Mission E-Commerce

Friends of Mission E-Commerce at the Dental Offices of Dr. Mark K. McAlister are celebrating Halloween by dressing up in costumes and reminding parents and children to be kind to their teeth while collecting candy this weekend.

This Halloween, Dr. Mark McAlister DDS and his orthodontics team are bringing the spooky festivities into the office by wearing colorful outfits for their patients. Dr. Mark takes pride in keeping the atmosphere young, fun, and lively for all of the children and young adults who visit his office. By doing so, he is reminding kids and adults alike to take care of their investment in their dental work by keeping their teeth clean over this sugar-filled holiday.

After Halloween, many kids tend to find themselves consuming endless piles of candy in a short period of time. Candy, especially in large amounts, can be detrimental to a mouth filled with braces. Dr.Mac wants his patients to enjoy the festivities and he understands that people will ultimately indulge in their trick-or-treating candy. While it may be impossible for some to avoid candy altogether, it is important to know the risks that can result from binging on candy.
Orthodontist, Mark K. McAlister’s tip is short and simple: do not over-eat on Halloween candy!
Most candy is almost entirely sugar and, therefore, can lead to rotting teeth and cavities. Some of the most dangerous candies are those that are extremely hard or sticky. The hard candies are known to break braces or, even worse, to break teeth. On the other hand, sticky candies can bend, break, and destroy the wires holding the braces together.

While the most health-concerned people say to stay away from any and all candy, Dr. Mark McAlister understands that Halloween is a special day that only comes once a year. Dr. Mac’s office strongly suggests that parents of children with braces (and without) be aware of the types of candy, as well as the quantities each child has. Halloween is a fun and exciting holiday and Mark knows that braces do not have to ruin the excitement.

Mark McAlister DDS

Mark McAlister is a Phoenix, AZ based orthodontist who specializes in braces, early orthodontic treatment, and invisalign. His patients are mainly anyone 8 years old to adults. Dr.Mark’s practice is child friendly and equipped with the most updated technology. They also offer early morning and later afternoon appointments for extra convenience.

More information can be found online at http://phoenixbraces.net/

By: Terri Wells

Just last week, Google changed access to information about searchers leaving their website after a search. Searchers who are logged into their Google accounts no longer automatically pass along the term with which they searched – with one important exception. But this exception is enough to make some observers question Google’s motives.

I’ll state right up front that both the technological and (for lack of a better term) political issues on this topic are a little confusing. I read both of Danny Sullivan’s excellent explanations of the issue, and I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. So let’s take this apart piece by piece.

We’ll start with the initial news point. Last week, Google changed the way it handled search results to make them more private, at least in theory. Those who search Google and are logged into Google.com via a secure connection now get their search results encrypted. Searchers won’t notice a difference, but the websites they visit will. If a secure visitor clicks through to a website that is not secure, that website will not receive any information as to what search term the visitor used.

This means that webmasters and SEOs get less information to play with. It’s harder to build a proper campaign when you don’t know what terms visitors use to find your website. Worse, what if one of these secure visitors buys something? You might want to optimize for that term, but you can’t, because you don’t know what it is!

Don’t panic; you’re not losing quite as much information as you think. According to Matt Cutts, only a very small percentage of Google users (in the single digits) actually use SSL when performing searches. That may sound low to you, but Sullivan said the figures he’s seeing for both Search Engine Land and his own blog bear this out. For one day for SEL in Google Analytics, he noted that 381 keyword-related visits had the search terms stripped out of them – out of nearly 15,000 keyword-related visits. That’s a loss of less than three percent of the data.

Also, if you maintain SSL on your website, Google will still pass along to you the search terms secure visitors used. Sullivan notes that this is a crucial point. “Encryption – providing a secure website – doesn’t block referrers if someone goes from one secure website to another.” As he sums it up, for a visitor searching from a connection that is not secure, Google passes the search term to both secure and not secure sites. For a secure visitor, Google passes only to secure sites. So a secure visitor would not pass their search term to a site that is not secure.

That’s true except in one important situation. It’s this exception that’s making Sullivan and others suspect Google’s motives. And the odd point is that it’s all but buried in Google’s blog post announcing the changes it’s made to improve the security and privacy of search. At the end of the third paragraph of the post, Google tells its users that “If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.”

