HTTP Cookies and Privacy Concerns

The issue of ‘cookies’ is becoming increasingly important for websites, online marketers and privacy advocates. Cookies have traditionally been used by websites to track visitor activity and repeat interactions, as well as what they do on a website through tools such as Google Analytics. The use of these tracking cookies has become increasingly sophisticated, but online users are also more concerned about their role, leading to privacy concerns and changes to legislation in Europe.

A cookie (aka HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie) is usually a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user’s compueter or device, or in the web browser while a user is browsing a website. When the user browses the same website in the future, the data stored in the cookie can be retrieved by the website to notify it of the user’s previous activity so that repeat behaviour can be tracked (such as by Google Analytics), or advertisers can use cookies to display relevant adverts to web users based on their tracked behaviour.

Although cookies were originally designed as basic tracking mechanisms, they have now progressed beyond this and have become a crucial component for marketers to target advertising and to implement direct marketing techniques to relevant prospects. This tracking activity has raised privacy concerns to an extent that prompted European authorities to take action in 2011. The European Union’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive began to dictate that “explicit consent” must be gathered from web users who are being tracked via cookies. As a result, all websites in the UK, for example, that use tracking cookies, need to make this clear and give visitors the option to block these when they use the website.

This area is increasingly becoming a issue between privacy advocates and web users on the one hand, who don’t want their online activity to be tracked, and online businesses on the other, who want to target and improve their marketing activity. This includes user tracking which many websites now do through tools such as Google Analytics, and targeted advertising which companies can use, from behavioural marketing to remarketing activity – which should increase relevancy and reduce advertising costs.

In the past month, Mozilla announced their intention to include a default setting that disables third-party cookies by default in upcoming releases of their Firefox browser. This prompted the US Interactive Advertising Bureau to state that it will fight the move, which it describes as being “a nuclear first strike against the ad industry”, as without the third party data companies will simply not be able to track users across sessions. Firefox may be hoping that this move will attract more web users to start using their browser and if that proves to be the case, then the other main browsers such as Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, are more likely to follow suit.

This could be a backward step for online businesses, who will lose valuable information and the option to improve the targeting of their advertising. For web users, it can also mean less relevant advertising and a reduced user experience. If you’d like to know more about cookies and how they can affect your online business or privacy, contact us now.

In an interesting legal case in Australia recently, a jury in the supreme court of Victoria ruled that Google is liable for defamation because its search results connected the plaintiff, 62-year-old Milorad Trkulja, to phrases such as “Melbourne crime” and showed his photo near images of suspected members of Melbourne’s organised crime scene. The ruling can have wider consequences for the role of search engines and the results they display.

The plaintiff had used Google’s search quality form to have content from other websites removed from its search index, but failed to provide the URL of the content to which he was objecting. Due to that, the Victorian jury ruled Google was not liable for its web search results, but guilty of defamation because of its image search results, which remained unchanged after the plaintiff’s request. The jury found that Google should have removed those results when it received Trkulja’s complaint.

It’s a complicated and unusual case that resulted in Google being ordered to pay the equivalent of US$208,000. Trkulja had previously won a similar case against Yahoo, which was ordered to pay about US$225,000 in damages.

Google is examining the original jury verdict and may file an appeal as it disagrees with the Judge’s comparison to it as an online publisher. A Google spokesperson said: “Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the web. The sites in Google’s search results are controlled by those sites’ webmasters, not by Google” .

Whether or not an appeal is filed and Google prevails with a favourable outcome remains to be seen. However, the potential ramifications of this ruling place more emphasis on Google and other search engines to police their search results, or at least to have a policy to respond to complaints about the way search results are displayed.

If you’d like to know more about how the search or image results on Google can affect you, or your business, contact us now for more information.

At the end of February many news websites reported on an internal editorial debate going on at Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopedia which has come to dominate information needs on the web and regularly appears prominently in Google’s search results. Since it became such a huge resource, Wikipedia has also been the target of an ongoing debate about the accuracy and reliability of its content and the issue of editorial standards.

Anyone can create an account on Wikipedia and contribute content, which has been the cause of the accuracy debate, although a panel of established editors are in place to review and remove inaccurate content where they can. However, several recent events on the site – where edits of the pages of US Senators Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy gave the false impression both had died – have prompted a review of the rules, that would see revisions being approved before they were added to the site. First raised by Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, he proposed a system of flagged revisions, which would mean any changes made by a new or unknown user would have to be approved by one of the site’s editors, before the changes were published.

