Last week I got in my PO Box an envelope addressed with my name (spelled correctly) and with my correct and complete postal address. Obviously, someone out there sold my personal info with my address: it must be a service provider, which is supposed to send me bills, invoices and other paper documents… because the address included my mailbox number, too. FYI: there is no mailman in this village, so banks, domain registrars, hosts and whoever else needs to send me mail, must have my mailbox number, too. OK, it was sold and Anthony Morrison – or his outsourced marketing people – bought it.

So, I am getting this beautifully printed, colorful 2 sheets, 4 pages letter inviting me for a free lunch or dinner, where in just 90 minutes he – Anthony Morrison can teach me how people are making money on the internet** (the asterisk means read the f***ing small print!) OK, he can… not that he would!

Free lunch (or dinner), free tablet computer (*small print: minimum of one tablet will be given away – I guess they meant maximum) and a free guide to the “Secret 16″ companies he’s using in his affiliate business.
Call this 800 number to register…

Being curious how they do it offline, I called and registered for the lunch. They asked for my phone number, too, in case they need to urgently contact me. Yeah, I know the trick but I gave them my cell. Two days before the event I just got an automated, registered-text call from a person claiming he was Anthony Morrison (I guess it was his voice) reminding me of the upcoming “meeting” and sharing his excitement about my registering. To be fair: at the end it had the ‘press 9 if you want to get off this call list’ option. But I waited until the next call (a day before the event) with that: I wanted to see how do they do it.

When I showed up at the hotel (Crowne Plaza Hamilton) on the hallway leading to the conference room a gentleman was giving out a 1/4 letter size paper form to everybody, saying: this is your ‘ticket’ at the entrance door. It was the usual
name
address
home phone
business phone
cell phone
occupation…
with the small print at the bottom – By completing this form you agree to be put on the contact list of the company.

Now, as you could already figure out, I am a maniac when it comes about reading the fine print. So, after reading it, I decided I didn’t really want to be on their contact list. Besides, they already have my postal address; they had for a few days even my cell phone#. And I don’t want to give them any more info.

Entering the door there stands a bouncer-looking heavy guy with the name tag Daryl.

Daryl: “Sir, you have to fill out the form.”
Me: “But it says I’d agree to be on your contact list and I don’t want to.”
Daryl: “Well, sir, you have to…”
Me: “Why?”
Daryl: “Otherwise you cannot be here. I cannot let you in…”
Me: “But you already have all my info: I got this letter addressed with my name and my address! Why do you need it once again?”
Daryl: “Sir, I am just doing my job. That’s what my boss told me to do: to ask everybody to fill out the form.”
Me: “Fuck your boss!” (No, I didn’t say that aloud; it was an internal monologue)
Me: “If I have to do it, then I will blog about this and I have a pretty popular blog.”
Daryl: “Sir, if you are so negative about this, you shouldn’t even be here.”
Me: “I am very positively looking forward to see what you guys have to offer. I just happen to not agree with your unethical methods of collecting personal info.”
Daryl: “Sir, I cannot make exceptions. You have to fill out the form if you want to enter…”
Me: [looking around desperately, maybe others would agree with me but all the guests pretend they don't see, don't hear anything]
Other bouncer-type staff members: [slowly and quietly sorrounding us and waiting...]
Daryl: “Sir…?”
Me: “OK, here is my name [writing] and my cell…”
Daryl: “That’s enough, thank you sir. Please understand I am just doing my job: I have a family that I have to support.”

I believed everything, except the ‘family thingy’ – he didn’t look as a family guy…

Then the show began. A gentleman by the name Mark Stone made a presentation (little bit longer than 90 minutes) with the sole purpose to sell us a
“3 Days Affiliate Marketing Training Course”
in the upcoming weeks at Burlington, ON. (Reminder: I live right between Hamilton and Burlington.)

The investment for the training, as an “anytime offer” – $5,995.
People, when do you want to start making money on the internet?
People: NOW!
OK, then now it will be only $2,990!

Nice touch: they didn’t wait till the last moment to tell you the price.

The rest was sales pitch and giving out small bits of info about what would they teach you at the 3 days seminar/course about affiliate marketing. The slides were showing Clickbank screenshots (!), informing about big companies like BestBuy, Wal-Mart and Amazon that rely on affiliates to bring it traffic.
It was like the proverbial intro part of a speech: tell them what are you going to tell them.

