I thought I would share the following article with our clients, since the subject of what to do when your web site content is copied tends to come up every once in a while. The source of this article is Jill Whalen of High Rankings, one of High Aspirations, Inc.’s most trusted sources of information on search engine optimization and our recommended SEO expert.

So what do you do? There are several options: send a letter; hire a lawyer; report them to Google via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint process so that they are removed from Google’s search results. Jill Whalen suggests the DMCA complaint to Google route.

The conversation is continued via comments to the article and you’ll even find mention of another service High Aspirations, Inc. told you about back in 2008 – Copyscape.

Read the entire Content Being Copied article on the High Ranking’s site.

In our Tech Talk post What are your web site’s goals? we listed some possible reasons for wanting or needing a website. Although most are self-explanatory, we thought there may be some that require a little bit of elaboration.

One web site goal which I’d like to touch on today is the idea of using a web site to build trust. How exactly can a web site manage to help build trust?

As I’m sure you’ve heard over and over again, “You have only one chance to make a first impression.” Make sure your web site design makes a professional and intelligent first impression and you’ll be laying the groundwork for trust. Your visitors want to feel secure that you are familiar with the subject of your site. The more professional looking your site is, the more secure your visitors will feel. Another way to make them feel important to you is to make sure that something as simple as navigation is easy to use. Your visitors will feel that you have been thorough in mapping out your website with them in mind.

Make sure your content is not only accurate and relevant, but also honest. Anyone can repeat a fact, but to make someone believe that you are not just mindlessly repeating information is quite another skill. Also, spelling and grammar goes together well with this point. Spell check your pages, and make sure your grammar is correct. The occasional mistake may sometimes be overlooked, but regular mistakes can definitely make you less desirable to potential customers.

Know your audience. If your audience is full of tech geeks then speak as one. If instead, your audience is made up of stay at home moms, or teens, or athletes, then speak to them so they will respect you. Do not belittle them. You need to know your audience.

Let your visitors know that you are still around. Occasionally update your content: add new information and update old information. It will make them feel better that you haven’t disappeared on them and it also shows them that you are keeping current with your field.

If you want to use testimonials make sure they’re real. Phony claims just break your trust, if you have a good product or service people will tell you so.

Of course, the same rules that apply in everyday situations also prove true for the internet. Swearing never makes a good impression and insulting competitors is very unprofessional. If you do not agree with something state your reasons intelligently and do not reduce your web site to a back alley brawl. You want your reputation to continue over the long-term, don’t ruin it by making a snide comment, it definitely will not help your cause.

Let people know that there is actually a human behind the words they’re reading. The internet allows people to be anonymous. If you want trust then you need to step in front of the veil of anonymity. Liz and I do it all the time. You always know that anything from this site comes from one of us.

Contact Us. Use this page to your advantage. Put your company address, telephone, and fax numbers as well as email addresses on this page. If people know they can actually contact you and speak to a human being they’ll feel much better about doing business with you.

Make sure your company policies are clearly spelled out. If you give a money back guarantee then state it. If not, then state that as well. Customers want to know beforehand what they’re getting themselves into. Trust them to make that decision, do not make your policies vague and confusing.

As you can see there are many ways to use your web site to build trust with your customers and visitors. Use the information to your advantage and never forget that without your customers you would not have a business. Listen to them and they will reward you.

The following article comes courtesy of WebAsyst. Anyone accepting credit cards online or thinking about doing so can get a lot out of this article which offers some great tips on how to spot fraudulent ecommerce transactions. WebAsyst’s method of checking their online orders offers a refreshing change to the sometimes overwhelming “automate everything” approach.

For those of our clients who aren’t familar with WebAsyst, they are High Aspirations, Inc.’s e-commerce software of choice. If you need a full-blown online store, then WebAyst’s Shop-Script may be the perfect fit. They also offer software for photo galleries, help desk functionality, project management, issue and bug tracking, and more. If you think any of WebAsyst’s software might help your company or web site solve a need, please let us know.

