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The FBI has shut down the file-sharing website Megaupload.com and charged the founders and five others with running “an international organized criminal enterprise” allowing for “massive online piracy”. It is estimated that MU and its sister company

, Vector Limited, caused half a billion dollars in copyright losses and made an estimated $175 million. Established in 2005, it was ranked as the 13th most visited website on the Internet at one time.

The site’s founder, Kim Schmitz, also known as Kim Dotcom, was arrested in Auckland, New Zealand by New Zealand authorities on behalf of the US. Kim Jim Tim Vestor, and Finn Batato were also among those charged. Three suspects remain at large, acc

ording to the Justice Department. According to the indictment, “for more than five years the conspiracy has operated websites that unlawfully reproduce and distribute infringing copies of copyrighted works, including movies – often before their theatrical release – music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale.”

The website was shut down earlier today. The suspects are being charged with racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two counts of criminal copyright infringement. Each individual faces up to 55 years in prison if convicted.

UPDATE (6:11PM EST): In retaliation, Anonymous has hacked into the websites of the DoJ, RIAA, MPAA, Universal Music, and the US Copyright Office. They are all officially down right now! Read more about it here and follow the Twitter feed.

As David Wolinsky cleverly states in his recent article:

“There’s a new rhetorical question on the rise: If a company runs a Groupon that completely decimates that business, whose fault is it?”

It’s happening more and more frequently – businesses run a deal on Groupon for months that forces them to lose a lot of money on each transaction and ultimate tank. The most recent being Food For All Market, a Philadelphia-based “gluten-free version of Panera Bread”. Owner Amy Kunkle admits that she didn’t fully understand the risks involved when using Groupon to offer deals to consumers.

Last June, Food For All Market ran a deal that lasted three months which allowed “an unlimited number of customers to get $30 worth of merchandise for $15. But Kunkle lost more than 50 percent on each transaction because Groupon took an additional $8 per sale.” In the end, the company was $10,000 in the hole.

The lesson to be learned here: Do the research and calculate the risks before jumping into the Groupon craze!

Today is the kickoff of this year’s Art Basel, here in Miami Beach and will run until Sunday. It is considered the most prestigious art show in the Americas and includes more than 260 galleries from all over the world and showcases more than 2,000 popular and new artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Commemorating its 10th edition with new collaborations at the Bass Museum of Art and Frank Gehry-designed SoundScape Park, outside of the New World Center, this year’s event will surely be a weekend to remember!

“The show will be a vital source for art lovers, allowing them to both discover new developments in contemporary art and experience rare museum-caliber artworks.”

If you are in the Miami area, I strongly urge you to come to South Beach and experience the free exhibits, public viewings, special events and performances. Personally, there are a lot of popular musical acts that I will hopefully indulge in. See you there!

For those unfamiliar with this exciting post-Thanksgiving frenzy, Cyber Monday is a marketing term for the Monday immediately following Black Friday, the Friday following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, created by companies to persuade people to shop online. It debuted in 2005 and has since become one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.

What this means for eCommerce online retailers and marketers is that if you have not already established a strong online presence you will sorely miss out on an incredible amount of sales. Last year, comScore reported $1,028,000,000 in online sales. Who knows how much of an increase we will see on November 28th, two weeks from now?

Make sure there are no issues with your shopping carts and eCommerce platforms before Thanksgiving. Some companies, like Amazon and Overstock, are jumping the gun and offering deals and specials at the beginning of next week!

SpiderBoost is excited to announce a new client, ZenSoles! They offer medicated flexible patches that contain natural ingredients, delivering targeted pain relief for the ball of your foot. The patch adheres directly to the bare foot, avoiding shoes feeling tight. Fast acting, long-lasting relief helps you forget about the pain and continue feeling fabulous!

You will be able to purchase these ultra-thin, conforming patches through their website soon! For now, you may send them an e-mail at info@zensoles.com and they will contact you to complete your order.

Last week, Google made an announcement that SSL Search (https://www.google.com) will become the default for Google signed in users. This change will be happening over the next coming weeks. According to the Big G, “…a website accessed through organic search results on http://www.google.com (non-SSL) can see both that the user came from google.com and their search query… However, for organic search results on SSL search, a web site will only know that the user came from google.com”. There will still be keyword data provided from those that used the Paid search advertising.