In case you missed, this is what happened:
A presenter with a projected PowerPoint slideshow was selling the idea of online internet marketing to a bunch of people in a hotel conference room. Judging by the reactions and answers of the crowd, the majority was absolutely clueless about internet basics; a few were using the internet for googling, emailing, facebooking… and even fewer had, eventually, a website.

Oh, and Anthony has never been there. We saw him only in a 2-minutes video, urging us to enroll in this fantastic opportunity! I wonder, if he would be there during the 3 days course… or the whole thing is “outsourced” to some kind of marketing/seminar company.

P.S. We got the free lunch at the end.
P.P.S. It was during eating the lunch the bouncers/salesmen approched each table “to answer our questions” and pushing the sale, which I declined.

I know, I know: I shouldn’t call them internet marketers, since I know quite a number of very honest business people who do business on the internet and they do NOT use cheesy tactics. It’s a shame they are called the same name as those crooks that give the bad name to a whole industry.

Internet Marketers(?) messing with the headings…

Anyway, here is how the unscrupulous marketers work:

– make a thin, no-content site
– stuff it with keywords
– get thousands of fake backlinks to it
– create even thinner “web 2.0″ properties pointing to the shitty site

The last 2 steps are done in order to make the search engines to believe the initial site is important: pretending it bears some kind of importance, since so many websites link back to it, refer to it… It is an accepted belief that search engines will rank a site higher if many other sites from the same niche market link to it as being the ‘authority’ resource.

In the “keyword-stuffing” phase the smartass marketers began to use heading tags (h1, h2, h3) tags inside the text, in the content, in the middle of sentences! The clever ones manipulated the stylesheet (CSS) to make these text portions to look the same as the rest of the text, knowing well the Search Engines bots will “see” the H1 tags around the keywords and will regard them as important. (The less clever ones believed the size of the fonts bears importance for search engines… but those guys are helpless.)

That’s how the whole SEO-guru industry was born: offering services to either alter the natural structure of web pages or to give questionable backlinks from shady sites to similarly useless sites.

Don’t forget: this was still during the time of HTML4 – which means one web page was supposed to have only ONE H1 tag (the most important thing like title) and several lesser H tags: H2 and H3 etc.

Code Poetry vs. Marketing Hyenas in the Headings War

Developers were still insisting on building properly structured web sites, while so-called internet marketers were pushing the limits using recklessly the H tags to get traffic and quick ranking, regardless of long-term considerations. In the area of e-commerce, internet sales, online sales… the marketers won.

Then the king of all search engines came and gave a big middle finger to such SEO “techniques” and deindexed a lot of sites. It was a good move, no matter what the owners of those sites say: you as a user of the search engine(s), the surfer on the net, when looking for information will not be directed to thin, useless site trying to sell you something. Instead the results listed in high positions will have relevant and important information. At least that’s the theory…

HTML5

For our topic HTML5 (the latest incarnation of the web syntax rules) brought one essential change: introducing sections it makes possible to use multiple h1 tags in a web document.

So, if we take another look at a single post page, let’s remember how it was in TwentyTen:
- span blog title /span
- h1 Post title /h1
- content (with optional and manually placed h2, h3, h4 tags)

TwentyEleven is using the HTML5 and the new “sections” (see the red code on the images below):

HTML5 code in TwentyEleven

Why is this great?
Now you can use h2, h3, h4 tags in your posts (or Pages) without breaking the rules of a well-structured webpage. Remember, the rules still exist, even if you disregard them
And if you wonder why the two H1 tags look differently on the frontend – the answer is in the CSS file (the stylesheet): the style declaration associated with the specific class of the H1 tag will determine the final look in the display.

In case you wonder about the theme used on this blog… Unfortunately, this theme was coded a while ago so it is not prepared for HTML5 or the latest WordPress… but watch this place when we switch to another theme soon!

Until then, if you want to play with the various HTML tags and their styling – download this .zip file which contains 2 html files: one that will display the H tags with your browser’s default settings, and another one in which the H tags were styled with CSS.
html-headings

After download, share your thoughts!

Even before the new WordPress version and the new default theme — TwentyTen — has been introduced, there were theme developers and bright coders suggesting to break the pattern used in the default WordPress theme when it comes to the usage of H tags.

