Before I go any further with the results of that digging, let me state categorically we have not, will not, and will not ever have any dealings with the site or those behind it.

Apart from being a really shabbily designed website, it;

• gives no indication of its owners
• is selling membership to unwitting tourists who might want to ‘feel part of the island’
• it claims to be non-profit making (sic!)
• offers people the opportunity to work for them for the investment of £2000
• the whole thing stinks…

The whole site and its related domains are written in a style of language many reading this will be familiar with… It includes the phrase “Simon says” throughout…

Yes, you guessed it. It’s an old favourite – it’s the inimitable Simon Harris again. Simon and Jenny Harris and Quills Wills may be down and unable to trade here (his words on the Gazette forum as I recall), but it seems they are not out.

The evidence?

The name of the domain owner – Melanie Ross (click on her name for the Google search which demonstrates clear link)

Companies House information…

LANZAROTE SOCIETY MANAGEMENT LIMITED
HARBRO HOUSE
CROWN LANE
DENBIGH
LL16 3SY
Company No. 06661107

and…..

THE QUILL GROUP (1986) LLP
HARBRO HOUSE
CROWN LANE
DENBIGH
DENBIGHSHIRE
LL16 3SY
Company No. OC328567

The same address is also the Registered Office of… THE QUILL GROUP COMPANY SECRETARY LLP
and THE QUILL GROUP TREASURER LLP

There’s plenty more where that came from – but I think you’ll agree it’s pretty clear as to who is pulling the strings on this baby! Of course, I have emailed and asked that any links they have included on there to our sites be removed – we have absolutely NO association with this venture.

The really worrying thing is that on the site it says that one of their aims is to represent the island and it businesses… Think about that one!

A note to tourists who may be reading this at this point – there are many good sites in addition to our own Lanzarote Nightlife if you are looking for information on the island – just Google, you’ll find plenty. And you certainly don’t have to pay to feel a part of the community – you are always welcome on sites like our own forum at Canary Nightlife, the forums on Discover Lanzarote and at the Gazette.

Now, of course, I’m not saying Simon Harris is a conman – I do however have an opinion based on all I’ve seen and read about him. What I would strongly urge anyone who is reading this – if you are thinking about doing business with him, or any of his companies, make sure you do thorough research – hopefully there’s enough in this post to get you started. That research may end up saving you thousands…

Caveat Emptor….

Should you find this at any time – don’t fix it – this is a good thing. Your site will no doubt have your search terms duplicated elsewhere, so no need to worry.

Don’t be afraid also to include common misspellings within you keywords and descriptions. Find a really common one and it can work very well for you…

1. The golden rule is to stay in touch with your customers
2. If you are inconsistent they won’t trust you
3. If they can’t find you they will go to your competitor
4. And if they forget who you are, you’ll have to start all over again

In principle I agree with what they are saying – but lets face it – it all sounds rather threatening… Realistically any advertising medium has as its first priority its own financial health. So many magazines are using this sort of approach at the moment.

If you are an advertiser you must put the interests of your own business first! Yes, it is absolutely crucial to maintain a presence – but all advertising should be judged on results – measure what responses you get, make a note of where they come from, and always assess how much each enquiry or sale is actually costing you.

Here my take on the above points;

1. Yes – absolutely, but if it’s your customers you are talking to there are plenty of other ways instead of paper advertising – email, direct mail, face to face (depending on your business), and of course your website
2. They trust you if you provide a consistent and quality service whether you are advertising or not
3. If you’ve done points 1 and 2 correctly your CUSTOMERS will return to you whether they see you in a magazine or not – though they do have a point when it comes to new prospects not finding you so easily – of course there are still alternatives to reaching those people to – it’s largely a case of applying a little imagination
4. If you’ve done point 1, 2 and 3 in the right way they haven’t forgotten!

Magazines, radio and the other old school advertising are not the be all and end all to marketing your business.

However, as I said ealier – marketing is critical in the bad times – absolutely critical, and with money tight you may have to cut your budget. If you are cutting back on your magazine, radio advertising find a way to replace it with something more cost effective – don’t just stop doing everything. If you do, they are right and your business will simply die.

Use the recession to assess what you are doing.

• How cost-effective is your marketing?
• Could you be getting better results for the same cost?
• Are there alternative ways to reach your audience?
• Could you generate more referrals?
• What do you have in place that can be improved upon?

