Sextortion scam is now hitting North American in-boxes. The scam appears to be coming from the United Kingdom judging from Google search results for “sextortion scam” or Bitcoin sex scam. The top 10 results are all UK based news sites. When reading the articles, the average sextortion being asked for was around 1500 pounds in […]

100 Blog posts? I couldn’t believe it when I sat down to finally write a blog post and realized it would be my 100th. It’s deja vu all over again. A few years ago I lost the original 100 blog posts I wrote as newmediamike  during a database switchover. Lesson learned – always back up your blog! So […]

SEO Horror stories recently hit trending over the Halloween weekend using the #SEOHorrorStories hashtag. I had to laugh at a lot of them and then I thought of some of my own SEO horror stories. Prior to going agency side 4 years ago I spent a few years in the frontline trenches of freelance small biz […]

I’m stuck on WordPress as my blog platform of choice because of it’s ease of maintenance. With a few clicks I can maintain not only the core WordPress CMS but also plugins and a myriad of themes. This morning however I had a bit of a panic. I logged on to newmediamike to approve some comments […]

Every morning my mailbox gets a new set of offers from SEO gurus offering to get me a number one ranking. It’s quite sad that the SEO industry is still plagued by charlatans such as these who have one goal. Separate hard working small business owners from their even harder earned money.  Business owners may […]

Is your website mobile friendly? What are you waiting for? Think of how you use your mobile device to conduct research. Your potential customer is also seeking answers to questions and quite often, they’re doing it from their mobile device. Consider this: More than half of American adults own smartphones and one-third own tablets, according […]

SEO presentation for Podcamp TO 2015 – How I rank #1 for “Search Marketing Expert” on Google My name is Mike Allan, I am a search marketing expert. But don’t take my word for it. If you Google “search marketing expert”, the blog post I wrote about becoming a self taught search marketing expert ranks #1 on […]

Are you attending PodCamp Toronto 2015?  I am presenting this Saturday February 21 at PodCamp Toronto 2015. My session is called “How I rank #1 for ‘Search Marketing Expert’ on Google”. The session starts this Saturday February 21 at 3 pm in Room 359 at The Rogers Communications Centre, at Ryerson University. The session is 45 minutes […]

These abandoned SEO Best Practice tactics never made for a better user experience, they were strictly used IMO, to game the search engines. Abandoning tactics that were designed to game the engines and that no longer work due to the constant changes Google makes to the ranking algorithm makes sense. For in the world of […]

What happens when you stop blogging? You lose traffic. About 6 months ago I started receiving odd emails asking me to approve comments, but the data was blank. Then I tried to post a blog post and it wouldn’t take.  It turns out my SQL database had maxed out. The database only had 100 Mb […]

Phishing season seems to be upon us. My partner’s Hotmail account has been hit with a number of phishing attempts. Some of these phishing attempts are rather elaborate and could easily fool someone who doesn’t know better. The purpose of this post is to hopefully prevent you or your loved ones from falling for two […]