For the main index or other multipost views (archives, search result etc.) the placement of the H tags was excellent: on the top the site/blog title in between h1 tags… below the list of posts with their own titles, all in between h2 tags – this gives a very logical structure for those pages. See the snapshot!

Traditional usage of Heading tags on a Main index

Actually, those were very valid questions.

Headings in TwentyTen theme

It was a huge milestone for heading tags, too! Without mentioning a lot of other goodies the developers provided, let’s focus on how they changed the usage of the H tags.

The main index, since it was OK even before, remained as it was.

The real breakthrough came on the single posts and Pages: in those instances the blog/site title lost its h1 tags and was wrapped in a span tag, while the entries (posts and Pages) got the h1 for their unique titles! The trick was to style the span class to look exactly as the h1 tag for the blog title: check lines #60-65 in the header.php and the related sections of the style.css. Here is a “visual aid” to understand what happened:

This brought a very welcomed change into the on-page SEO (optimization for search engines done of the web page itself) scene. Instead of plugins and various manual tweaking of the code – we got a perfect placement and usage of the Hn tags.

And we all could have lived happily ever after with it — if it wasn’t for HTML5 and Internet Marketers (IM).

Most people don’t understand the significance of the heading tags in HTML, so no wonder, historically, the WordPress developers performance in that regard was also less than stellar. So, what are the HTML heading tags, anyway?

For a quick explanation we may need to go back in time to the pre-web era and take a look at the printing traditions: even if many are not aware of it, during the development of the web page technologies we “borrowed” a lot from the traditional print media (books, newspapers, scientific papers etc.)

All of the above examples, but especially the most organized type of them, namely the scientific papers, always used to have a very well-structured tree-like outline.

Headings and subtitles in scientific papers

Different headings for subtitles...

Headings in word processors

The first word processors and even their latest versions, actually, applied that kind of document structure into their tools and here we have the different “headings” as style options: heading1; heading2; heading3 and so on.

The outline view of a Word document

Headings in HTML

A fact that often gets forgotten: the world wide web has been invented by scientists and for them the most familiar outline of a structured document was using different headings; i.e.

Main Title = Heading1

Subtitle = Heading2

sub-Subtitle = Heading3

and those concepts were converted, logically, into h1, h2, h3, h4 tags in HTML, the “markup” language of the web:

H tags in a HTML file; notice the resemblance to the document outline

By the intentions of the early web (html) developers we should follow these rules for headings:
- h1 – only 1/page
- h2, h3, h4, h5 – more/page

The rules is quite obvious and doesn’t need much explanation.

Heading and browsers

HTML headings - no style

On a traditional web page this is what happens, more or less (unless the web page creator is a complete moron); and even more: browsers natively recognize these Hn tags and display them in a way to visually suggest their hierarchy. In plain English: H1 tags will be shown with bigger font size than h2; h2 will be bigger than h3 – you got the idea…

Furthermore, the search engine algorithms were also built with taking into account the hierarchical importance and relevance given to h1, h2, h3, h4 tags!
(this is the thing that will cause later a lot of BS on the internet)

CSS-styled heading tags

Headings in old WordPress themes

A quick return to our promised WordPress analysis: the default themes sucked for years… if we look at them from the viewpoint of optimization for search engines (SEO).

The blog title was h1 on every page, everywhere, no matter whether the visitor was on a multipost page or on a single page. Next, the post/Page title was always h2 – even on a single post view, where the most important thing is (and should be) its title, not the site title! Additionally, there were other unwanted h2 tags used: in the sidebar for different sections, for the comments title for example.

That is until the appearence of TwentyTen with the version 3.0 of WordPress.

The story:

1. Last night I got a Google alert for “wordpress mistakes“. (Yes, I set up such alerts to track where my products are mentioned.) The alert said this site

http://www.libanonchat.org/socialnetwork/view/post:1576

is mentioning “wordpress mistakes”… And it does, indeed.

