| LED Digest 1862: The Problems Of Autoresponders |
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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 ================================================== Guest Moderator: Published by: Veronica Yuill LED Digest post,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ August 31, 2004 Issue #1862 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Is Microsoft Crawling My Site? ==-- ~ Sarah Hayes "I’m having a big problem with what I think is Microsoft crawling my site continuously... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Email Autoresponders ==-- ~ Rob Palmer "This saves us hundreds of dollars a month that we used to spend on a hosted service..." ~ Joe Halbrook "Recipients lack an of understanding of how to properly whitelist the autoresponder..." --== Natural Search ==-- ~ Cyrille Hallard "...I use the excellent freeware Xenu Link Sleuth to check Web sites for broken links..." --== The Future of SEO ==-- ~ Pat McCarthy "If I look at the statistics of all the sites I manage, most of the traffic either comes from crawler engines or partner relationships which aren't directory-like in nature..." ~ John Barendrecht "I think the reason so many people are turned off by link exchange is that most of it is done by spiders. [...] Do I really want to exchange links with a robot?..." ======= NEW ====================================== From: Sarah Hayes Subject: Is Microsoft Crawling My Site? I’m having a big problem with what I think is Microsoft crawling my site continuously. The site uses osCommerce, although I don’t think this is the problem, it’s just that osCommerce has a Who’s Online section in the admin, so I can monitor it. This IP address does not show up in the other stats packages, so I guess they are blocking it somehow. The IP address in question is 65.54.188.65, which I am told belongs to Microsoft, but is not related to dial-ups. This IP address can hold sometime 10 sessions at the same time, adding items to its carts. Yesterday one cart had the value of nearly £4500 (a customers average order is £35.00). This is happening 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Last month I had to pay over £70 in additional bandwidth and I’ve now had to upgrade my account! This morning we blocked that IP address and now (a few hours later) they are accessing the site using 65.54.188.73. What is going on? Should I block their whole range of IP addresses? Can anyone help? Sarah Hayes ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Rob Palmer Subject: Autoresponders > Anyway, I'm looking for suggestions to other > services. The ones out there (Aweber, GetResponse, > etc) look suspect. We use AutoResponsePlus (www.autoresponseplus.com) and find it does everything we want for our combined autoresponder/mailing list requirements. It can mail to our 120,000 subscribers in less than three hours, and has all the features we were looking for. Also, as you buy the software and run it on your own server, it saves us hundreds of dollars a month that we used to spend on a hosted service. Best wishes Rob Palmer Freelance Work Exchange (Find Work, Make Money) http://www.freelanceworkexchange.com/ ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Joe Halbrook Subject: Autoresponders In LED 1861, Brett Swooshman wrote: > ProAutoresponder has been blacklisted or > tagged as SPAM by just about everyone... > I'm looking for suggestions to other services. Brett, This has become a growing problem with many of the autoresponder series being delivered these days. Again, the reason is multi-fold: 1. Recipients lack an of understanding of how to properly whitelist the autoresponder, which publishers should offer their subscribers in each mailing. There's a free whitelist instructions generator tool located at this URL: http://www.cleanmymailbox.com/whitelist.html 2. Many current spam filtering solutions are still doing heuristic testing of email content, regardless of Sender email address or Subject Line whitelisting. 3. People simply forget that they subscribe to some email autoresponder series, because the duration in days between mailings are too far apart. They then report the mailings as s-pa-m. 4. As ridiculous as it sounds, autoresponders can be imposed (via spamming) on unsuspecting recipients. It's happened to me before, because some don't impose a double opt-in process for subscriptions. Because of the above reasons, there needs to be a better way to 1) insure that permission is granted to receive an autoresponder series, such that the recipient can not claim s/he forgot s/he requested the series, and 2) a delivery mechanism that prevents 3rd party spam filters implemented at either the ISP level or client level from inspecting each mailing in the autoresponder series, and possibly filter one or more mailings. With these two criteria accomplished, one could conceivably continue to use ANY of the existing autoresponder services, without fear of obstructed delivery. Knowing this to be an issue months ago, I developed a service that works in tandem with any autoresponder service to guarantee delivery. It's called EZ-Feeds, and it's strictly permission-based: http://www.ez-feeds.com EZ-Feeds works just like RSS feeds, only it requires little additional work by the autoresponder publisher, it delivers all of the autoresponder series by bypassing the SMTP protocol and all the associated spam filters - because permission has to be expressly granted by each recipient, and it provides all the metrics that are required by autoresponder publishers to track results, even on plain-text autoresponders. Joe Halbrook Permission Technologies Bypass the SMTP protocol and the Spam Filters [Moderator comment] Be careful with this type of solution! A publication I subscribe to recently switched from email to a feed supplied via a browser toolbar. When I read the system requirements and discovered that it only works with IE/Windows, I gave a hoot of incredulous laughter and promptly deleted it from my list of subscriptions. I haven't used IE for several years now (except for Windows Update and Microsoft's Knowledgebase), and an increasing number of people are switching to other browsers. At least RSS feeds are browser- and OS-independent. This type of proprietary system doesn't seem to me to be the way forward -- it runs counter to the entire ethos of the Internet, which is all about open standards for exchanging information. ~ Veronica ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Cyrille Hallard Subject: Natural Search Hello Ledders, Tom Aman, LED 1861 wrote >> To be safe, routinely run link checking software to validate all of the links on the site (i.e. software that will give you some form of report that says "these links are probably broken").