam" is designed to blackmail people. Cyber criminals send emails stating that your computer has been infected or hacked. Maybe they claim to have installed a remote access tool and taken a humiliating photo of you, or video of you watching porn, etc. . If they are not paid, they threaten to distribute this photo by sending it to all of your contacts.

The Cyber criminals send these emails out to thousands or even tens of thousands of people in the hopes that just one or two people fall for the scam. These criminals have nothing better to do, so they just keep coming up with one new scam after another.

The following is an example of what one of these emails will look like (including bad grammar and spelling errors)

You may not know me and you are probably wondering why you are getting this e mail, right?
I’m a hacker who cracked your email and devices a few months ago.

Do not try to contact me or find me, it is impossible, since I sent you an email from YOUR hacked account.
I setup a malware on the adult vids (porno) web-site and guess what, you visited this site to have fun (you know what I mean).
While you were watching videos, your internet browser started out functioning as a RDP (Remote Control) having a keylogger which gave me accessibility to your screen and web cam.
After that, my software program obtained all information.

You entered a passwords on the websites you visited, and I intercepted it.
Of course you can will change it, or already changed it.
But it doesn’t matter, my malware updated it every time.
What did I do?

I backuped device. All files and contacts.
I created a double-screen video. 1st part shows the video you were watching (you’ve got a good taste haha . . .), and 2nd part shows the recording of your web cam.
exactly what should you do?
Well, in my opinion, $1000 (USD) is a fair price for our little secret. You’ll make the payment by Bitcoin (if you do not know this, search “how to buy bitcoin” in Google).
My Bitcoin wallet Address:
1EVTsy4QxFBRnkzdn9xHkCJkamUW8Nd5sz
(It is cAsE sensitive, so copy and paste it)

Important:
You have 48 hour in order to make the payment. (I’ve a unique pixel in this e mail, and at this moment I know that you have read through this email message).
To track the reading of a message and the actions in it, I use the facebook pixel.
Thanks to them. (Everything that is used for the authorities can help us.) If I do not get the BitCoins, I will certainly send out your video recording to all of your contacts including relatives, coworkers, and so on.

This particular email appeared to come from the recipients email address – but upon viewing the email header we see that the sending address was actually This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. – a Russian address.

So how did the hacker get your name and email address in the first place?

Your email, name, and password was very likely stolen from a compromised website such as Yahoo. If you are concerned, you can check if your accounts have been compromised by visiting https://haveibeenpwned.com.

Proud to be a sposor of the 50th Annual Devereaux - Kaiser Car Meet.

We also designed the flyer, T-Shirts, and Dash Plaques.  Hope to see you there!

I am often asked why I specialize in building Joomla websites when many other web designers seem to use WordPress.

The short answer is that from personal experience I prefer Joomla, I think it is more secure and has more functionality than WordPress.

Back in 2007 when I started switching from static html sites to content management systems I experimented with Drupal, Joomla and WordPress to see which one worked best for me. Being a graphic artist first and a web designer second, I found that Joomla had more flexibility and was much more robust than WordPress.

The basic difference between WordPress and Joomla is that Joomla started out as a CMS meant to serve larger portal-like websites and WordPress is often associated with simple blogs, but it can also be a great solution for landing pages and basic sites.

Joomla is more geared towards developers who want to have creative control and are not afraid to “get their hands dirty” working with servers. WordPress, on the other hand, is more beginner friendly and very-easy to get started with. Many cheap web hosting companies offer one click WordPress installs for those who want to set up a simple site or blog. Joomla is more complicated.

Joomla is known for its complexity and a site built with Joomla can have endless possibilities, but the learning curve is very steep for those with little experience in web development.

Currently over 2 million sites are built using Joomla including The Guggenheim, Holiday Inn Express, U.K National Crime Agency, OpenVPN, United Nations, Linux, Harvard,University, Ikea, Lipton, and the Hill to name a few.

Security

Security is always a big concern and WordPress accounts for 74% of all hacked websites. However – it’s also more likely that amateurs will use WordPress, and those people may not always want to spend the extra money to buy commercial security extensions, keep the site up to date or use premium web hosting.

Due to its popularity, WordPress has a giant target on its back when it comes to security vulnerabilities. There are thousands of plugins available to customize WP, but this also makes each installation a nightmare from a security standpoint because it’s impossible to make sure that every plugin remains compatible with newer versions of the platform.

