It’s been a fun-filled week of many activities, both on professional and personal levels. I’ve accomplished much, yet I have a ways to go with my personal projects as well as customer projects.

However, a good portion of this week has been spent keeping a watchful eye on the GoDaddy WHOIS verification and GoDaddy phishing email scam.

If you’re in the dark and confused as to what I’m referencing, I encourage you to read our post on the ICANN verification process and how your business can and will be impacted by it should you ignore it.

That said, I’m glad to report that my domain auto-renewals seem to be back to normal.  Also, I have not received a fake or phishing GoDaddy verification email.

But I’m not sure we’re yet out of the woods on this. I’m still going to log in each morning until I feel at ease that all is well with the GoDaddy domain auto-renewal system.

As for the WHOIS verification process, a little more information is coming to light about how to successfully update and verify domains with the “Pending WHOIS verification” status.

Apparently domain thieves and scammers are on the loose only a few days into the new year with a phishing scam for the ages.

Yesterday, I wrote about GoDaddy and their nonchalant attempt to get me to verify my email address and whois information for the numerous domains I own so that I’m in compliance with the ICANN verification process.

My point of yesterday’s email was pointing out that domains registered with GoDaddy were not auto-renewing from some strange reason.

In short, I had to manually renew the domains that did not auto renew and will probably have to keep a close eye on my account over the next few days, weeks and months until all is remedied.

On further inspection of my GoDaddy account, I also noticed some domains with “Pending Whois Verification” as their status.

This was strange because I had never seen this before listed as the status for any of my domains.

Long story short, as a part of ICANN’s new verification process, domain owners must now verify their information by a certain time period.

If you don’t verify the information by the deadline date, then you could not only lose your domain name, but also risk losing all services associated with the domain name.

This may come as a shock to alot of people who don’t log into their domain accounts on a regular basis.

No telling what they may find if they only login a few times a year when they do login.

But where this story takes a twist is when I receive an email from GoDaddy stating something about verifying my email address.

And then I wake up this morning to the see headlines stating “…GoDaddy Phishing Email Scam…”

Not a good way to start my morning off to say the least.

As any good domainer would do, I inventory my domains on a monthly basis.

I determine which domains are worth investing more in renewal fees based on a few metrics of my own.

Well, preparing for this month, I had a handful of domains that were to renew on the 1st of the month.

I typically pay for all of my domains a month at a time, using various discount codes when applicable.

When times permit and when I’ve sold a few domains more than my monthly goal, I try to take care of all of my domain name renewals at an annual rate.

This way, I don’t have to worry about large domain renewal bills from month to month.

Because I am a Discount Domain Club member of Godaddy, I get a handsome discount for owning thousands of domain names.  

This, in addition to GoDaddy discount codes, helps me to save a tremendous amount of money on an annual basis that an everyday person not in the club or using discount codes could not save.

But back to this month and domain renewals.  This month, I had 135 domains that were set to auto-renew.

I tend to watch my domains and their renewals very much like a hawk watches its prey.

So imagine my surprise when I logged into my GoDaddy account and viewed domains that were set to auto-renew had not been renewed.

I had an interesting conversation with a potential customer about lowering the website bounce rate and why their website was not garnering favorable search rankings.

As usual, we volley questions and answers back in forth in hopes of shedding light on behaviors that might shout negative SEO, search engine penalties, or exponential room for SEO improvement.

I must admit that this potential customer had performed their SEO due diligence and had much to show for their time and effort.

They had a search-safe optimized website, very active social profiles and signals, and a content marketing plan that they reviewed every month using their web analytics and SEO reporting tools.

Just wait one minute before you hit the buy now button for buying traffic, or at least read this post in its entirety before completing your order.

Website owners and managers are quite familiar with the term or phrase “buying traffic for their website” in some way.

For most, buying traffic for websites is a way to get quick, targeted traffic at bulk or high volumes.

Buying traffic is becoming very common nowadays.

Now there are several ways to buy traffic, such as PPC advertising networks (i.e., Facebook, Bing, and Google) offering internet traffic targeted by category, age, and country.

In addition, website owners are able to buy traffic from specialized SEO and non-SEO practices such as banner ads on a 3-party website or buying media blasts.

There are a multitude of methods, both search-safe and non-search-safe, to buy and receive instant website traffic.

However, before you choose to invest money in buying traffic from any source peddling such services as a method to increase website traffic, it is highly important to consider the pros and cons of buying traffic.

Let’s have a look at 9 tips I suggest web buyers consider when buying traffic for their website.

Everyone knows that SEO has always taken a beating over the years. SEO has been viewed as a necessary evil to grow one’s business in the age of internet marketing.

For most small businesses, SEO has been a nightmare experience with an industry full of nothing but money hungry crooks holding a website and search rankings hostage in lieu of thousands of dollars and empty promises.

The SEO industry, as is any other industry, has its share of good, bad and ugly players that market themselves as SEO ninjas, specialists, professionals, internet marketers, inbound marketers, and whatever other phrase of the month comes to mind to make a dollar.

As of late, the top buzzword or phrase of SEO has been content marketing, and how it’s becoming the new SEO and future of internet marketing.

So, just what is content marketing and why has it been coined the new SEO? I’m so glad you asked.

If you own, operate or manage a website, I’m sure you’ve heard the latest craze and buzzword, content marketing, tossed around much like a game of horseshoes or washers.

For some, content marketing has become a science of keyword stuffing their content in an effort to increase search rankings.

Content marketing has become a full-fledge game of creating keyword salad.

A dab of this or that with a pinch of that or this, and this magic combination of subtle keywords is suppose to bring about favorable rankings from SEO gods.

For small businesses that believe this keyword salad business of keyword stuffing is the most effective SEO, Google and other search engines think otherwise.

I’ve had the opportunity in the last two weeks to review the SEO efforts of some small businesses that have a local focus when it comes to SEO.