I just got this in my email and it is enough to shake up any business owner. My email stated that a William Jackson had filed a complaint against me with the Better Business Bureau.

First I have never had a customer by this name and so I figured it was a scam or virus hoax, but the note sure looked legitimate, but I did not open the PDF attachment. I sent the BBB a note for clarification and then did a search on the Web.

This is what I found. First PDFs can now be exploited for virus attacks. Second the BBB has posted a notice that this is a scam and a new way to embed VB Script using their name. The link in our blog post title will take you to the Better Business Bureau site so you can read all about it and make sure that you are not a victim.

For me, I was a bit shaken up. I really pride myself on offering total customer satisfaction and work really hard to assure it, so to think that there was a customer who had a problem I did not know about threw me for a loop. Until I realized I had no customer by this name.

In fact one of the triggers to identify this may be a hoax was the messages headers were masked and the PDF file had a funny name.

Make sure you are not a victim, just delete the message if it comes from the fictitious address operations@bbb.org .

You’ve seen them, but may not know what they are called. You know the block of content on a site that is just keywords and some words are big and some are small. They are called Buzz Clouds or Swickis. I don’t have one on this blog, but you can visit Web-World Watch and see one on the right side bar near the bottom.

Whatever they are, they are interactive and allow your site visitors to actively participate in adding more keywords, letting you know the keywords they think are important and to search for more information on your site and the web on the keywords included in your buzz cloud.

If you want to start one, and by the way set up is FREE. Just click the post title to go to my favorite Swicki from Eurekster. It is super easy to set up and you can add the HTML that is generated in your blog template or add it to your new Blogger layout if you are using it in the add custom HTML widget.

Swicki even automatically lets you know when you’ve had click activity on your Swicki. I think that you will find what others think is interesting and adding one is just another way to create interactivity and make your site more interesting and of value to readers.

MFAs or sites Made For AdSense, also known as AdSense Arbitrage sites are being banned from the Google Content Network effective Juan 1, 2007. Personally I think that this is good news, but in the professionals forums you should hear the squawking.

Made for AdSense or AdSense Arbitrage sites are somewhat shady sites that play on the misspellings of popular domains and exist for one reason to entice people who really land there by accident to click an ad and generate click income for the site owner. A whole cottage industry has been developed catering to this particular strategy with huge AdWord’s spend budgets being used to actually drive traffic to an arbitrage site. Typically the site owner moves in and out of domains quickly, sometimes even using the three day domain period and then returning the domain to ICANN at no charge to work the traffic. What you should know is that this is not a legitimate business making opportunity and shaded in gray.

There are many involved in the field who would hotly contest my comments and say that this is free enterprise at its best, but I have long felt that these were not legitimate business efforts and finally Google has recognized that and is actively shutting down these account. Webmasters involved in this “industry” will now have to look for another avenue to scam people into clicking their links and inflating their profits at the expense of “real advertisers”. I say thanks Google for getting rid of this blot in the AdSense program.