You read that right. It doesn’t matter if you’re using a secure connection; advertisers will STILL see the search term that brought you to their web page. Why is this a problem? Web publishers tend to use AdSense rather than AdWords if they use anything with Google, and very few of them use secure servers. They need information on who is finding their website via which search terms just as much as advertisers do. It’s as if Google is saying “we’re protecting our users’ privacy, but you can peek if you pay us.”

Except it’s even more complicated than that. Sullivan argues that Google doesn’t really consider this referrer information private. He points to an incident in 2009,  “when Google made a change to its search results that broke referrers from being passed. Publishers were upset, and Google restored referrers.” Even more recently, Sullivan continued, when search rival DuckDuckGo challenged Google on privacy issues, Google head of web spam Matt Cutts denied referrers were a privacy issue. “Referrers are a part of the way th web has worked since before Google existed. They’re a browser-level feature more than something related to specific websites,” Sullivan quotes Cutts as saying.

It seems very much as if Google is trying to have it both ways, and turn an extra profit besides. As Sullivan explains, if you know the search term someone  used to get to your website, “you can then target them in various ways across the web with ads  you believe reflect that search interest…This is called ‘retargeting,’ and  Google’s a leading provider of retargeted ads. When you cut the referrers out, except for your own advertisers, Google makes it harder for its competitors to offer retargeting services.” It also means that only Google advertisers can do keyword-level conversion tracking. This kind of tracking gives you a better idea of the value of certain search terms, so you can change your SEO approach to suit.

Many Google users may not care about these issues, but it smacks of hypocrisy on Google’s part. As Sullivan explains, “if Google thinks this needs to be done for privacy reasons, then it need to block referrers for everyone and not still allow them to work for advertisers…If blocking referrers isn’t a privacy issue, then Google needs to provide referrer data to all publishers, not just those who advertise.”

Read more here

By: Terri Wells

If you figured that Google could do better when they unveiled their Music Beta service in May, well, it looks like Google agreed with you. Rumors started circulating on Friday that the search engine plans a much more complete music streaming and downloading service, to compete with both Amazon’s service and Apple iTunes.

A number of sources have been quoting “leaks from music companies” as saying that Google has been in active negotiations with the four major music production firms. Supposedly, only the smallest of these, EMI Group, has inked a deal with the search company. Some observers believe that Google will launch their service in a matter of weeks even if they EMI Group as their only partner initially.

The New York Times notes that Google most likely plans to link it to Music Beta, the company’s existing cloudservice. For those of you not familiar with it, Music Beta lets users create a music locker of sorts in the cloud that can hold up to 20,000 songs. Users can then stream these tunes to their mobile phones and other devices.

Potential piracy stands as one of the obstacles Google needs to overcome to convince music companies to sign on. The Times quoted one senior music company executive as saying that “We want to make sure the locker doesn’t become a bastion of piracy.” Without the help of the major music companies, Google’s new service could become much less convenient than either Amazon’s or Apple’s.

Someone using a cloud-based music service needs to get their music in the cloud – that is, onto the remote servers. Uploading an entire music collection over the Internet from one computer onto remote servers can take many hours or even days. During this time, the personal system’s performance might be affected. If, however, the music service holds licensing agreements with the major music companies, there’s no uploading required; the user can simply tap into the central repository of music already on the remote servers to listen to copies of the tunes they own. That makes the service much less of a hassle for the user; it’s less time- and resource-consuming to get started. This is one reason it’s so important to Google to get those deals in place.

The other reason, of course, is that both Amazon and Apple have made license deals with the major music companies, which would give them a strategic advantage over Google if the search giant fails to come to the agreements it needs. This must be particularly frustrating at the Googleplex, as the company is rumored to have been working on a music service like this for more than a year.

Once the service is in place, Google could take it in many directions. For instance, they might add a merchant service similar to YouTube’s new “Merch” service reported by the Daily Mail . They could include the new service as part of an Android update, such as the one named Ice Cream Sandwich scheduled for later this week. It could even become a special feature of Google Plus.