<< For an Information Technology Companies Directory in Canada (www.it-careers.ca), I check weekly the broken links from the 3000 links that are listed on my site (Home page URL and Career page URL of companies). To help me to succeed in that task, I use the excellent freeware Xenu's Link Sleuth to check Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html Regards, Cyril Hallard ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Pat McCarthy Subject: The Future of SEO In response to David Yancey's reply in LED # 1860, first I should thank him for the kind words and then point out that I'm actually I'm a HE instead of a SHE. But that happens often online, maybe I need to start going by Patrick. Anyway, I must say I agree with parts of David's response and disagree with parts. David is correct that when you add up all the small directories, yellow page guides, shopping directories, etc. you can end up with a large chunk of the online population using those methods to find sites. However, if I still look at the statistics of all the sites I manage, most of the traffic either comes from crawler engines or partner relationships which aren't directory-like in nature. There isn't much traffic coming in from focused directories/shopping guides/yellow page listings. Now, one could argue that the lack of directory traffic is because I've been focused on crawlers and partners, but you'd be wrong. I've spent significant time getting listed in related directories, shopping guides, and everything of the sort. So, I guess David could be right that as new web users come online they'll use these other methods. I find it a bit hard to predict future trends in the web world, but I still think for a new web user, using a crawling engine is much quicker than clicking around a yellow page guide or directory to find what they want. David argues that crawling tends to work for specific queries but that the large proportion of users are looking for product info, expertise, city guides, travel-related issues, etc. Currently, I still can find relevant info in these areas much faster at Google than I can when trying to first figure out what directory I should use, and then actually use that directory. Nobody is ever really searching for "travel". They may type that in a lot, but that's not what they really want. So yes, new users need to learn how to refine their queries, but this is a process that still seems much quicker than finding the appropriate directory and hoping it has the results. That's really the crux of this problem. If you're new to the web, do you go to Google and type in "travel San Diego", or spend an hour trying to find a travel-related directory that will hopefully have some info about traveling to San Diego? Won't I have to use a crawler even to find that directory? Am I supposed to keep track of 20 different directories for each area of online interaction? My travel directory, my shopping guide, my sports directory? Or, do I use something like Vivante that covers many categories? I do like how it works, but I've already seen quite a few of my favorite sites that aren't in Vivante, and on some of my searches the results weren't ordered in a great relevancy. Palo Alto Software comes up #5 on a search for Palo Alto Software. I'm not trying to negatively critique you though, I do like the site and it's a very ambitious and courageous project. David's conclusion is excellent though. Site owners need to consider *all* sources for traffic, and judge the ROI for their time and money on those sources. I would definitely not rule out directories from my marketing mix. I probably spend much more time doing that than most. While you say that I prefer Google, I currently do prefer it for both my personal search AND for traffic referrals/ROI. However, this is not because it's the cool thing to do, it's simply based on RESULTS. When I personally search, I get what I want very quickly, and for my web sites, Google provides not only a good ROI, but a large quantity of revenue. Now, if you can show me places where I'll get better results in either area, I'm more than open to try it out. I might be able to get a bigger ROI with FindWhat on PPC, but for one sale a week is that ROI worth pursuing with the amount of available time I have to spend on marketing? Time is essential. Most of us don't have enough time in a day to market our site like we should, so if I've got an hour to work on marketing my site, working on something that will help me in the crawlers almost always has a greater ROI than anything else. I would definitely not ignore non-crawler sites. But until I see actual results start showing up, increasing my efforts in these areas is not probable. This could all change in the future though, I'll leave that door open. Pat McCarthy Palo Alto Software http://www.paloalto.com/ ------- new post - same topic ------- From: John Barendrecht Subject: The Future of SEO In LED #1861, Dirk Johnson wrote: > There are many ways to earn links, > (many legitimate, and some not)... I think the reason so many people are turned off by link exchange is that most of it is done by spiders. Everyday, I get some that say "I visited your page and we could benefit form link exchange." There are 2 problems with this. First, they usually use an email address that is only in the source code of my site, not on the human visible part. Do I really want to exchange links with a robot? Second, most of these are not even remotely close to being related to my site. Yes, you could have a car dealership link to a vitamin site. But will it help either one? I am not against linking. When I first started my site, I had about 20 pages. Within 2 weeks of going live, Yahoo linked to 2 pages, without me asking, they found the site somehow. For the first month, they accounted for 98% of my site's traffic. Note to Adam/Veronica -- next time could you warn us if the address that LED comes "from" changes? My very aggressive spam filter didn't like Veronica until I white listed her. In fairness to Veronica, it hates 98% of the people who send me mail. John Barendrecht Dance and Fitness Videos & DVDs. http://www.centralhome.com [Moderator comment] Sorry about the address change, it was inadvertent, and we don't have access to the normal LED address for sending. All will be back to normal when Adam returns! ~ Veronica ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order to learn how to do it." - Pablo Picasso |