Moreover, WordPress doesn’t ship with basic features such as forcing a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). In fact, most of its advanced security features rely entirely on plugins.

SSL and 2FA is native to Joomla, it offers its own set of security extensions, and its developers maintain a list of those extensions with known vulnerabilities.

In the very early days when I started out building sites, I used shared hosting or built sites on the clients hosting account. As my client base grew, I was able to upgrade and migrate to my own dedicated managed servers. I have built and manage every site on my server. If you don’t have your own server you are sharing space with a lot of different sites that are most likely not updated or secure, and could be easy targets for hackers.

Search engine optimization

If we compare the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) capabilities of both platforms out of the box, Joomla takes a slight edge due enabling its users to set meta descriptions and keywords for new articles. There are those who claim WordPress may be a little more SEO-friendly, but I doubt few serious web designers who would depend on the basic out of the box installation for SEO best results. Joomla can be made even more powerful by purchasing a few addons. I use several commercial SEO extensions that greatly increase Jooma’s functionality.

Performance is one of the weak spots of WordPress. But then again, if you buy a Prius you wouldn’t expect it to handle like a Porsche. Joomla has a good reputation concerning performance. Part of the reason is that it has performance-boosting functionality built in, and it also comes with plugins to make it even faster. Joomla also excels in the area of e-commerce with many extensions and templates for the purpose.

More Joomla Advantages

More advanced user management – Joomla offers a more advanced system for user access controls and user management out of the box.

Flexible for different content types – Joomla’s components and modules give you a bit more flexibility for displaying non-standard content types.

Multilingual support – Joomla has multilingual support built-in to the core, while WordPress requires you to use a third-party plugin.

Multiple templates – Joomla lets you use different templates for different pieces of content, or different parts of the site whereas you can only use one WordPress theme.

Working with Joomla since 2007 now I know it like the back of my hand. Over the years I have found the best extensions to expand Joomla’s functionality as well as speed and security.

I tell potential clients they wouldn’t go to a high-end Steakhouse and expect to get Taco Bell – so even though I could build sites using WordPress I will always recommend Joomla because the client will get a better, faster, stronger site - and the most bang for their buck.

It doesn’t matter if you are a large corporation or a grandmother with a computer full of family photos – we all need to have good backups.

I’ve had people contact me regarding photos of their wedding I took 8 years ago that they lost when a computer crashed. I’ve had clients crash accidentally delete important files, format hard drives, and lose laptops – all without a good backup of their data.

Having your computer backed up is simple and inexpensive, especially when you consider what your data is worth and how hard it would be to replace.

A lot of people use Carbonite because it’s a well-known backup service with a generally good track record, but recently when I had trouble retrieving files from Carbonite I started looking into alternatives.

The problem with Carbonite happened while I was out of town and had to retrieve some older files for a client. To this day Carbonite can’t explain what happened – but basically, I was able to log into my account but unable to see or download files. Matters were made worse when a technician at Carbonite tried to help and accidentally deleted all of my backed-up files. They claim they were able to recover the files after 48 hrs but I was never able to download the ones I needed. This defeats one of the main reasons to have a backup service in the first place.

At the time I had 2 different plans with Carbonite, a Safe Prime plan at $149.99 per year and a safe basic plan that was $71.99, so I was spending $220 a year for something I could not use. And of course, when I tried to cancel my account after 6 months they would offer no refund.

With Carbonite I had always noticed the interface was horribly slow, and it was just a real pain to view backed up files. When I first installed Carbonite it took almost a month for my first backup to finish. I also believe Carbonite did slow down the computer a bit while backing up even though they claim they don’t. Carbonite does not back up external drives, and you need to manually back up any videos.

Unfortunately, I also found out the hard way Carbonite not only has horrible customer service, but their people really don’t seem to know what they are doing – at least the 5 people I talked to over a period of 3 days.

So after some research, reading reviews, and asking around I settled on a new online backup company called Backblaze. The immediate bonus was that backblaze is only $50 per year per computer – and that’s even for business use. It took less than half of the time to back up my whole computer that Carbonite took – and did not slow the computer down at all while backing up.

Several times now I have retrieved files while traveling and it is easy and quick. You choose the files you need and you get an email when they are ready to download. This usually happens within just a few minutes even for large files.

With Backblaze you can download a free restore of as many files as you need anywhere in the world. There is also an option to have a 128 GB flash drive ($99) FedExed to you, or an external drive up to 4 TB ($189). You can return the storage media and get your money back if you don't want to keep it as an archive.

