I’ve been asked by a couple readers lately just what an electron plumber is.

First, look at the definition of a plumber:

“A plumber is a tradesperson who specializes in installing and maintaining systems used for potable (drinking) water, sewage, and drainage.”

An electron plumber does the same thing but with electronic signals.  If you work in IT, networking, computer software, telephony, audio or video distribution, then you too are an electron plumber.

Maybe it’s time we started a union?

What Is An Electron Plumber? is a post from: ElectronPlumber

Found another great WordPress plugin the other day, this one called DoFollow Trackbacks. If you link to any article on The Electron Plumber you get a dofollow link in return back to your site from that article!

What is dofollow?

By default, WordPress has a built in feature for both trackbacks and pingbacks, both methods used to update someone of a link back to their site.

Thus, if I was to link to your website from The Electron Plumber, you would receive a notification through your WordPress or Blogger interface that someone was linked to your site.  It’s automatic and requires no effort on the part of the linker or the linkee.

Another feature of WordPress is that you can allow trackbacks to appear on the original article page as a way of thanking the other site for linking back to you in the first place.  But by default those links at marked as “rel=nofollow”.

Now, if you have a website or blog or plan on doing any internet marketing and do not know what nofollow is and how it affects you, you’ll have to learn.  Basically marking a link with a “rel=nofollow” tag is a way to tell search engines (specifically Google) that you do not trust that link and you do not want the search engine to count that link as a vote for the site you are linking to.  The most common uses are to link to an affiliate program, or to link to a site you want to point out to users as a bad site, or simply to prevent spam.  The theory is that if blog comments and user editable sites such as Wikipedia automatically nofollow links, then spammers won’t bother trying to build links using them to get a better search engine ranking.  It certainly doesn’t prevent all spam, but seems to cut down on it for the most part.

Also, if you allow people to place links in your comments that are dofollow, search engines see that as an endorsement.  And if that endorsement goes to a known spam or “bad” site, the search engine may actually penalize you for putting such a bad link on your site, that is unless is is nofollowed.

What does all this mean for you?  If you link to any of our articles from your site or blog, you get an automatic dofollow link back to your site or blog from the page you linked to!

Enjoy!

The Electron Plumber Adds DoFollow Trackbacks is a post from: ElectronPlumber

We get asked a question all the time when helping friends and family learn to make money online by setting up websites and writing content.  That question is, “I see all these free webhosting places advertised everywhere.  Can I just do that?”

The answer is of course not.  There is not a free host on the planet that is worth the time you would put into it.  And you will end up spending far more cash in the long run.  It constantly amazes me at just how cheap people are when attempting to start an online business.  Unlike a real brick and mortar business, you can start a real website with a real domain for around $10, then pay around $5 a month to keep it going.  If you are that strapped for cash, do whatever it takes to scrounge $15 dollars together to pay for the first couple of months of real hosting, after which it will not matter.  Even the lamest site ever can make $5 a month with minimal effort.  That’s basically a couple of paid posts, or one Text Link Ad, or a bunch of random clicks on Adwords, or any combination thereof.  Seriously, you can do it.

Still not convinced?  Still thinking about using free web hosting?  Here is the world of headaches you will be opening yourself up to by trying to save a measly $5 today:

1. They’re Not Free – Most of the “free” sites will nickle and dime you constantly for things you need.  When you go to sign up for that advertising program and they require you to have an email address @ your website, time to shell out $15 for an email address.  Real hosts give you anywhere from 10 to 100 email addresses with a $5 hosting account.  Want more than 100mb of storage or 100mb of bandwidth, another $15 per month.  Want customer support?  How about something non-standard installed?  Good luck.
2. Free, as long as they can show their Ads – Most Free sites put up their ads on your site.  That’s what makes it “free” for you.  And the ads they serve are the typically spam “Punch The Monkey And Win!” type ads
3. Free, on their domain – Most allow you a “subdomain” on one of their crappy domains, so your address would be “worldsbestwebsite.freecraphost.cc”.  Good luck getting anything to rank well on Google or look respectabl.
4. Free, if you buy a domain – The hosting is free if you pay $30 for a domain name from them that normally costs $10.
5. Free, for 100Mb of storage and 100Mb of bandwidth – Typically just enough storage and bandwidth to tide you over until your site might actually gather some real traffic, then you have to upgrade to their overpriced “premium” hosting.
6. Slow As Heck – Free hosts have little incentive to upgrade their hardware and make your site load quickly.
7. Scammy – Many free sites we checked out tries to get you to do “offers” in exchange for the free hosting, including Google Biz Kit type scams and those mobile phone number monthly charge scams.  Many people do not realize it is not part of the 20 step process in signing up for “free” hosting and enter their phone number or credit card number.
8. No Control – Especially if you go with a subdomain host, you have little or no control to what happens to your content and pages.  Basically the free host owns it and can do what it likes, including reposting it on their own sites, etc.
9. Likely to Disappear – Many of the free hosts of a few years ago cannot be found anymore.  What happened to the sites that people created with them?  Who knows, they’re just gone now.  Why chance it?
10. Support? – Good luck getting support from a free host should you ever have a problem.  Why would they bother when you are not a paying customer?
11. You Don’t Own Your Site – Many of the free webhosts make you use a subdomain which cannot be transferred.  Real domains with traffic can SELL for good money, subhosted free sites are owned by hosting company generally and are not yours.  All that effort down the tubes.