But can Google make a new music service work in the face of such strong competition? Success in one area doesn’t always translate well to other areas, as we’ve seen in the past with a number of Google flops. Motley Fool even lists five reasons they believe the yet-to-be-revealed new music service will flop. The analyst company cites everything from Google not playing nice with the record labels to heavy competition from Amazon and Apple (that shut even Wal-Mart out of the market) to Google’s own lack of patience as reasons the music service will fail. On the other hand, we’ve also seen Google succeed against larger, more entrenched rivals. We’ll have to wait to see how this one plays out.

Read more here

By Anick Jesdanun

Google recently came out with Offline Google Mail, software that lets you use Gmail while disconnected from the Internet. Messages that you write, delete or move to a folder — or label, as Gmail calls it — get synced with your Gmail account the next time you are online. You can also read messages that had been sent to you before going offline.

Google’s new software for using Gmail without an Internet connection comes across as a throwback to an era when we weren’t connected all the time and on all sorts of devices, from phones to iPads.

These days, if I need to read or write an email when I’m not at a regular computer, I can usually do so on my phone.Wi-Fi is also plentiful — even on planes and trains — when I need to catch up on messaging using my laptop .

But I found myself lacking both options during a recent trip abroad. Fortunately, Google recently came out with Offline Google Mail, software that lets me use Gmail while disconnected. Messages that I write, delete or move to a folder — or label, as Gmail calls it — get synced with my Gmail account the next time I’m online. I can also read messages that had been sent to me before going offline.

As a result, I was generally able to get away with buying a half-hour or an hour of Internet access at a time in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, where “complimentary Internet” is a term foreign to hotels.

I composed emails on a flight to New Zealand and had them sent during a brief layover at the Auckland airport. I read and wrote more emails on the flight back to the U.S. and synced the account once more at my parents’ home in New Jersey. By the time I was back in my apartment in New York, I was caught up on three weeks of email.

The software itself was easy to install and use — once I found it. It requires a Gmail account and won’t work with Yahoo, Hotmail and other Web-based email services.

Also, it works only with Google’s Chrome browser, which means I had to install it on my laptop to start things off. I then had to open the browser and open a new tab to find a link to Google’s Chrome Web Store. After that, I had to find the free Offline Google Mail software among the scores of offerings at the store.

The software is still in a “beta” test mode, a label that Google Inc. sometimes slaps on products for months or years. That’s a way of saying that you may encounter glitches along the way.

Read the full review here

by Pamela Parker

After quietly testing in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, Google will roll out a new algorithm globally that gives more weight to landing page quality when it comes to AdWords Quality Score. This means ads with landing pages that Google deems to be most relevant to the query will be able to rank higher for lower cost-per-click bids.

“What we’ve seen is that there are ads available in the auction that are as good a quality as the top ads. But the landing pages — the merchant sites, the advertiser landing pages — are of much higher quality than the ads that we see at the top of our auction,” Jonathan Alferness, director of product management on Google’s ad quality team told me. This, says Alferness, means the user experience isn’t what it could be. Hence the change to give more weight to landing page quality. “In the end, we believe that this will result in better quality experience for the users.”

Landing page quality has long been a factor in Google AdWords, but more as a negative signal. If an advertiser’s landing page was particularly terrible or misleading, advertisers could have their ads rejected or their accounts suspended or revoked — depending on how bad the policy violation was. The new change will assign landing page quality a positive value, incentivizing advertisers to make sure the landing page’s keywords and content are closely aligned with the keywords for which they’re bidding. Ads with high landing page quality will get a “strong boost” upward in the auction, according to Alferness.

Alferness says Google will crawl the landing pages associated with every ad and make a determination as to its quality.

“What we always ask our advertisers to focus on is relevance — choose a landing page or site experience that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re targeting and also a good experience for end users,” said Alferness. “This is just continuing to sort of push on those best practices. I gives us the ability to really reward those advertisers that have been doing this, whose landing pages really are some of the best in our systems.”

The change will roll out in the next week or two. Advertisers may see some variations in ad position and keyword Quality Score at first, but things should settle down within a couple of weeks, according to Google.

Read more here