| LED Digest 1996: Orphan Pages, also List Ethics |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest post, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. July 19, 2005 Issue #1996 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== <Moderator Comment> --== Orphan Pages ==-- ~ Roy Williams "...search engines list some pages as a 'Supplemental Result'..." --== Contracts and SEO / SEM ==-- ~ Bill Davison "Are there any high-minded essential SEO's who offer a written contract to the client...?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== List Ethics ==-- ~ Mark Whitman "If you just want a legal way to send to the list, that's simple - the Can Spam Act." ~ Trevor Johnson "BestPrac.org's principles state one situation where using an acquired list is legitimate..." ~ Sheryl Coppenger "...where did the list come from?" --== Hidden Link Swapping ==-- ~ Steven Rothberg "...we stopped trading reciprocal links years ago." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Inbound Link Numbers ==-- ~ Brad Waller ~ Michael Martinez ======= NEW ====================================== <Moderator Comment> There's some great feedback coming in about the status of our little LED list. Thank you! I'm going to hold off on publishing them for now though, because they would take up too much space and we've got some good discussions going. I'll sprinkle them in throughout the week instead. Have a great week, Adam ---------------------- From: Roy Williams Subject: Search Engine indices It occurs to me that search engines list some pages as a 'Supplemental Result'. I read that this means that this is an 'orphan' page that has no incoming links. My question is - how did Google list it? If there was a link to this page which has now vanished, how did Google know? It seems that they keep an index at 'their end', and periodically go through it - a sort of 'internal spidering'? Is this true? Real gone, Roy Williams Nervous Records www.nervous.co.uk -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Bill Davison Subject: SEO pricing contracts Are there any high-minded essential SEO's who offer a written contract to the client guaranteeing a greater fixed return on investment, or is SEO just another one of those "trust me" hyperboles? Bill Davison ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Mark Whitman Subject: List ethics > Is there a legal and ethical way to use an email > list you've acquired from another source? - Brent Duncan, LED 1995 Is this a trick question? Yah, delete the list. Do you have permission from the people on that list to send anything to them? If so, send away. If you don't have everyone's permission, sending in bulk to that list is spamming in all cases. What's so hard to understand about the term "bulk unsolicited commercial email"? I'm assuming your message is commercial, color me cynical. If you just want a legal way to send to the list, that's simple - the federal government has made it very easy for you with a little thing called the Can Spam Act. Just comply with it (very easy) and you'll be spamming legally. Mark Whitman -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Trevor Johnson Subject: List ethics Let's deal with the ethical side of that question. (The legal issue may differ markedly from country to country - not only of the senders, but also of the recipients. You can almost be sure that you'll be breaking the law in one country or another, no matter where you are located.) There is a question that should have preceded the one asked.... ie: "Is there an ethical way to ACQUIRE a list from another source?" Answer that question, and you are well on the way to answering the original question. The answer to this second (should have been first) question is.... *drum roll* Sometimes, but rarely. BestPrac.Org's Principles of Best Practice in Email Spam Prevention (http://www.bestprac.org/principles.htm) state one situation where using an acquired list is legitimate - where it has been acquired as part of the acquisition of another business as a going concern. I've seen some honest list operators who have sold their lists first of all notify their subscribers that the list has a new owner. The old owner announces and explains the change of ownership, introduces the new owner, then reminds subscribers of their right to opt-out. Others go a step further, a step more honest again, and recommend that existing subscribers resubscribe to a list owned by the new owner. That way, all subscribers voluntarily and KNOWINGLY go through the confirmed-opt-in process once again. (Some marketers will argue that you'll lose subscribers that way. The answer to that is that they are subscribers that don't want to remain on the list - so their choice should be honoured.) One unfortunately common, though highly unethical approach is that some vendors sell lists (not just to one buyer, but to multiple, sometimes hundreds of buyers), claiming that they are "opt-in lists". The assertion is ludicrous. No-one opted in to the list of the new buyer. The unethical vendor of such lists may defend themselves by claiming that, when people opted-in, they agreed to allow their details to be sold..... Oh, come on. NO-ONE *knowingly* agrees that you can sell their email address to anyone and everyone who wants it. Tricking people into consenting by having a very discrete link to a privacy policy on another page, written in 6 point type, two thousand lines in length with one paragraph inconspicuously buried in the middle of it where subscribers "consent" to allow their details to be sold is unquestionably unethical - as would be the use of such email addresses by anyone who buys the list. (A less extreme but still unethical ploy is to place a check-box with the default already checked on the subscription form.) Consent is NOT consent if it is obtained by trickery and deception and the subscriber has no idea that they have even given such "consent". Ninety nine percent of the time, though, the only honest ways to use lists are: * Build your own list of confirmed (double)-opt-in subscribers; or * Buy advertising space in legitimate, confirmed-opt-in ezines (such as LED, for example). Trevor Johnson, Chairman