If anyone finds a free host that they think doesn’t suck, please let us know and we’ll take a look.   You may not think they suck now, but give it a few months when you run out of disk space or bandwidth or a year when your site traffic starts to spike and you cannot transfer to a better host without paying a fee or sell the domain to work on a new project.

When you want to put a site on the web, go with one of the big three web hosts.  You will see hundreds of sites that claim to “review” the top 10 web hosts or whatnot.  The problem is, they only review the top 10 web sites that pay them a commission.

Let the internet do the voting on who you use as a webhost.  If you go to Alexa.com and look up the three most popular web hosting companies BY ACTUAL TRAFFIC RANKING.  You want the Google, Yahoo, and Facebook of web hosting, not a bunch of bit players.

The top three web hosts by Alexa Rank are:

Godaddy (Alexa Rank 168)

Hostgator (Alexa Rank 438)

Bluehost (Alexa Rank 941).

Note that the Alexa rank listed there is out of ALL sites on the internet, so to be in the top 1000 is pretty dang good.

We use both Godaddy and Hostgator for all our domains and websites and have multiple accounts on both.  Honestly I like Hostgator better for a number of reasons.  It’s far more user friendly and doesn’t try to upsell you crap you do not need all the time like Godaddy does.  I think Godaddy is as popular as they are based on their television advertising campaigns rather than value or customer service.   It’s far easier to buy bulk domains at Godaddy, but the hosting is better at Hostgator.

I have never used Bluehost, and would not necessarily recommend them.  They require you to pay fully for 12 months of hosting up front (at $7 a month that’s $84) vs Hostgator or Godaddy where you can pay monthly.

Note that both Hostgator and Godaddy are Accredited by the BBB and both receive an A+ rating.  Bluehost is not BBB rated.

Seriously, the rankings should tell you something.  After Hostgator, you have to drop another 500 sites to find Bluehost.  After the top three, you have to go almost another 1000 sites down the list to find the 4th most popular Web Host.   Those “See The Top 10 Web Hosts!” sites you see advertised everywhere are just working for commissions from the smaller hosting companies that are just not worth it.   Don’t waste your time.

Why Free Site Hosting Is A Waste Of Time And Money is a post from: ElectronPlumber

A commenter named Steve pointed out yet another variant of the latest Facebook virus, this one posts a message with the web site called “www,articlecash,cn”.

Seems like the perpetrator of this virus is trying hard to stay one step ahead of their URLs being branded as attach or scam sites by changing the web address slightly each time.  Odd that they used such similar addresses but it’s likely that they registered them a while ago for some other less nefarious purpose and just used what they already had.

These sites are hosted in China and the registration information is for one of the largest web hosting companies in China.  Seems like someone is trying to hide behind a private registration in China.  The Affiliate network tracking that the links push through is somewhere called go2jump.org, which is owned by Tatto-Media, which had run afoul of the Washington State Attorney Generals Office at least twice in the past.  The final destination where the user is asked for their credit card for the Google Profit scam is a group called New Era Marketing, LLC 374 Banff Ct, Las Vegas, NV 89148.

The likely thing here is that someone in China wrote a virus that floods peoples Facebook pages with an affiliate offer from Spain that points to a US company.  The US company can completely deny any involvement (and it’s likely the truth) and the jerk who wrote the virus will likely never get paid by the affiliate network after word gets back to them that they used a Facebook virus to advertise the offer.