Now is not the time to panic – use it to learn – get smarter! And, take a long hard look at your business as a whole.

This recent article about us was in the April edition of ‘Spain’ magazine back in the UK.

There are of course business benefits to us from press articles…

• they add credibility
• they have the potential to bring in business (this one brought us an SEO client)
• they may create additional website traffic – the Canary Nightlife and Gandy-Draper sites saw additional traffic throughout the circulation period
• our clients see that actively marketing ourselves and our sites s in turn driving traffic to their advertising with us and their own websites

We were approached to do this article after an article about Elle in the expat section of ‘The Sun’ website.

Watch this space – we may have another on coming up soon…

In adding some AdSense to the site and whilst testing without any content up on the right hand side pops something like… “Visiting Earth – For all you need to know visit Trip Advisor for everything you need to know about Earth”.

Perhaps they see the advantage of targetting any aliens about to visit and looking for reviews of hotels they can rest up in before the invasion?

I know, I´ve been talking about this a lot recently – but it’s an important issue. Today, eagle eyed Sally from Sail Lanzarote S.L. spotted in her stats some suspicious activity, and asked us to look into it… This afternoon she came back with a web address – which she again found in the stats – that had clearly plagiarized their website.

They had downloaded the site using FrontPage and changed the images and made minor alterations to the text. It was a clear breach of copyright – all our sites and those of our clients carry a copyright warning.

So, on this page are the two screens grabs for you to compare…

Was the site copied? We reckon clearly, and as every occasion in these circumstances we were prepared to go as far as legal action to deal with this if necessary.

Whilst we find it somewhat flattering that people like our work enough to copy it, and it also being a testament to Sally and Paul’s writing skills – it is not acceptable to steal copyrighted materials, so we took action.

Here’s the email we sent…

You have blatantly copied a website designed for one of our clients www.saillanzarote.com – in addition to copying much of the text you have also copied the web page design for which our client paid for. The original site has a clear copyright notice which you have breached.

In addition to being unprofessional, lazy and ill mannered, to steal text and design in this manner is a breach of international copyright law as outlined under the Berne Convention.

May I suggest very strongly you remove this text immediately and desist from using the original design or we and or our clients (a registered Spanish S.L. company) will no option other than to pursue any means available to us to have it removed. In addition to facing possible action from our lawyer in La Palma, we fully intend to bring your illegal actions to the attention of Google, your hosts, the SE domain registrar, and to the attention of the general public via any and all online media available to us.

I expect the content to be removed within 24 hours and an apology to my client for your blatant abuse of their hard work and investment of time and money spent on their business. Please, make no mistake that action will be taken if you do not comply within 24 hours this is not an idle threat.

At the time of writing  the pages have now been removed (or possibly renamed – so we will be checking in the future) – so no need for me to name names. 

It will be interested to see if the apology is also forthcoming? We’ll keep you posted…

It’s a nice little system for generating a bit of extra income from your website.

As opposed to AdSense, Adbeans the monthly value of the ads for your website based on a number of criteria, and then sell the space on your behalf. All you need to do is add a bit of code – or if you are using blog software it can usually be added with a download. We had a few problems on one of our sites – but their support was fantastic! The ads are easily made to fit your site content – if you look to the bottom of the left column you can see the ads that appear on this site.

You decide how many ads to show and on what pages – and you can also veto any specific ads if you feel they are not right for your site. Not that we have needed to – the ads assigned to our account appear to have been well selected.

Let´s be honest the AdBeans website isn’t great – it sort of looks a bit unfinished – but the emphasis is on functinality rather than promotion. But take our word for it – their system works fine once you are registered and is bringing us a nice little side income.

Your not going to make a fortune using them – but it is guaranteed income rather than pay per click. The big difference is AdBeans is not their just, or maybe in some cases not at all for the click through. It is their to support the SEO activities of their clients – it’s about creating quality inbound links.

It is certainly worth signing up to AdBeans to see what it can do for you.

Interested in finding out about other affiliate programs? Take a look at the affiliate marketing category.

The two are very different animals however, and do not always match each other. For example – you may have a Google Page Rank of 4 or 5 (it goes 0 to 10 – with 10 being the highest) but you still do not come up at the number one spot for their chosen search term in Google results.