2. By a closer look it was clear the site is just subscribing to the RSS feed of another site where the real mentioning of my work happened:

http://www.sub-url.eu/?p=1351

It is a blog providing hundreds of links to stolen, copyrighted works. Many of them solod at tyhe same place, in the Warrior Forum WSO section where my work is also available for a discounted price for fellow forum members.
The domain was registered on August 8, 2009 in Germany by an individual having the email address: ali.fawaz@gmx.de at Cronon AG (cronon.net)
The domain is hosted by STRATO Berlin at the IP address: 85.214.24.127

Just with a few quick search queries you can learn all the above data about domains and their owners: use whois databases; whois hosting type searches etc.

2a. Strato has their own terms and conditions for host clients here:

http://www.strato.de/agb/

Thanks to my German-speaking friend I now know that section 2.2 deals with copyright infringement:

2.2 Der Kunde ist dafür verantwortlich, dass seine Domain(s) und seine Inhalte weder gesetzliche Vorschriften noch Rechte Dritter verletzen. STRATO weist darauf hin, dass gegebenenfalls – insbesondere bei internationalen Domains – andere nationale Rechtsordnungen zu beachten sind.

DMCA type notice sent to STRATO.

Here comes the twist: that “clever” domain owner at sub-url.eu (Ali?) is providing a link to both the sales pages and to direct downloads. However, both links are “shortened” by a short URL service offered by

http://finanz-partnerweb.de/shorturl/

The way it works: clicking on the link you see the finanz-partnerweb.de website for 16 seconds and then you are redirected to a shabby business domain: uploading.com

At this moment I am not sure the URL shortener’s owner and the sub-url.eu owner are the same… However, they use the same WordPress theme on their sites and they are both hosted at the same host under the same IP address: STRATO Berlin at 85.214.24.127 — Coincidence?

After further digging: the shortener guy is located in Hammeln, Germany:

Name: Carsten Ulrichs
Organisation: Internet Service e.K.
Address: Linkworth 5
PostalCode: 31789
City: Hameln
CountryCode: DE
Phone: +495159810310
Fax: +495159810319
Email: cu@ulrichs.de

On the stolen-material-promoter sub-url.eu site there is a Facebook link to its FB page under “Find Us on Facebook” title… Pretty lame, if you want to remain anonymous!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Business-Tips/218228814912274

Location info from that FB page:

Basberg Str, 31785 Hameln, Germany
About: Web Sevice info busines & tips Seo Marketing Make Mones Online
Description seo marketing free web service submit url business & tips free download programe softwear make money online
Email: ali.fawaz@gmx.de
Phone: 05151-500500
Website: http://www.sub-url.eu

Ali lives very close to Carsten and they seem to work together!

3. Believe it or not, these German guys could all claim they are innocent, they just discovered a “great resource” website and pointed to it. (In a SOPA world just because they link to a site that is distributing illegally copyrighted material, i.e. my ebook, they could be shut down, too, together with the real criminal.)

The real criminal in this case is the domain uploading.com – they permit to upload stolen material to their server! Although they have an abuse report page:

http://uploading.com/contactus/abuse/

… no matter what you do, the form will never be submitted, just goes into a perpetual “loading, loading, loading…”

Of course, they have a section in their Terms of Use referring to copyright:

“8.5 Proprietary rights and trademark legislation

Uploading.com Service can be used with lawful purposes only. Transfer, distribution or storage of any materials breaking laws or lawful acts, including laws on export regulation, are forbidden. This includes materials protected by patents, laws on copyright, trademarks, service marks, trade secrets and other intellectual property rights. The client is obliged to receive the preliminary consent of the author in cases when such materials are to be used. By using the Service, you declare and guarantee that you are the author and owner of copyright and/or the owner of due licenses for the represented information. You also declare and guarantee that your information does not break trademark laws and other rights of the third parties. Uploading.com reserves the right to suspend or terminate the transaction that breaks or is thought to be breaking the Agreement or any of the laws described above.”

As it seems nobody is really eager to enforce it because the site is full of stolen copyrighted material!

This domain is registered with namecheap.com and is using their famous privacy protection option: you need to be some kind of law enforcement agent to make them to reveal the real identity of the site/domain owner.

However, based on their IP address, they are hosted by LinkShop and I am sure they are hiding behind the following info (the abuse report address for their domain/IP)

person: LinkShop Abuse Team
address: Room 606, Fook Cheong Bldg, 63 Hoi Yuen Rd
address: Kwun Tong, Hong Kong
phone: +852 8170 1439

Today I was sending take down notices to everybody: registrars, hosts for ALL the websites and domains mentioned in this post. Including Google – because the sites are using G. ads.