Anyone seen another other variants?  Anyone figured out where they got it from?

www,articlecash,cn – Yet Another Facebook Virus Variant is a post from: ElectronPlumber

There now appear to be multiple variants of the ArticleGet,cn Virus that are hitting Facebook.  The latest creates a post on someone’s wall that looks like this:  “Is this something you can do ? www,ArticleCar,cn”

Articlecar.cn appears to link to a traditional Easy Google Profit scam fake news site, but there very well might be something worse lurking in the background on the site.

Looks like there are two main possibilities for how someone gets this one:

1. Cross Site Request Forgery:  You click on a link and go to a website which runs some behind the scenes frames and scripts that you never see.  If your browser is autologged into Facebook it is then able to make Facebook think you posted the link that the worm submitted under your name.
2. Virus Execution: You have a virus on your computer that is allowing it to be used as a “zombie” for someone running a bot network.  They are able to make your computer do things without you knowing (thus the zombie part, really should be called a werewolf actually) including posting messages like this to the various social networks.

Either way, not a good thing.

At first we really strongly suspected that it was #1 above (CSRF), but we went and checked out both ArticleGet.cn (which I would NOT recommend without good script blockers in place on your computer.  If you do not know what that means, do not go there) as well as all the scam sites linked from it.  None of them had anything running on them that would cause this sort of Facebook behavior.

If a friends account is displaying these messages, warn them immediately.  If your account is posting these things to your wall, be very afraid, you could very well have some very nasty things running on your computer.

www,ArticleCar,cn – Another Facebook Virus Variant is a post from: ElectronPlumber

Quick note about something that many people on Facebook are running into. There appears to be a Facebook post hack or virus or scam (not really sure what form it is taking since we have not seen it live in the wild yet) where it appears that someone posts a message to their wall that says “www,ArticleGet,cn I heard some ppl in my family talkin about this during Thanxgiving. Check it out”

Articleget.cn appears to link to a traditional Easy Google Profit scam fake news site at first glance. There certainly may be some other dastardly doings in the background once you load the site, so I would not suggest going to the site.

If you see a friend that has posted this, warn them immediately. They either have:

• Installed a rogue Facebook application that is posting bogus  messages like this to their wall.
• Have a virus or malware on their computer that has given away their Facebook name and password and someone is using it for spamming scam links

Either way, clean it up stat!

If anyone has more information, please add a comment below.  Is it something posted to a friends wall like it came directly from that person, or does it appear to be from an App they installed?

Click Here to Share this on Facebook! Hit “Post to Profile” to warn your friends about it.

Articleget.cn Facebook scam or virus or app hack is a post from: ElectronPlumber

We get a lot of questions about removing or blocking popups and adware from one source or another, especially pop up ads for all the different Google Biz Kit and Easy Google Profit scams that are out there. Fake news sites and fake blog sites popping up seemingly at random as you are surfing the web are typically a good sign that you have some sort of unwanted adware, malware or spyware on your machine.

How does it work? Some as*hole internet scammer decides that spam is just is not good enough for them and figures out a way to sneakily install software on your computer that causes ads for scam offers to appear over and over and over on your computer.  They do this in the hopes that you will be foolish enough to click on one and cough up your credit card information.  Do it to 10,000+ people and at least a couple will fall for it.

Most adware invades your computer because of something you explicitly did, rather than some sort of hidden virus that invaded. That free music download software you installed, or that dialog box you clicked on about how you have a virus and CLICK HERE NOW to remove it that installed something called SuperVirusInstaller.exe are the most likely vectors for this sort of computer disease.

At best, they just pop up ads and fake virus scan reports over and over again until you want to throw your computer out the window. At worst, they lurk in the background, copying everything you type into your keyboard to a hidden file that gets uploaded to some black market server somewhere for later mining for username/password combination and credit card numbers.

How do you clear these scam ad popups from your computer? Follow these steps:

1. Start Using Firefox as your web browser!  Internet Explorer is generally considered to be far more vulnerable to scams and viruses than Firefox.  Also, Firefox comes built in with a Popup blocker that will only allow popups from websites you trust.  Seriously, using Internet Explorer to surf the internet is like having a one night stand without a condom.  Nothing good can come of it, and it might be years before you find out just how bad the consequences were.
2. Download, install, and run Ad-Aware from LavaSoft.  It’s a program specifically designed to find all the things that traditional anti-virus software misses.  It can scan your computer for things like constant ad popups and spyware. And it’s FREE to scan and fix any malware problems it finds.  If you want full anti-virus protection and live ongoing malware protection there is a cost for Ad-Aware Plus or Pro, but you can download Ad-Aware Free right now and do a quick scan.

