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A fun new scam is cropping up, similar to the scary sounding spam about infringing photos which phishes you for sensitive information, but this one seems a little less nefarious. Instead of looking to capture your sensitive data, “scammers” (likely more like black-hat SEOs) write to you posing as a client or “on behalf of” a client, claiming you are using one of their copyrighted photos on your website without their permission. A client recently forwarded one of these emails to us, which made us aware of the backlink scam. Here’s how the email went: Hello there, You are using my client’s image in one of your articles url.com We’re glad that it’s of use to you. There’s no issue if you’ve bought this from one of our market partners. However, if you don’t have the proper license for the image, then we request a clickable image credit link to [Company Name] (clickable link to https://url.com/) at the bottom of your article.  You can learn how to properly give attribution here.  Unfortunately, removing the image isn’t the solution since you have been using the image on your website for a while now. Feel free to ask any questions that you may have. Regards, [Name]Client Relations Team[Company]

That title? That’s just here for search engine optimization. Yup, I went there. The fact of the matter is, there is no war on Christmas keywords (There’s also not really a war on Christmas, but that’s a whole other topic!). If anything, there’s a war on other winter holiday keywords.

While the internet isn’t exactly in a complete and total uproar about this like some of our previous installments of calm down, internet, many of our clients are sending us emails questioning the content of this spam — and rightfully so. In today’s “calm down, internet” we talk about a scammy piece of spam that threatens to take legal action against people for using “illustrations” or “photographs” that don’t belong to them.

Yesterday I came across an interesting post in a group I am part of. This post linked to another post on a forum, which described various ways that Facebook is going to be changing. Basically the post, which can be viewed here, said “a friend of mine was at a place and this is what they believe they heard”.

You may have heard a bit about net neutrality recently. The reason for this being that the FCC unveiled a plan yesterday (11/22/2017) to roll back protections put in place in 2015 to preserve net neutrality. Many people understand what this means, and others do not. This is where I’m going to derail: this is different from our usual calm down, internet posts, as calming down is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing. You should be freaking out. Everyone should be freaking out. This is a huge problem, and you should be freaking out That being said, let’s delve into what net neutrality means so you can understand what it does. The internet has been growing in usage and popularity for years. We access it everywhere, on our phones, on our computers, at home, at the cafe, at the store. Everyone has the internet, or close to it. Everyone can access the information on the internet equally. Back in the 90s when we were connecting via dial up, we didn’t even have to consider the wealth of information that would be on the internet in 2017. With growing usage and the vast amount of knowledge available on the internet, it was important in 2015 for protection rules to be put into place to ensure that internet traffic was all treated fairly and equally. The FCC plans to repeal the 2015 rules set to keep internet traffic fair The plan unveiled yesterday (11/22/2017) is set to have a…

Recently, my newsfeed was blowing up with people who were very concerned over news articles stating that Facebook was “moving non-promoted posts from the general news feed”. Rightly so if you were to read a headline like that. If you’re a small business or a business that relies on word-of-mouth or social media to sell things without dumping a ton of money into advertising (say, you’re an artist, for one) this can sound extremely scary. However, as with most things people lose their minds over, I sigh, click on it, read the whole article, then explain to people why the sensationalist clickbait headline may not be what it seems. Welcome to our first blog post in our new category Calm Down, Internet. We’ll go over social media, online marketing, and search engine things that hit the general public that can sound scary but might not be what it is being touted as. Are Facebook page posts moving out of the newsfeed? Let’s step back in time for a moment here and think about the history of Facebook. When Facebook first began, it was only for college students. In fact, you had to have a .edu email address in order to sign up. Facebook then eventually opened up to the general public, and we all enjoyed seeing posts from our friends and families in chronological order. If you were on Facebook this far back, you’ll remember that you’d see all kinds of obnoxious things — Spamming of Bit Strips from your…