| LED Digest 2297: Email is Collapsing |
|
|
|
================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. November 29, 2006 Issue no. 2297 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== "Add to Google" RSS Tip ==-- ~ John Smart "...does this increase you Google ranking?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Transactional Emails Being Ignored? ==-- ~ Joe Halbrook "...provide a link to your customized whitelist instructions." ~ Mike Collins "This is an issue I have struggled with firsthand..." --== The Supplemental Index ==-- ~ Anonymous "Here is my experience..." ~ Dirk Johnson "Over-analysis of links and link profiles is largely a huge waste of time and money..." --== The Email Crisis ==-- ~ Shel Horowitz "Email is collapsing, pure and simple..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Site Hijacked ==-- ~ Tom Aman ========== NEW =================================== From: John Smart Subject: Google RSS feeds I was reading a wiki entry (one of my vices! Where else could I learn how to gain control of an out of control camel? I am sure that will come in useful one day!) Anyway, I saw this link: http://www.google.com/ig/add?feedurl=http://www.wikihow.com/feed.rss ... which will add the RSS to your Google home page (which I love!) I am sure this is well documented, but I am not well known for reading instructions. For all of us considering RSS'ing in the future, this is well worth adding to the page. Looking at the Wiki page, I saw there was a link for the Yahoo version, but I am not a big Yahoo fan, so you will have to get that one yourselves! Now this leads to a bigger picture. Despite their denials, if one has a link to google like above, and some users include the RSS feed from your site, does this increase you Google ranking? It should, because you are showing you have regular updates, and google can monitor that X people include that link on their Google page. John Smart InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Joe Halbrook Subject: Confirm messages > A large percentage of new registrants go through the > trouble of filling out our form, but do not confirm their > registration. Why do you suppose this is? - Dirk Lutzweiler, LED Digest 2296 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1379/55/ Dirk, One thing that may help considerably is to add some prominent text just above your Submit button on your registration page, indicating that the applicant will receive a confirmation email, and that they MUST click a link within that email to confirm their registration. Otherwise, they will not be registered on your site. This could also be noted on the redirection page, after the Submit button is clicked. For your newsletter, another helpful hint would be to provide a link to your customized Whitelist Instructions. I provide a free tool to generate Whitelisting Instructions for any site or email publication. It generates instructions for many of the major email filtering solutions on how to whitelist an email publication, and can be easily customized to fit your site design. It's been used by thousands of site and email publishers for years now. The link to this free tool is located here: http://www.cleanmymailbox.com/whitelist.html Best of success, Dirk. Joe Halbrook cleanmymailbox.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mike Collins Subject: Confirm messages This is an issue I have struggled with firsthand, and I've come to realize that your niche can make a huge difference in your conversion rate for confirmation messages. About 97% of subscribers confirm their subscription to my marketing newsletter, but my niche-related newsletters do not fare so well. One such newsletter (with a decidedly less web-savvy audience) has only a 59% success rate for confirmations. I very recently customized my Subscription Thank You page (I had been using Aweber's default page out of laziness) to include explicit instructions on how to confirm the subscription and to make it feel more like a part of my site. Early indications are that the conversion rate has increased, but it's too early to tell how much. Best of Luck, Mike Collins http://www.fresh-niche-content.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: [name withheld] Subject: An Anonymous Suggestion Hi Adam, If you publish this, I do not want my name or web site published. It relates to one of your recent posts in which part of it provided the suggestion regarding using the Google removal tool. Here is my experience. For several years our web site experienced Top 10 results for multiple pages within our site that has been live since early 2000. In 2005, a vendor, whose product we had promoted since 2000, decided they no longer wanted to market direct to the public and asked us to get the pages for their product removed from out site. After changing all the links I used the G removal tool for each of the 12 pages. Within less than 2 weeks, our site disappeared from top rankings. We dropped to (and hovered between) 70 and 110 and some pages were in the 300 range. We contacted G about once a month for 6 months asking why and received nothing but their canned responses. Over the next 12 months, we looked at everything we could have possibly done to cause this drop (corresponding it dropped our revenue by 90%). Then, almost like magic, and almost exactly 12 months to the day, our site (and most of our pages) came right back to the positions (actually several are better than before) that they had prior to the major drop we had experienced. Since regaining our former positioning, I have read several places that people who do a lot of testing are recommending that you "Do Not" use the Google removal tool for this very reason. The only difference of their tests and our experience is they state a 6 month tour of web site purgatory versus our 12 month tour. Thanks, Anonymous -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Dirk Johnson Subject: Supplemental index & the Google compliance industry Google is going to do what they want. People are going to react to that. Some people in the SEO community will always claim that the sky is falling. It's good for their business to scare people with "it's way more complicated than you can imagine, so you need an expert." The fact is, from what we have seen, it's really quite simple. Provide valid and fresh content, optimize it properly with good title tag, headlines, alt tags, make your site navigable, and get links to it from other relevant sites. Lots of links. And keep getting them. Over-analysis of links and link profiles is largely a huge waste of time and money for the site owner. Is that really what Google wants us to do? Run every website decision through an ever-expanding Google review process? I'd doubt it, and I see a lot of evidence that their algorithm is not as picky as the SEO world wants us to think. There are other search engines that don't use Google's criteria. What about them? What if they use different criteria? What if, no matter what you do, you can't get Google to do what you want? Then what? Google recently punished the BMW site for cloaking. Should everyone that links to BMW remove their links? How soon? What if you are a BMW dealer? How do you really know who's "in" and who's "out", for sure? Or, worse, what site is going to be punished next? Should you be pre-emptive, in some imagined way? How often should you run a link profile on your entire site, in order to "comply" with your arbitrary and ever-expanding Google criteria? Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, annually? What if a critical link to a business partner site goes "bad". Do you have to remove it, as with the BMW scenario? Then what? How much are you willing to pay to do that compliance review task, then act upon the report? And bottom line...what's the return on investment? Is there any return at all, or is it just wasted money that continues to rise in cost, as the SEO world dreams up ever more elaborate criteria that they say needs to be reviewed? I am aware of over a dozen compliance review criteria that could be applied, and I hear about a new one about every month. And worse, is it actually thwarting your goal, by holding you back? Will your SEO consultant who is doing this compliance review work for you ever discuss the ROI of such busywork? Likely not. They couch it as "insurance". Against what, when competitors who do quite well in the search results seem to be ignoring all of it? At some point, some site owners will have their fill of this approach, and kick this kind of money-pit, time-wasting nonsense to the curb, and then just do what seems to work for everyone else. I have often said that the more complicated the SEO strategy, the less grounded in reality it is. Site owners are welcome to buy into the growing "Google compliance" industry. Just realize that many successful competitors are not going down that road, either out of sheer ignorance, or just a basic refusal to care about Google that much. If you think that Google should "run" the World Wide Web, then play along with the self-appointed pundits in SEO world that concoct these complex compliance schemas. If not, then just do what is right for your site and your circumstances. For what it's worth, we just see very strong evidence that the sites that simply cover the basics very thoroughly generally do quite well. They don't play the Google compliance game, beyond just common sense basics. Just something for all to ponder. Best regards, Dirk Johnson, Partner - Operations DomainDrivers LLC www.domaindrivers.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Shel Horowitz Subject: Email > Spam has taken a large bite out of email already. > Where are we headed? - Moderator Comment, LED Digest 2296 Oh, boy, has it ever! Thank you, Adam, for giving me a much-needed chance to vent. Email is collapsing, pure and simple -- and it's gotten much, much worse in the last two or three weeks. I took my email off charter.net and am feeding it directly through my webhost (BlueHost.com), starting in mid-November -- this was to solve problems with undelivered mail in both directions. But... 1. I've gotten hundreds more spams per day in my spamfilter, many of whose subject lines start with a first name followed by "wrote:" (nothing after the colon). I don't know if this style was just invented or if something in the switch opened up my spamfilter to stuff that had been going straight tot he trash before. But it's like 600 spams a day. 2. More of my outbound email is blocked, including absolutely everything I try to send to comcast.net. These are not even transactional emails but often notes to friends. 3. Certain legitimate messages I try to rescue from my spamfilter are being rejected with a 550 error by the server (yet all the trash gets through, it seems) 4. And then there's the simple matter of inbox overload. I find that usually 50 or 100 more messages make it into my inbox each day (that is, get past the spamfilter) than I'm able to read and still get any work done. I am seriously considering setting up a specified address for newsletters and closing my other eboxes, replacing them with a helpticket system. I have serious reservations about doing this, but I can't maintain the status quo. These days, the only way I believe that an email was read is if I get either a response or a return receipt. This was the best technology ever invented for communication -- and for marketing -- and the bastards have absolutely killed it. Vent over -- for now. Shel Horowitz Marketing consulting * copywriting * publishing assistance * speaking How to market ethically/effectively: http://www.frugalmarketing.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Tom Aman Subject: Hijacked > They got so p$#sed off that they came into my computer with a > virus that hid all my drives and took out my windows sys 32 file. - Ray Nicholson, LED Digest 2294 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1373/55/ Regarding the board problem and the takeover by bad guys, one thing you (and anyone else who runs discussion groups) might seriously consider is to create one or more Yahoo groups to use instead of running your own board. I belong to several Yahoo groups that are connected with various Web sites and all discussions take place within the groups. While it may be a bit more hassle for people who do not already have a Yahoo ID, using Yahoo for this lets you easily take complete control over members and postings by requiring your approval for each member to join, (if you want to do this) and by letting you approve each post before it appears (if you want to do this). Groups set up like this are not attractive targets for spammers as you can get rid of them so easily and you can prevent all spam posts from ever appearing. As for the virus problem, can you be sure it was the spammers targetting you specifically (which, for technical reasons, seems unlikely)? I suspect that you just happened to have the bad luck of picking up a virus at the same time as you were dealing with the other problem. In any case, were you running active virus protection software when this happened? Tom Aman Aman Software ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand." Kurt Vonnegut |
