“Pizza Tech” is a derogatory term that legitimate PC repair businesses use to describe low-priced, fly-by-night computer repair people who repair computers for just enough money to buy pizza and beer.

Their rates are extremely low and reflect their lack of technical qualifications, business registration and ethics. They see nothing wrong with using or installing pirated, illegal or unlicensed copies of Windows or computer programs and will offer to install them for a very low price or for free. So why beware of them?
Their lack of ethics and working for cash under-the-table aside, they can make a real mess of your PC and end up costing you far more than you bargained for. After they have finished with your computer, you may end up having to call a qualified technician to undo their handiwork, fix the original problem as it should have been the first time, and possibly recover your trashed data. One of my customers was charged more than the price of a brand new PC to repair her old computer – after a Pizza tech spent six hours working on it while his tag-along child ran unsupervised throughout her house!

Some Pizza Tech customers may find that their system will not pass Microsoft’s periodic validation checks, leaving them with a system or software they can no longer access without paying Microsoft to make it legal. And would you trust your personal data to the prying eyes of someone patently dishonest, with no morals or principles? Can you be confident that your computer will be free of password-stealing keyloggers, trojans and spyware after a Pizza Tech is done with it? Theft of credit card data and identities is rampant. One of my clients had $13,000 removed from his bank account without his knowledge or approval, so it’s not a hypothetical risk!

After returning from vacation last year, I received a call from one of my customers asking me to come and repair his computer, half-jokingly admonishing me to never go away and leave him alone like that again. In my absence, he had called someone else to fix a problem and swore he’d never to do so again. I said it can’t hurt to try another tech, to which he replied “Oh yes it can!” To reduce the risk of it happening again, I have added Remote Desktop Support services that enable me to fix most problems remotely and still enjoy a vacation once in a while.

How can you spot a Pizza Tech, other than by unbelievably-low prices/rates and offers of free or low-cost software? Ask if they are a registered business and charge taxes on repairs. All computer repair businesses in Ontario are required to collect PST and those with revenues over $30,000 are required to collect GST. Ask for their business registration number for verification. Will they give a receipt and provide proof of identity?

Do they have a website with their own domain name (e.g., businessname.com or .ca) and does it have their business street address? (A small claims court summons can’t be served to a P.O. Box!) Is their phone number in Canada411’s Reverse Number Lookup? If neither of the above, how do you expect to retrieve your computer or contact them in case of a problem or dispute? Do they have testimonials on their website by people whose names you can find in Canada411 or are they fictitious? Depending on the answers to the above, you will have to decide whether or not they are legitimate, qualified and trustworthy.

There is nothing wrong with shopping around for someone to repair your computer, just make sure he/she isn’t a Pizza Tech.

Written by Larry Sabo of Sabo Computer Repair http://sabocomputerrepairs.com/PizzaTech.aspx

Used with permission.

Many times website owners who are new to link building simply don’t know what to expect when it comes to the timeframe for registering backlinks.

A backlink check will tell you how many incoming links are registered with a particular search engine, but it will not tell you how many backlinks you actually have.

Why is that? Well, it usually takes search engines months to re-evaluate incoming links, so if you do a backlink check today, there are likely links that are going into your site that haven’t yet been calculated in.

It would be nice if we could build links and then immediately have them show up in a backlink check, but that’s just not the way the it works.

As you’re building links to your site, here are some ways to keep track of your progress and build links effectively over time:

How To Check Your Backlinks

It’s incredibly easy to do a backlink check for your site. In Google, just type this into the search box (replacing the ‘yourwebsite.com’ part with your URL:

link:http://www.yourwebsite.com/

The results of that search will bring up a list of sites that are linking to your website address. In the upper right hand corner of Google you’ll be able to see a total count of your registered backlinks.

An even better tool is Yahoo Site Explorer https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com which provides a list of your registered backlinks and much more detailed information. Both of these backlink checking tools are free, so you can try each one out (or do both).

Why Are Links not showing up?

Let’s suppose you know that you’ve build links to your site, but nothing is showing up when you do a backlink check (frustrating, I know!).

There are some logical reasons why backlinks may not be showing up:

1) If your site is brand new, chances are it has not been indexed by google yet.

When you launch a new site it does not automatically appear in Google–it usually takes several months for Google to realize that the site is there and to index and categorize it.

Until your site is indexed, it will not show up in any search engine searches and no backlinks will register. You can even do a search for your exact site name or URL and nothing will show up.

If this is your situation, don’t worry! This waiting is something that all website owners go through, and Google, Yahoo and other search engines will eventually index your site.

It can sometimes take anywhere from 1-3 months for a new website to be indexed.

2. Not enough time has elapsed since building the links.

Even if your site is already indexed, it usually takes search engines several months (3-4) to recalculate the backlinks. So, if you have been doing article submissions for the past 2 months and you know for a fact that you have quite a few incoming links, those links will not show up in a backlink check for another month or two.

This doesn’t mean the links aren’t there, they are, the search engine just hasn’t registered them yet.

As you can see, one necessary component of any link building campaign is patience. There will be a time delay from when you build the link to when you see the actual link show up in backlink checks.

Keep in mind, this time delay doesn’t negativity impact your marketing; even if the links haven’t shown up yet, you should continue to market your website. Don’t hope for immediate results, you should be going for a long lasting impact on your search engine ranking for your keywords, rather than a brief traffic that goes drops down after a few days or weeks.

When you’re link building, you need to market consistently. Some great ways to market your forum are posting on forums and blogs with a good page rank or submitting articles to sites like articlesbase.com or ezinearticles.com

It takes time, but you will be rewarded in the long run, just keep working on getting links!

Always remember to stay away from black hat SEO techniques such as link farming, spamming, and keyword stuffing.