Yet another company is using deceptive practices to try to scam website owners out of their hard-earned money.

A letter comes in the mail with your domain name at the top. The letter says something like “Website Listing Service” at the top right. The first paragraph on the letter is “How to make a Payment”.

Basically, these companies are taking advantage busy business (and website) owners that can’t always keep track of every detail or have simply delegated the task of paying the bills to someone else. These companies (ILSCORP/ LISTINGCORP) are trying to trick you into thinking you OWE them for services previously ordered, when in fact the “payment” is to purchase their worthless service. In fact, on the back of the letter, it legally is required to say “THIS IS NOT A BILL. THIS IS A SOLICITATION”.

Always watch out for any charges or ‘renewal notices’ associated with your domain name, especially if they are by phone, fax, or postal mail. Almost ALL registrars and hosting companies use email for their official correspondences.

Google’s latest update is causing a stir in the webmaster circles. Many web developers have reported that all of their web pages except for their index page have been moved to something called the supplemental index.

“What is the Supplemental Index?”

Google’s Supplemental Index is an alternate index that is normally only used when Google index cannot find relevant results in their standard index. Being in the Supplemental Index generally means that your web pages won’t be found for most searches.

You can check to see if a web page is in the Supplemental Index by performing a Google search for site:mydomain.com (replace mydomain.com with your own domain name). If you see “supplemental result” next to the results then those pages are supplemental.

“How Can Google Do this to me?”

It appears that this is just a bug in the transition to the new Google data centers. Since one of the main reasons for the Big Daddy update is that Google wanted to solve problems with redirects and canonical URLs, they may be isolating web pages in order to test new algorithms on these types of URLs.

“Will This Affect Me?”

If you have spam free web pages with good content and a good number of incoming links, the Big Daddy update should have a positive effect on your Google rankings. However, if you use spam techniques to try to improve your rankings, you may find your web sites suffering at the hands of Big Daddy.