Yes, it is annoying to deal with imbecile thieves and jerks. But this site would not be the first that went down because I went after them. In all my correspondence with the registrars and host services I made them aware: their answers would be made public in this blog.

Now I am just waiting… If you have similar stories, please share them in your comments!

Despite all this – I am still against SOPA!

UPDATE (one day later)
The illegal copy of my ebook has been removed from uploading.com. However, if you have a good product, chances are it has been uploaded to that thief site – so check it out!

Since I wasn’t around in November when my birthday was, I decided to have a huge WordPress Combo Holiday sale now. As some of you may know last month I’ve been in Europe, visiting my home land and family and after that I went to Spain. There we visited Madrid, Toledo, Cordoba, Granada (and Alhambra), the Southern Cost and, finally, Barcelona. A few old friends from various countries joined me there to celebrate my birthday.

The internet was on and off, so I didn’t risk to start a sale from there and not being able to deal with eventual technical glitches. Now we have a late birthday sale or an early Christmas sale – whichever works for you better.

I put up a new sales page for the two best selling WordPress products of mine in one single package: the “combo”. It offers the Profit Crushing WordPress Mistakes and the WordPress 3 MultiSite videos for one low price. Check it out here! Those are the products advertized here in the sidebar.

There is good news even if you own them already: you can sign up for free as an affiliate and promote it to your list. You have a list, don’t you? Sign up, start promoting it and make some more money for the holidays!

Once again: here is the link to my Holiday WordPress Combo!

Next, as my earlier posts can prove it, I don’t engage in personal attacks. This post will be no exception, either: I don’t have anything with the people, only with the methods and publicly available statements.

One more thing, before we discuss the comments from my Spam folder. I consider all the hype around SEO (search engine optimization) to be voodoo science, to say the least. Make no mistake, I do think and do believe there are certain common sense settings and methods to help search engines finding and properly indexing your web pages (including WordPress sites). I just dismiss all that “hocus-pocus” promoted by SEO-products sellers and shady SEO-services that want you to think they are the best thing since the sliced bread. So, I might be biased against SEO plugins promising all that BS but I’ve never said anything publicly against them. Till now.

The reason for posting this is a new WP plugin, called SEOPressor. More exactly the methods used for promoting it and the contradiction with its promises.

No, I am not going to link to it. It is claiming that it can promote your website to position number one in Google search result pages (SERP). Maybe, maybe not. I am not going to analyze the mistakes promoted by the plugin, like the obvious lack of knowledge about semantic HTML coding when it comes about headings… That’s beyond my point.

However if it is so powerful that it can be used on any WordPress site to get on page #1 in the search engines, then why do that promoters of the plugin, both the original site owners and their affiliates need to post spam comments on my blog to get some backlink juice?

Isn’t it ironic? Here is a script (tool, software, plugin) and its sales page and video states it can help you to get on page #1 in SERP… yet, instead of using it to do what it says, they all go around and post spam comments on WP related blog posts.

Some of the spam comments link directly to the sales page, others to affiliates’ pages. I don’t really care where they point, since all of the comments ended up in the spam. (Yes, Akismet is doing a good job.) It happens that sometimes I look at the spam comments, either out of curiousity or because they are flagged as “pending”. Well, no more ‘pending’ — they are clearly spam.

A side note for the affiliates: any decent marketer promotes only products that they bought, tried and are convinced it works. Which means, if you bought the product, put it to work and it does what the sales page says… you don’t need to spam my blog because you are on position #1 in the SERP, aren’t you?

You should click on the image above: it’s a screenshot taken of my spam comments with all the links highlighted!

Final thought to all the WP/SEO gurus out there: you can create and sell whatever magic product you come up with, I don’t care. If you can sell it, go for it… Just stop spamming my blog! Otherwise I will go publicly after you, as I did above.

First of all: I love you all who signed up to download my free stuff! I love you because by signing up to my list when I needed some assurance that my chosen path into the marketing world was right – you provided the feedback I needed. You made me think I was offering something of value: a report or some tutorials, sharing my knowledge and experience. At that point we all were happy: you got a free resource, I was watching my list growing.