However, this potential editing change has proved controversial and sparked a row among the site’s editors. It would mean a radical shift from the site’s philosophy that ostensibly allows anyone to make changes to almost any entry. Wales’ proposal has caused a storm of comments on the Wikipedia forum, with many editors saying the proposal was unworkable, so that Wales has now offered a compromise, asking those who were opposed to the changes to make “an alternative proposal within the next 7 days, to be voted upon for the next 14 days after that.”

A BBC report says that a system of flagged revisions has been used by the German Wikipedia site for almost a year. However critics say that the process is labour intensive and some changes can take days, if not weeks, to appear. The issue is similar to that faced by the Open Directory some years ago, when this volunteer-edited directory was being swamped by submissions for listings on the resource, particularly when it had a notable influence on Google’s search results. The problem facing many human-managed websites such as these is becoming one of scale and resources to keep pace with the rapid growth in content – which was once the sites’ strength but now becomes a serious management concern.

Google have announced a new trademark policy for AdWords advertisers in the UK which will come into effect at the start of May. This change will have an impact on the way that some companies will manage their campaigns, or monitor what their competitors are doing with their PPC advertising campaigns.

Prior to this month, Google has restricted UK advertisers from bidding on their competitors’ trademarked terms, although companies who wanted to protect their terms had to apply in writing to Google to ensure their trademarked names or brands would be blocked.

Now Google’s new trademark policy for the UK falls in line with many other countries, allowing advertisers to bid on competitor trademarks within the search terms used, although the trademarked names still can’t be used within the advert text, unless with permission. The outcome for companies is that they could now find sponsored PPC adverts from competitors appearing when a user searches for their trademarked terms, thus increasing competition and so potentially causing inflation in the cost of their trademark/s as keywords.

The change has come about following a recent legal action against Yahoo! UK when a company tried to sue them for allowing competitor advertisers to bid on their trademark. Yahoo! won the case and their policy allows advertisers to bid on trademarks as long as the landing page includes content about that trademark. Consequently, Google seems to have considered this ruling and so relaxed its previous position about trademark bidding.So now companies need to be more aware of who is bidding on their trademarks and to consider how to counter any aggressive activity. In the same way, advertisers may also consider bidding on their own competitors’ trademarks. However, because Google’s PPC model is based on a combination of bid price and clickthrough rate (as well as the Quality Score of a search term) the issue of relevancy is likely to favour the owner of the trademark.

Combined with the restrictions on using a trademark in the advert, the owner of that trademark will be the only advert that can display the term, thus adding to the relevancy of the listing. In addition, people searching for a brand name are most likely to be looking for the brand website, so the majority of traffic is still likely to flow to the ad containing the trademark they searched for. The only other issue is that if a company is not yet bidding on their own trademark within Google Ads (AdWords), they may now need to assert their position by opening an account and bidding on their own trademarked term.

To find out more about this change to Google’s policy and how it might affect your AdWords advertising policy, please contact us now.

Business Week recently published an article detailing the experiences of some pay per click advertisers affected by ‘pay to read’ or ‘pay to click’ websites which pay users to click on adverts from search engines’ content networks such as Google AdSense.

This is one example of methods used to make money at the expense of legitimate advertisers who use PPC tools such as Google Ads (AdWords) or Yahoo Search Marketing, although there are some others:

• Competitors clicking on adverts manually
• Automated bots
• Links within spam emails
• ‘Scraper’ websites produced with automated or stolen content in order to rank, which display ppc advertising.

As an advertiser you do need to accept that your competitors may click on your adverts (which the search engine will filter if done repeatedly), but in most cases large scale click fraud tends to only affect highly competitive markets where there is a high ‘bounty’ per click – it is by no means a constant problem in all markets.

However it is still prudent to take some steps to reduce the risk of this affecting you:

Monitor your log files: Using a website analytics program you can monitor a range of information that might indicate changes in the quality of visits to your site provided by pay per click advertising. These can include sudden increases in single page visits, a large number of visits form unusual geographic locations such as Asia, or a large drop in your click to sale/lead rate.

Monitor any ‘content’ advertising you may be doing: If you use pay per click advertising to advertise on the search engine’s network of content websites such as Google AdSense or Yahoo Publishers network, there could be an increased risk of you receiving poor quality clicks from ‘pay to read’ schemes, meaning this activity should be monitored closely.