Historically speaking, the easier backup is, the better chance it'll get done, and I can’t think of anything simpler than Backblaze. I highly recommend it and only wish I had discovered it sooner.

Backblaze will automatically back up all external drives – all of your files including documents, photos, music and movies. Unlimited files. Unlimited file size. Unlimited speed. You can Restore multiple versions up to 30 days and set Automatic or scheduled backups.

Using Backblaze you can also locate a missing or stolen computer!

I currently have 2,567,992 files backed up – and this obviously crippled Carbonite! But using Backblaze I am quickly and easily able to select the files I need and within minutes they are processed and placed in a zip file. I get an email when they are ready (and the zip file is kept for 7 days just in case).

Business owners get overwhelmed with emails daily. Clients, potential customers, and way too much spam.

For someone trying to grow their business an email claiming to get them maximum traffic can sound tempting, and occasionally, an email will come through that says, “SEO Proposal” from a person who is an “Expert Online Strategist” who has reviewed your website and “only wants to help”.

It’s nice to imagine a perfect world where complete strangers would go out of their way to help your business do better.

These mysterious people claim they can magically unlock the secrets to Search Engine Optimization, grow your company’s online presence and make your website the most beautiful powerful website on the internet while sending you so many new customers you won’t know what to do with them all. How can this all not sound amazing? Unfortunately, when you dig a little deeper you find this is nothing but a total scam and these criminals are only out to get as much money as they can from you.

You may think the email is real and that their intentions are pure but if you look closely you will notice that the body of the email is quite generic. It’s common for business owners to be told that their site is failing to rank for important keywords, they won’t identify or specify the ill ranking keywords to you.

It may seem like the email has been directed at you or your company. These scams work in much the same way that horoscopes are written to be generic so hundreds of thousands of people will all read the same horoscope and believe it was for them.

If you’ve received one (or 20) of these emails recently, it was not a personal note to you but very likely a piece of spam generated in bulk by a software program. Often, the sender is an SEO lead generation company whose function is to collect contact information from unsuspecting leads (like you). You can be certain that no human being has spent a single second analyzing your website.

If you contact the sender to discuss web services or search engine optimization, you will be sold to some other unidentified SEO company that will run a quick “analysis” of your site and then try to sell you on a contract for their SEO services that will be a total rip-off.

Worst yet - these companies are usually out for something much more malicious than just your business. They may send specific spam emails that contain viruses, phishing attempts or malware to obtain your personal or financial information. If you actually hire one of these “SEO experts” and give them access to your site you may even find that they are using your site to commit cyber fraud.

So how do you know when you are dealing with a malicious imposter?

There are a few key factors to look out for when spotting an SEO scam email:

• Like spam phone calls, these SEO spam emails will come unsolicited and from an unrecognizable email that can’t be traced back to website.
• The email is either not personalized or is personalized–but is either impersonal or wrong.
• They use terrible subject lines.
• The “SEO Expert” has an unprofessional email/email service. I.e. the email is a Gmail address – because they are free and the scammer can create new ones easily.
• Typos…and lots of them, bad English and poor sentence structure.
• You receive an identical pitch from multiple senders.
• There is no company listed and no real phone number, website, or physical address.

The email will usually start with something like:

• Hello, I just visited your website and thought you might be interested in learning about the new #1 method for attracting customers online.
• I was surfing through your website and realized that despite having a great design; it was not ranking on any of the search engines (Google Yahoo and Bing) for most of the keywords relating to your business.
• Would you like your company to be listed at the top of Google for multiple search phrases (keywords) relevant to your products / services? We can get your website on page one of Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

An “SEO expert” or “online strategist” emails you with news that he or she has analyzed your website and noticed that it is underperforming. The “SEO Expert” will claim they have been checking your website quite often and they have “analyzed” your website, They will point out many unspecified errors and offer vague solutions that they claim will get your website to rank higher. They claim they can get you to the top of Google search results They assure you that you’ll get more traffic, more customers and ultimately more business if you hire them.

These scams are so popular because real SEO strategy is complex and, when done right, quite time-consuming. There is no magical way to land on the top of page one overnight.

Does it make sense that if you hire someone you don’t know, who reached you through an unsolicited spam email, is a wise investment in SEO strategy or your company?

Real SEO is equal parts art and science. It is a painstaking ongoing ever evolving process that takes time and cannot be mechanized. There just aren’t easy shortcuts or tricks.