But then, being a novice marketer, I didn’t know what to do with you. I mean what to do with your email that I had in my list. Somehow I felt uncomfortable blasting out indiscriminate affiliate offers to you; i.e. to suggest buying stuff in order to get commissions if you buy. So, I neglected you. Didn’t send out anything… because even in real life I firmly believe in the mantra: talk only if you have something to say. I now know it was a mistake — you completely forgot about me and that you signed up to my list(s).

Later, when I had a new report of mine to offer — I’ve sent out a cheerful message: look, what I made, I wrote another short book, get it free. Some people unsubscribed. Obviously, you didn’t, since you are reading this. Others, and I hope you were not among them, brainlessly clicked on the “spam” button. Spam? You put your name and email address in the form because you wanted my intellectual property for free and you even confirmed your intention to receive further notifications from me.

We were still cool. Then I sent you a call to participate in some charity drive, to raise funds for one or two noble causes. Some of you complained again. WTF is wrong with these people, I started to ask myself…

Finally, I put together a few excellent products, and all related to the topic of the list you have signed up. Let’s make it clear: you signed up because you wanted to pick my brain, knowing I am one of the best WordPress experts you ever met. So, I produced and released top notch WordPress related products: videos, e-books, guides. Most of the time I offered significant discount to you as my valued subscriber. Now I have to ask:

Was it YOU that reported my discount offer as spam? You can’t be that dumb. It must have been someone else…

Now I didn’t expect that all of you would run to purchase my bestseller. You may have other priorities and I understand that. Or, maybe, you feel entitled to never-ending freebies and get offended if a valuable resource is offered to you in exchange for your hard-earned money. (I won’t even mention that you could also earn some money as an affiliate, promoting the same product you were not interested in…)

Here comes the important part: if you are not interested in my offers (free or paid), please, please find the UNSUBSCRIBE link in my last email message and click on it. Unsubscribe! – I beg you. Do it now. Let’s say good bye to each other and go in peace. No hard feelings…

From now on everything will be the other way around: you will need to buy something first in order to get freebies. My paying customers will get my free reports, my free updates and all the discounted offers.

While I enjoyed having your “company” during your subscription period, I need to clean up my list(s) to get rid of those that complain about my messages. You are on a marketing list and you agreed to receive email from me. I don’t blame you for feeling abused by so many unwanted email offers. However, you specifically asked me to send you more information. And when I did, you reported it as spam. Honestly, I will not tolerate it. Would you?

Again, find the unsubscribe link in my last message and click. Do not click on the spam button! Have a nice day and good luck in all your endeavors.

P.S. A last chance… You can get all my WP related products and a few hundred more (over $4,000 in value). Watch the video to learn how!

Now, I have a soft spot for talented people from Eastern Europe. Actually, I do know quite a number of very talented artists: when I look at their work (portfolio) I am always blown away. Wow!

Then we start talking about my needs and knowing I would pay in good dollars, they promise to make everything I need and want. However, the end result is far from what I have seen in their portfolio. No, I am not saying those works were fake or not made by them because I know them and I know for sure it’s their work.

When I started to think about my unlucky adventures with them I went back in time and told to myself: the great artists of the Renaissance era were able to work for “sponsors” (or customers, if you wish), yet producing genial pieces of art. Think Michelangelo, Leonardo and all that “gang”… with their wonderful craftsmanship!

Then around the 19th century with the Romanticism came this (crazy) idea that the artist doesn’t give a sh*t about the customer because they wanted to ‘express’ themselves. The art became important i n itself. The artists got attitude. The image of this exuberant, Bohemian, eccentric artist became the standard.

I reckon in all my attempts I met only this Romanticist type of artist. Not one Renaissance man…

So, if you have issues with your graphic guy, ask yourself whether he is a Renaissance man or a Romanticist artist?

P.S. Still looking for a Renaissance man…

1. I am an old fashioned marketer and truly believe that a WSO (Warriors Special Offer) should be special, i.e. discounted, which means there must be a non-discounted version for the rest of the world.

2. I know some marketers don’t like to promote products from that forum and I wanted to give them a chance, too.

So, without further ado here is the direct link to the salespage:
http://imtools4you.com/wp_mistakes/

If you are interested in promoting it, just sign up as an affiliate by clicking this link or see the yellow ad below the post.

P.S. If you are already signed up as an affiliate for my Dream Tool videos, you just need to login and you will see the new product, too.