Be aware of your contractual agreements with the search engines: Both Google, and Yahoo require you to notify them of any disputed clicks within a set time period, so you should monitor your stats at intervals more frequently than this to make sure you are able to start a dispute. The search engines will also will not reveal the data or methods they are using to police the problem.

Although the onus is currently on the advertiser rather than the search engine to highlight any problems, efforts are being made to lobby the search engines here. The click fraud network has been formed to represent advertisers, plus there has been discussion of setting up a independent third party to monitor the quality of search engine clicks.

Spammers and hackers can create emails or programmes that take many forms and create one of the main threats to conducting business on the Internet. One of the latest tactics is to infect PCs with a new type of Trojan horse program, which can be one of the most potent threats to a computer or network system, either at home or in the office.

A Trojan horse is a malicious software program concealed within seemingly harmless software, but when activated by the innocent user it can be extremely destructive. They can be used to establish a user as a “zombie” computer host from which other programs or actions may be generated, without the knowledge of the innocent user.

The latest scam has been nick-named by threat management solutions firm, Sophos a ‘joe job’. The spam campaign looks as if it has come from a reputable source but in effect contains malicious code and is extremely damaging if it infects recipients.

One example is an email that was distributed looking as if it had been sent by BBC News and another in June tried to target those using Gmail. The email stated that a prize of $500 was on offer which could be redeemed at what looked to be a Gmail link. The link actually took people to a Tripod-hosted site whereby users had to spend $8.60 as a membership fee before they could gain access to their ‘winnings’ (which of course were never there!). Not only that but the email offered to pay the reward via PayPal or other electronic accounts. Those falling for the initial spam then handed over more personal data.

Security firms are now reporting that spamming is taking on more sophisticated methods of defrauding unsuspecting net users. Spammers now use email, Web and other techniques to make the email look more authentic. With the incorporation of interconnectivity, emails that look harmless become potentially more dangerous.

Everyone in business and at home needs to be vigilant about hacking. It’s something that is never going to be eradicated and the number of these threats is forever growing. Security firm, McAfee recently reported that it took 18 years to build a database to provide protection for 100,000 threats (this target was reached in September 2004). It only took a further 22 months to double the number of threats to 200,000!

Spammers may be individuals working from their bedrooms to see what they can do to create trouble or for some warped publicity kick, or they can be organised groups who aim to generate significant sums of money from unsuspecting recipients. Many spammers these days try to get past spam filters by using an image. Such image spam can cause ‘bandwidth bloat’ according to Commtouch, another online security firm. This type of spamming accounts, on average, for 30% of spam sent around the world and can sometimes be as high as 70% when it reaches the height of its distribution.

In a statement by Dan Yachin, Commtech’s research director of EMEA Emerging Technologies, the dangers of image spam become obvious, ‘while textual spam messages cause loss of productivity, image spam messages that are three times their size are a whole different ball game, causing a real bandwidth and storage crisis.’

if you’d like more information on this issue or how to protect your business, please contact us now.

Although plagiarism had been a problem for companies long before the Internet arrived, the web has made it much easier for unscrupulous individuals or companies to copy and use information or images with a few simple clicks. So if you find that your website has been copied and your copyright has been infringed, what can you do about it?

If a business competitor decides to copy text or information from your website, this can be easily done with several clicks of the mouse. They can also copy the source code of your site, including the optimised metatags, or in the most extreme cases, copy the whole design and structure of a site. We often see forum postings from webmasters expressing a combination of disbelief and disgust when they have found that another website includes their plagiarised content and want to know what can effectively be done about it.

Sometimes this plagiarism is simply the result of laziness or sometimes it is done to try and replicate the search engine rankings of a site that performs well, but simply copying information from sites in the hope that this success can be replicated is a sadly deluded technique! Unfortunately, there are also people who just think that they can make ‘a quick buck’ by copying a successful online business and don’t care who they antagonise – if they get found out, then they just move on to another project and website.

We’ve suffered plagiarism from our website by 4 different competitors over the past 3 years. They do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and in most cases such plagiarism doesn’t result in any significant business threat. However, it is intensely frustrating that such unscrupulous companies can set up a website with the minimum of effort by using text and images that we have spent considerable time crafting to reflect our brand and services.

So how can you find out if your website has been plagiarised and what can you do about it?