BestPrac.Org http://www.bestprac.org -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Sheryl Coppenger Subject: List ethics Legal is highly dependent upon the jurisdiction your in and the jurisdictions you're sending email to. I am not your lawyer, but since it isn't easy to determine where the recipient is I'd assume the worst case. A couple of sources for researching laws: www.spamlaws.com www.cauce.org Ethical is a higher standard. And IMO, unless you know for a fact that the people on the list opted for "carefully chosen partner" email or something like that, you're on shaky ground. If you're talking about one of those "20 million opt-in addresses for $50" they're no more genuine than the $20 rolexes. I guess the next question should be, "where did the list come from?" Sheryl Coppenger -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Steven Rothberg Subject: Links > ... even though I can't find the links that are listed > on these blind pages, do the search engines spider > them? Do they add to my link popularity anyway? If > they went away, would it make any difference? - William Ernest Waites, LED 1995 For a search engine to find a links page, there must be a link to the links page from another page which has already been indexed by the search engine. For example, imagine a typical site. It has 10 to 20 pages, of which one is a links page and another is the home page. The home page would include links to at least one interior page and that page would link to at least one more page etc. More likely, the home page links to at least a handful of the interior pages and each of those links to another handful. On many sites, the home page would link to all of the interior pages, including the links page. Yet none of the pages on the site will be indexed by the search engines until a page on another site first links to at least one of the pages on the site in question. How do you get that link to your site? Two primary ways: (1) submit your pages to the handful of major search engines and (2) ask another site to link to you. Both are free and easy and critical to building traffic. Now that we've covered that ground, let's answer the question: if a links page has no links to it, will it be indexed by the search engines. Although it is unlikely that it would be, it is possible. If the webmaster or some other person submitted the links page to a search engine and the search engine chose to index it, then the links page would be indexed by the search engines and theoretically could be found by someone surfing. But if that page has no other inbound links and is essentially just a long list of links to other sites, the search engines will recognize its uselessness to virtually every conceivable surfer and will rank it so low that only the most illogical of surfers would ever find it. By the way, we stopped trading reciprocal links years ago. A link from my links page to yours in exchange for a link from your links page to mine does neither one of us much good. And if you take down your link to my site, which happens a lot, then I'm now linking to a site that probably is of no value to my users and therefore of no value to me. Steven Rothberg http://www.collegerecruiter.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Brad Waller Subject: Inbound links > In fact, a recent study suggests there is > considerably less overlap in the databases > than has been previously estimated by third > parties. - Michael Martinez, LED 1994 > Please Michael, show me this fact. Please > show me the details of the study that you report. > Please point out the facts. - Simon, LED 1995 I remember the study Michael is referring to, but when looking for it I found an earlier one from a year ago that says: ---------------------- "Thumbshots Ranking researchers have been tracking overlaps for popular queries for several months and found a general increase in overlapping search results between Yahoo and Google." (http://www.thumbshots.com/corporate/press/20040517-1.pxf) ---------------------- This might be the original study that the article I recall came from: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~asignori/web-size/ Here are some quotes: ---------------------- " In this short paper, we revise and update the estimated size of the indexable Web to at least 11.5 billion pages as of the end of January 2005. We also estimate the relative size and overlap of the largest Web search engines." "Analyzing the coverage of each engine over the 5 rounds, we obtained the following engines coverages Google=76.16%, Msn Beta=61.90%, Ask/Teoma=57.62%, Yahoo!=69.32%" ---------------------- Danny Sullivan talks about the issues in his articles: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041111-084221 and http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/article.php/3512376 Brad Waller Manage and Sell your own Banners http://adjungle.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Inbound links > Google has been showing only partial inbound links for > a couple of years to discourage SEO specialists from > running queries against their database. - Michael Martinez, LED 1994 > You say this Michael as if it is fact. Please point > me to the Google resource that explains that. - Simon, LED 1995 It is, actually, a VERY WELL DOCUMENTED fact, widely reported throughout the SEO world. The primary source of information is Googleguy, an anonymous Google employee who participates in a few SEO forums. For example, on November 19, 2004, he wrote: "I'm pretty sure I've said it several times. Google's link: command shows some, but not all backlinks to the specified url." > Please show me the details of the study > that you report. Please point out the facts. Here. It's easy enough to find on the Web: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~asignori/web-size/ > ... to be honest with you I think you spread many falsehoods > and then fail miserably to back them up with facts. That dog won't hunt. Michael Martinez, Author Understanding Middle-earth, Parma Endorion, and Visualizing Middle-earth http://www.michael-martinez.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. 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