Now to the article…

How To Avoid Fraudulent Credit Card Chargebacks
By Mike Ushenin, March 12, 2011

Our company has been accepting bank card payments for 5 years now and during this time we have gained some experience in avoiding chargebacks which should be useful for beginners. We do not use automatic fraud detection tools because of their inability to provide very accurate and timely results and have instead assigned this task to human payment inspectors. This decision has been yielding very good results.

Because of the ambiguity of the payment verification procedure, fraud detection and prevention is more of an art than a science; however, there are specific rules you should follow to foil fraudulent credit card attempts. The first criterion is whether a customer previously purchased something successfully. If no orders have been processed from a customer’s email address in the past, it is necessary to apply other tests. We use the following checklist for additional payment verification:

1. Order price. If a customer orders the most expensive product, especially without testing the item or corresponding with our support team, chances are high that the person is attempting to use a stolen card and additional review should be made.
2. Payer’s IP address. We use special online services to determine the country name corresponding to the payer’s IP address. It is always suspicious when the payer’s country does not match that of the cardholder.
3. Payment time. After identifying the country name, we note the payer’s time zone. Any order placed between 3:00 am – 6:00 am is suspicious, as it is extremely rare for a genuine customer to be purchasing during those hours. As a rule, true purchases and payments are made during the day, or at least before midnight.
4. Email address. If the customer’s email address is hosted by a free online service like Gmail, AOL, or Yahoo! and contains meaningless abracadabra before the @ character, that is a good indication of fraud. On the other hand, if a valid email address is based on an existing company website’s URL, and has the form sales@… or payment@…, etc., it probably belongs to an employee of an existing company; the probability of fraud is negligible in this case.
5. Number of declined transactions. We always review transaction history for each new payment. If a person has made several unsuccessful attempts to pay for an order, this is a red flag indicating possible fraud. Even if a card is finally accepted after several declined transactions, we perform additional verification in such cases.
6. Requests to the support team. If a customer “suddenly” decides to buy something without asking a single question (especially when other customers send an inquiry at least to ensure that we have an actively functioning support service at all!), this is suspicious, especially if combined with any of the other factors listed above.
7. Related information about the customer’s company. If a customer has specified his/her company name during checkout, we often perform an additional search on the Internet to find out whether the customer’s name and his company name are mentioned somewhere and are really associated with each other. If no evidence of such relationship is found, the transaction is flagged as suspicious.

If a payment inspector suspects a certain transaction to be fraudulent, he or she sends the so-called “verification request” to customer. This is an email message with standard content, requesting the customer to provide a scanned copy of an identification document as well as a scanned image of the bank card which was used for payment. If the provided documents identify the customer as the real cardholder, then the payment is accepted and the ordered items are delivered to customer. Scanned documents are always carefully reviewed for signs of alteration. We have seen cases where criminals, a.k.a. “fraudsters”, actually send requested “proof”, but the scanned or faxed documents turn out to be false.

Let us look at the situation from a different perspective. When genuine customers (not fraudsters) place an order on our website, they complete the order form, type in payment credentials and contact details, and simply wait for the order to be shipped. It may be an irritating obstacle for this person to receive a payment verification request, preventing the person from completing the sale. Besides, sending copies of personal documents over the Internet may make this person uncomfortable, even with key data blacked out on scanned images.

For this reason we rarely send payment verification requests if the expected risk of fraud is minimal. We have adopted an internal rule which says “if there are no clear indications of fraud, payment will be accepted and product shipped”; it works well because of the high professional level of our personnel. Even though this principle may occasionally result in a chargeback, it ensures that we treat our good customers well. Experience often gives immediate insight into what may be a potential fraud and which orders are genuine, and inspectors who have processed many orders are very good at telling the difference.

Remember: it is very important for online merchants to perform scrupulous verification of incoming bank card transactions, and this effort to stop fraud is well worth the rewards to their businesses as it is to ours.

The original article can be found at the WebAsyst Blog. Thanks go to Anton Perepelkin, WebAsyst’s Partners Relations Manager, for the permission to republish.