It’s quite hard to find images that have been copied, unless the culprit has retained the image name or ‘alt’ tag content. However, reproduced copy is easier to find and we use 2 methods to regularly check our pages. Firstly, the excellent
CopyScape website provides a search tool whereby you enter the URL of any page on your site and it will scan other sites and bring up those with a close word match. Another way, which uses the same basic technique, is to simply copy a paragraph of text from your website and place all of it into the
Google search box, which can then bring up any other sites that are using the same information.

CopyScape is also a useful online resource that provides advice on protecting your copyright and
taking action should a competitor start using it. Although it can be useful to have dated copies of all copyright content registered with your solicitor, legal action can often be expensive and drawn out, with limited chances of success unless you can demonstrate an impact on your business.

The best route is to take a copy of the offending page/s, then e-mail the offending website with a polite request to remove the offending material, which will sometimes get a quick result. If not, you can also contact their web hosting company who could be held legally responsible for hosting a site that is infringing copyright and so, depending on their concern to abide by the law, may pressurise the site to remove the content. Search engines should also be contacted if they are indexing the offending pages, as they may also remove these from their listings if the offence continues. Another option is to post a page about the website’s plagiarism ‘ as we have done ‘ which is likely to get their attention if they are concerned that potential clients may look use a search engine to find out more about the business and then see details about their unethical behaviour.

If you would like further information about how to check for copyright infringement or ways to tackle plagiarism, please contact us and we’ll be pleased to help.

‘Website accessibility’ is one of the buzzwords on the Internet right now, but how important is it for you to make your site accessible and how difficult is it?

Accessibility refers to meeting a set of website design guidelines and standards that enable your site to be used by as wide a range of users as possible, including those with disabilities. There are a number of good reasons to make your website accessible, including:

• Having a truly accessible site means that you are taking into consideration how different groups, such as the visually impaired, may use the web and therefore ensures your site can be used easily by the maximum number of people.
• In many cases this will also result in your site being more usable and working consistently across a range of browsers.
• There are legal requirements outlined in the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) that websites are obliged to adhere to. The interpretation of this act in relation to websites is continually evolving and no case has yet been brought under UK law. This article from the Royal National Institute for the Blind provides a good overview of the current situation.
• An accessible site also indicates to your peers and potential clients or customers that you have an awareness of accessibility issues and are being actively inclusive.

Making your site accessible to users can vary in difficulty, depending on how your site was originally designed and its size and complexity. Websites which are designed with well structured HTML tend to present fewer problems than sites which rely heavily on graphics and ‘tables’ for their presentation.

There are a variety of reports and checklists that you can use to evaluate and improve your site’s accessibility – we have found the following resources were particularly useful:

• The Web Accessibility Initiative provides a large number of guidelines for different levels of accessibility, including their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are the accepted international standard.
• Bobby and Cynthia are accessibility validation services that can test a site’s pages to the above guidelines and the American section 508 standards.

If you would like to know more about how your website performs, we are able to offer a more detailed evaluation of your website’s current situation and include recommendations on making your site accessible. This evaluation will identify aspects of your website which may discriminate against disabled users and do not meet the requirements of Part III of the UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

This evaluation will address some or all of the following areas, depending on your situation:

• Manual and automated tests of the website for accessibility against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• Assessment of a range of usability issues, including any navigational issues
• An assessment of whether the website contravenes government set guidelines
• Site simplicity and consistency – how language and visual cues are used within a website
• Browser compatibility – how the website is viewed using different browsers
• Readability – colour schemes, text only versions and visual clarity
• Speed of download
• Font compatibility
• HTML and style sheet validation

If you would like us to implement a report on your site’s accessibility, please contact us for more information and a quote, since the cost of this report will depend on the size and complexity of your site.

We have heard of a number of cases recently where companies have received an unsolicited call from companies trying to sell new domain names at highly inflated prices.

This is not a new scam and was rife several years ago as companies raced to buy up domain names. The call comes from an agency who claim that they have been approached by another company who intend to purchase a series of domains that are very similar to the recipient’s own domain name/s. However, this ‘agency’ offers the recipient to buy these names first at a highly inflated cost of up to ‘450 for two years, but they have to act quickly and, in some cases, encourage them to make the purchase on the phone there and then.

The simple message is DON’T DO IT! This scummy practice preys on scare tactics to extort money from unsuspecting companies. There is no threat from another company and the costs quoted are extreme. Besides, if someone does buy a similar domain, will they really challenge your business or achieve online visibility that will lure customers away from you?

If you are approached with a similar offer, please ignore it or feel free to get in touch with us if you have any concerns or would like help in establishing whether it is legitimate or not.