Take the two steps above and take back your computer from all those annoying popup ads!  We cannot guarantee that you will not see any popup ads ever again, but the two steps above will greatly reduce the number you run into.

How to Get Rid of Popups and Adware – And Prevent Them From Returning. is a post from: ElectronPlumber

I absolutely love WordPress. It is by far the best basic site content management tool on the planet today and I challenge anyone to dispute that. Note that I said BASIC site tool. If you want to do anything far outside the “blog” type of site, it will likely not meet your needs. But for 95% of the people out there, it is perfect. If you can use MS Word or Excel, than you use WordPress. Setting it up, changing the design, and making it look really good is another story, but for the basics of putting stuff on the Internet, it is great.

That being said, it is severely lacking in some basic document management tools that you might be used to with something as feature rich as Word.  Part of it has to do with the WordPress editor being a web browser based application, the other part with the fact that it uses a MySQL database to store all the content.  But that is also part of its greatest strength.

I have started a number of new websites recently, all based around one single site that I started about 18 months ago that is really starting to pay off.  That one site started to take off near the end of the summer and I cloned the idea across a couple of related niches.  It only takes a few hours a week to maintain and update each one.  The first site made over $1000 last month and is on track to make $2000 this month, all using completely legal and ethical white hat methods.  I’m currently writing up a tutorial  to teach people to do the exact same thing with the only investment being a basic hosting account.  I plan on giving it away for no cost as long as you link back to the tutorial from any sites you create.  Stay tuned.

BUT, I screwed up a couple of them and had been using an incorrect affiliate tag all over the place and thus was not getting credit for anyone who clicked through the links on the pages.  I can certainly fix it on articles going forward on those sites, but needed to change all the old ones, especially since they were starting to get traffic and clicks.  However, the WordPress browser based UI is really clunky for changing things like that.  I would have to go to each individual post one at a time, wait for them to load, edit them, save them, etc.

Another option would be to export the entire site using the WordPress backup tools, then do a search and replace in the files manually in a text editor, then clear the site and reload them back in.  Another unappealing option.

SQL to the rescue!  Here is how to do it:

1. Go to you web hosting panel and open whatever tool it uses to connect to the MySQL database for the WordPress site you need to Find and Replace on.  Sorry I cannot be more help on this step, but the procedure and tools vary widely from hosting provider to hosting provider.  Just get there.
2. On most MySQL web interfaces, there will be a tab called “SQL” for the database, click on it.
3. Enter the following as your query.  Replace the ‘oldtext’ and ‘newtext’ below with what you want to search and replace.  This will work for any text, including the text inside URLs, which was what I screwed up.

UPDATE wp_posts set post_content = REPLACE (post_content, ‘oldtext’, ‘newtext’);

Bam.  Done.  Enjoy!

Search and Replace with WordPress is a post from: ElectronPlumber

UPDATE:  Paypal discontinued their single use credit card number program.  Click here for a credit card with no fees that allows you to generate one time use credit card numbers.

The PayPal system contains a method to generate a single use credit card number linked to your PayPal account.  Don’t want to read the rest?  Click here to sign up for a Paypal account and use their Single Use Card feature.

Why would you want to use a single use credit card?  Well, the most important reason is that you should never use a Debit card for online purchases of any kind.  Let us look at why…

Credit cards:

• Credit cards have many protections for both online and offline purchases that protect against fraud and theft.  It’s in the bank’s best interest to make sure fraud doesn’t happen since it’s their money you are spending.
• Credit cards typically have a maximum allowable deductible for fraud at somewhere in the $50 or less range.
• Credit cards allow you to dispute charges, many up to 90 days after the fact.

Debit cards:

• Debit cards use money directly out of your bank account, and thus banks have much lower reason to protect the account.  It’s your money, not theirs.
• Debit cards can have deductables starting at the hundreds of dollars for theft and fraud, some have none at all.
• Many Debit cards only allow an account owner to flag fraud or dispute a charge within 2 days of the charge.

What does that mean to you?  Well, if you only have a debit card but you’ve been itching to try a particular offer, it just might be time to do it.  If you’ve found a particularly enticing “free trial” that may be too good to be true at a site that you don’t particularly trust with your real credit card, now you can create a one off card tied to your Paypal account.  Even credit cards have risks as well, so if you can avoid using your real one for an online purchase, so much the better.