Google says that Google Page rank is determined by a high number of factors… but are reticent about listing them all. One of the most deciding factors however, is the number of backlinks from external websites referring to a particular page. The rank is always allocated to a page, rather than the whole website… so you will usually have a higher page rank on your home page, than to an internal page – this is usually because people will usually point to your home page when referencing your website.

Recently our guide to moving to Lanzarote achieved a Google Page rank of 4. This tells us that Google views the site as beneficial to readers, because there are so many links pointing towards it.

Our nightlife website Canary Nightlife has a page rank of 3. However, some of its internal pages also rank well… such as the Island pages and town pages inside the website.

So how do you raise your page rank? The first place to start is by getting lots of people to link to your website – or to a particular page. You can do this by a variety of methods… such as reciprocal linking, article writing, posting on message boards and much more. Ensure that your content is engaging, and of interest to lots of different people. You might think that you have written a masterpiece – but if nobody else shares your interest… then it’s not a lot of use. Aim to get your link listed on pages that already have a good rank themselves, as their “vote” is respected more highly by Google.

Be wary of websites that email you for a reciprocal link – claiming that they have a high page rank… but then shove your link onto a page on their site that isn’t even acknowledged by Google. This doesn’t help you – and only benefits them.

One thing to always remember though – is that content is vital for the health of your website. Keep it current… keep it fresh… keep it relevant… keep it updated!

To check the Google Page Rank of your own website – either install the Google Toolbar direct from Google… or you can enter your site address into this tool below.

Both options are free of course.

Only yesterday we had three instances of this…

1. A short excerpt of text from our Lanzarote Nightlife website had been taken, altered very slightly and re-used. We contacted the people in question who dealt with the matter professionally and quickly and of course apologized. It seems that a former member of staff had originally copied our text, there is no way they could have known this. So – hats off to their response… No need to name names – we were happy with the response.

2. Far more maliciously, some idiots who have set up a WordPress blog, and recently spammed our Canary Nightlife forum with a link to their own forum with a total of 3 member – yes I did say 3 – took several pages word for word from our website and cut and pasted it onto their very amateurish looking blog. To say we were not happy is an understatement. It was clear from these people´s previous actions in spamming our forum there would be no reasoning with them.So, we approached WordPress directly with our complaint. Then we posted this comment to their blog….

In addition to spamming our forum recently. It now seems that your Playa Blanca and Puerto del Carmen page content has been either lifted from our pages directly or copied from articles we have published on Ezinearticles.com – and breached their terms by not providing acknowledgements to the author and our website.

Your actions have been reported to WordPress, and we are currently in the process of reporting you to Google in order to get your site blacklisted for stolen content. We are also reporting your actions to Ezinearticles.com and we will be discussing this with our legal representative in Las Palmas at the earliest possible opportunity.

In addition to being unprofessional, lazy and ill mannered, to steal text in this manner is not only a breach of the terms and conditions of the sites involved – including Wordpress – it is a breach of international copyright law as outlined under the Berne Convention.

May I suggest you remove our text immediately or we will no no option other than to pursue any means available to us to have it removed. You have been warned.

We got a fantastic response from WordPress – within an hour – who duly investigated and removed the posts in question pretty much immediately (it was a clear breach of their terms and conditions). They also assure us that the user has been instructed to contact them following an investigation – it’ll be interesting to see if they get banned. In summary – very annoyed with the morons – very impressed with WordPress. Obviously we won’t name names with these people either – we wouldn’t want to give them a link!

3. In digging around – whilst in this mood – we found several reproductions of articles written by Elle and posted to EzineArticles.com. These are very similar to our site text – but with a few words changed (duplicate content will penalize your own site with Google) – the terms of use for these articles are that if you wish to reproduce them on your own site you must include the footer and links specified by the author as an acknowledgement. The articles we found weren’t just on silly little website as in number 2 – some of them were on very well known and well respected websites! We will in due course report their misuse to EzineArticles – as we know from experience they take this kind of content theft very seriously.

The bottom line is – if you spend time writing original content why should other benefit from you work! Our advice to anyone with a website is ALWAYS include a Copyright notice, and ALWAYS act on what you find…

We can now help using numbers diverted from the UK and obtaining your number is FREE!

The number provides call rates for as little as 3 pence to your friends and family, or if you still do business with the UK, your business associates. Or, if you are a UK caller regularly calling the island, you can request numbers to divert to you most used numbers in Lanzarote.

It’s incredibly simple – click here to find out more and request your FREE UK number.