While nobody can be certain what exactly this will do the the SEO frontier, we can safely make assumptions that it will change the way we can use analytics data. While Google claims that they are doing this to protect user privacy so that logged in users not be showing their searches to the websites they visit, this is most likely part of the overall strategy to make more people stay logged into their Google accounts, as well as leverage their AdWords advertising platform. At this point, it is all mainly speculation, but it is still important to think about.

In an Emergency Whiteboard Friday, SEOmoz’ Rand Fishkin addressed the major issues regarding this change. At this point, as Rand explains in the video, we should measure and track how much lost keyword data we are experiencing over time in hopes of better understanding how this change will affect organic SEO for Google. While he maintains a neutral stance on the whole matter, he urges the inbound marketing community to express their opinions and feedback to Google. Rather than just get upset about it, we can also figure out how to adapt and tweak our overall SEO strategies.

Yes, you read that correctly… The man famous for 80s gems like “U Can’t Touch This” and “2 Legit 2 Quit” is making a comeback of sorts. In an announcement made at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, MC Hammer (a.k.a. Stanley Kirk Burrell) unveiled his new business venture. He plans to launch a new search engine named WireDoo. O’Reilly Media’s Alex Howard had the chance to interview Hammer, in which he explains how WireDoo’s goal is to improve search by providing “relationship-driven searches” and “go beyond the generalities that give you more relative information in a consistent way in a new environment.”

WireDoo is currently in closed beta and is planned to launch around December 2011.

Our team is participating in a breast cancer fundraiser walk for Breast Cancer Awareness Month!

On Sunday, October 9th, 2011, there will be a walk that starts at 9:00AM at the Shops of Midtown Miami. “The Making Strides event is not a race; it is a celebration of survivorship, an occasion to express hope, and a shared goal to end a disease that threatens the lives of so many people we love.”

Our Team Page lets you donate or join us!

“Making Strides Against Breast Cancer is more than just the name of a walk; it describes the progress we’re making together to end breast cancer. However, nothing can describe the hope inspired by walking with hundreds or thousands of others who share a passion for ending this disease. Because nearly everyone has been touched by breast cancer in some way, we’ve decided to make a difference by walking and raising money as a team in our local American Cancer Society Making Strides Against Breast Cancer event.

This year we are asking you to “put on your pink bra”  and join us. Saving lives from breast cancer starts one team, one walker, and one dollar at a time. Join us, and together we will create a world with less breast cancer and more birthdays.”

“Dear Customer,
At around 4am EST, our system administration team identified a website defacement attack affecting a large number of customers. We are still investigating, but it appears that files named index.php have been defaced.
If you have a backup of your site, you may upload your index.php files to correct this. You may need to do this for each directory. If your site uses an index.html or index.htm, you will need to upload those files, then delete the index.php.” – InMotion

If you received this message on Sunday, rest assured that you were not alone!  InMotion Hosting’s customers’ websites were attacked early Sunday morning by one Bangladeshi hacker going by the alias “TiGER-M@TE”. It wasn’t just a server hack, but their whole data center was infiltrated. The perpetrator replaced every index file in every major directory of every account including the provider’s official sites. This could have affected as many as 70,000 websites.

In an alleged interview with TiGER-M@TE by The Hacker News, he claims, “ ”I hack 700,000 websites in one shot, this may be a new world record. After submitting 200,000 domains, zone-h was going down again and again and became almost unresponsive in the end. So i was unable to submit all websites. so I’ve listed all domains in this attachment. It was not just a server hack, actually whole data center got hacked.”

This appears to be the same hacker who was previously successful with his attack on Google. He claimed to be hacking since 2007, working alone, and only using private exploits and zero-day attacks.

If one of the largest web hosting companies can be hacked, then just about anyone can be a target. In fact, this story hit close to home here at SEO Expert Marketing, as one of our clients had their website go down. Thankfully, we were able to swiftly alleviate the situation an hour after noticing it was hacked.

Are you in search of new e-mail marketing software to help grow your business and establish a stronger online presence?

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