We’re going to do this Homer Simpson free Frogurt style and go through the good and the bad…

Credit Card number that is secure from theft, that’s good!

The card can only be used by the merchant that you originally use it on.  No potential for someone selling your card number on the black market, as if they do it won’t work.

The Paypal Virtual credit card isn’t actually “single use” but actually “single merchant limited use”, that’s bad!

It gives a merchant the ability to charge the card up to 4 times over the course of 2 months.  As the Paypal help info puts it -

“The limit for any single-use card is 4 authorizations from a single merchant or an expiration date up to 2 months from the creation date, whichever comes first.”

Certainly better than using a regular credit card online, but doesn’t stop a particularly unscrupulous merchant from double charging you, or for a “trial” offer to charge your card before the trial time period is up.

You can cancel the single use credit card anytime, that’s good!

Simply click on the “Cancel Now” button in the Paypal interface to shut off the card whenever you want and even the merchant you originally used it on can’t charge it again.  Perfect for those reoccurring billing free trial offers.  Simply cancel the card if you don’t like the product.  Make sure you call their support number and cancel as well, but certainly cancel the one time use card as soon as you know you don’t want more of the product.  This will prevent any “mistakes” from happening where they will ship and charge you despite canceling, which many people have complained about.

You can’t set a limit on the card to only be the amount of the charge, that’s bad!

You can’t actually set a limit on the card unfortunately.  The card will match your daily PayPal limit, which you can set as low as $500.

It’s still far far better than using your real credit card number, that’s good!

Seriously now, if you are ever giving your credit card to any site you don’t trust, use a single use card.

How do I get a Single Use Card?

Click here to sign up  and create a single use card. Then go to My Account, then click on the Create Secure Card Number link.  Note that you do NOT need to install the plugin, as you can simply create a one time use card right from there.

Again, remember that it won’t keep you completely safe from being scammed, but it will certainly help!

UPDATE:  Paypal discontinued their single use credit card number program.  Click here for a credit card with no fees that allows you to generate one time use credit card numbers.

How To Get A Free Single Use Credit Card is a post from: ElectronPlumber

First, I’d like to thank everyone at Adwords support who helped to bring our Adwords account back to life.  I received very courteous and helpful messages from a few different folks from Google Adwords Support over the past weekend regarding the status of our Adwords account and their efforts to restore it.

You can read about how the account was suspended first at our article on how Google was going after the Google Money Tree scammers. Next, you can read about my efforts to restore our good name on Google Whacked – Our Adwords Account Still Wrongly Suspended

I’ll post their messages if I receive permission from the individuals who sent them, but since they were all private email correspondence, I will just summarize.

On Saturday I received an email from someone who didn’t identify their position or department at Google that they had been made aware of my suspension and were taking steps to rectify the situation, but it would likely not be fixed until Monday.

Then today I received a message that the original Support person I had been corresponding with had re-escalated my issue to the Policy team and they confirmed that we were incorrectly suspended for Google Money Tree violations and apologizing for the inconvenience and confusion.

Note that all this effort from Google was spent for an Adwords account that had spent a whopping total of $7.00, so I don’t think the size of your Adwords spend makes any difference in the support effort.

How We Appealed Our Adwords Suspension

• First off, we did nothing wrong.   I believe this was the most important factor in getting our Adwords account restored.  Their terms and conditions are quite clear on fraudulent ads, sneaky redirects (mistaken or otherwise), and the like.  If you’ve been suspended for doing something against their terms, I would not suggest holding your breath.
• I wrote to Adwords Support using their online tools.
• I did not take no for an answer from their first email.
• I did not take no for an answer on their followup email and politely insisted the very courteous support person escalate the issue to a supervisor or manager.  This is a little technique I learned back in my Technical Support days right out of college.  Make it perfectly clear that you are not mad at the Support person, it’s nothing to do with them, thank them for all the help so far, but since the issue still is not resolved and they cannot resolve it, please pass the issue to someone who has the power to resolve it.
• I posted about it here on this site (no idea if they ever looked at the article or not).
• At no point did I contact anyone outside of the standard Adwords Support structure or tools other than posting here.  However, I have no idea what went on behind the scenes for communication, just the five email messages I received on the matter.

At every step the Adwords Support team was courteous and polite, and I tried my best to be the same, yet insistant that we had been wrongly suspended as well.

So, all’s well that ends well!

Google Adwords Account Unsuspended! is a post from: ElectronPlumber