| LED Digest 2302: Stopping Spam? Follow the Money |
|
|
|
================================================== 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 .............................................. December 6, 2006 Issue no. 2302 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== <Moderator Comment> ~ 90% of Email is Spam! ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Questioning SEOs on their Methods ==-- ~ Nathan Holley "First, ask them straight out what their methods are." ~ John Smart "Ask them to prove themselves..." ~ David Spahr "The best people would charge the fair price and not the most." --== The Email Crisis ==-- ~ Marty R. Milette "Stopping sales-related spam should be incredibly easy - just *follow the money*!" ~ John Barendrecht "Perhaps mail servers should be registered like websites?" ~ Joe Halbrook "...there's a marketing opp for someone who might have the time." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== 98% of Websites Ignore the Disabled ==-- ~ GJ Berg ========== NEW =================================== <Moderator Comment> Further to our discussion about the current email crisis, a study has just been release that claims nearly 90% of all email is spam! Here's a snip: ------------------------ "Junk emails are still clogging up Inboxes, with spam accounting for 89.73 per cent of all email traffic, new figures claim. "According to security company SoftScan, spam containing pictures increased dramatically in 2006 and is becoming more sophisticated to confuse anti-spam software. SoftScan said that spammers are using more complex images and colours to trick anti-spam filters. "According to the figures, more than 60 per cent of spam comes from Europe while only five per cent is from South East Asia." Source: http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/102469.html ------------------------ It appears that spam is getting worse than ever and email is getting ever more compromised as a business communications tool. With things so bad, what does the future have in store? Email technology is now appearing vulnerable and naive - it's a free playground for unethical, greedy spammers. More below in "The Email Crisis" thread... -Adam ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Nathan Holley Subject: Questions for potential SEO's > Gimme one word (if possible) to ask a business owner who wants > to sell me SEO services on his website that I can use to ask him > the pertinent questions about [his methods for improving rankings]. - Pieter van der Vyver, LED Digest 2301 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1389/55/ Hmm... that's a deceptively difficult question to answer. There's not a single word or question to ask - that's obvious - but the questions you *need* to ask require a certain level of knowledge and sophistication. First, ask them straight out what their methods are. Do they practice link buys? Reciprocation? If so, send up some mental red flags. Buying links is a very advanced technique that has to be done correctly (see this thread on buying links: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1364/172/ ). And reciprocation... well I don't want to raise the ire of Dirk Johnson and other pro reciprocaters... but this can sometimes work against you more than it can help. More specific info? For starters see Aaron Wall with some recent comments about this: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001940.shtml#17111 . Quote: ------------------- "If [reciprocal links] put you in your topical clique they are probably great. If not I think there is a poor risk to reward ratio to getting too aggressive with it." ------------------- Next, ask them for some client examples. They may not be forthcoming - that's okay - ask them for some SEO case studies they've done. They must have these to be considered, even if it's just for their own site. Run a search for their site and check out backlinks, domain history, etc. This can tell you how long they've been in the game. Call them on the phone! You wouldn't believe how often people make decision by emails and email is not the best way to communicate. Do they offer reporting? If so ask for a sample report. Are they big on SEM stuff - PPC, etc? Talk to them about this. Again - this requires some knowledge of SEO; otherwise you're just asking questions and nodding your head. Hope it helps Nathan Holley -------- new post - same topic --------- From: John Smart Subject: Questioning SEOs Ask them to prove themselves -- they should be able to give examples -- such as: We worked on site xyz.com, if you search for this phrase "whatever" on google, you will see them come up at position X, then if you go to xyz.com/credits, you will see our name listed as the SEO company (I always put a credit page in -- gotta be able to prove I did the work!) I hope that helps, John Smart InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World -------- new post - same topic --------- From: David Spahr Subject: What Questions to Ask SEOs? > I am very much aware the best person will be the one paid > best, but gimme a "word" or two that I can "test" the owner. - Pieter van der Vyver, LED Digest 2301 I think it's possible that there may not be a correlation between money and best people. The best people would charge the fair price and not the most. Why bother with asking for a word if you believe this is true? A lot of SEO is quite simple. It needs to be about some traditional ideas about marketing as well as design technique. Rather than letting people bamboozle you with arcane "techniques", ask them about their marketing strategy. Even if you were to say the SEO is actually a subset of search engine marketing, SEO is no good unless it addresses this. You can read a good tutorial at bruceclay.com. Marketing. David Spahr * Stereoviews.com * Antique-Photography.com -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Marty R. Milette Subject: Email Stopping sales-related SPAM should be incredibly easy -- just FOLLOW THE MONEY! At some point, a credit card processor will be processing the payment for the order -- and THAT is the perfect point to bring the system to a screeching halt. Of course, that makes the assumption that the credit card companies WANT to stop a major source of revenue. Hmmmm -- maybe not. One system I thought about would be to have credit card companies issue a fake set of credit card credentials that could be used to place a fake order from a spam site you wanted to report. Once the spammer's credit card processor tries to process an order with the fake number, all would be logged and the alarms would go off. Another solution would be to have millions of people place orders then immediately issue chargebacks to shut-down the vendor, but that would be risky and probably illegal. Must be other ways to cut off the money supply... Marty R. Milette -------- new post - same topic -------- From: John Barendrecht Subject: Email Like others on this list, I want to stop spam but not lose important email. Our mail server's anti-spam and anti-virus is updated daily. However, I was still getting bombarded with "Hi, it's Lucy." Since your email address is harvested by robots, I thought there must be a way to beat these cyborgs. I watched the "Terminator" trilogy for clues. Sure enough, they have a fault. They can only read the source code of your website, but not the visible text like humans do. So wherever my email is displayed, I have a link that automatically fills in the subject line. I also instruct people not to remove the subject line: http://www.centralhome.com/contact.asp . I tested this for a few weeks by sending others to spam folder. Now I have changed the mail server to reject emails without proper subject - Remote host said: 554 5.7.1 Message cannot be accepted, BW filter rejection). You can try this on infoline. I also reject email that where the IP doesn't resolve. This stops most spam servers on a dedicated IP. However, some legitimate email is lost as some CGI forms, etc. send mail from a spare IP that has no reverse entry. This may explain why some of your double-opt in emails are getting lost or why some newsletters don't make it through. But legitimate mailers, like LED, identify themselves properly. My forms are forwarded to my mail server and it sends out the mail, rather than SMTP. ISPs could do more to stop spam. My ISP blocks all outgoing mail on port 25 unless it goes to their mail server. This would stop the zombies. I get around by sending my mail out on port 366, so this is not perfect. The other way to stop spam would be to fix "the internet," so all mail servers identified themselves properly and no faking of IP. Perhaps mail servers should be registered like websites? And no hiding of contact information. But I'll leave that to smarter people than me. But I'm dreaming -- as long as ISPs make money selling bandwidth, software companies make money selling anti-spam and av software, this problem isn't going to go away. Best regards, John Barendrecht Centralhome.com Company Inc. http://www.centralhome.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Joe Halbrook Subject: Email > How does one make this switch? (to RSS contact forms) - Nancy Cardinali, LED Digest 2300 Nancy, As you know, a few years ago I developed an server-side solution that could be used to convert an existing HTML form to generate and append items to a secure RSS feed, instead of sending preformatted emails to the web site owner. I never went public with that application, due to time constraints. In researching the answer to your question concerning how to make the switch to RSS, I really find it amazing that none of the hosted web form solutions and CGI form-to-email script authors provide the RSS functionality. (Obviously, there's a marketing opp for someone who might have the time. :-) However, Tom Aman, in LED Digest #2301 offers some excellent practical suggestions to prevent form abuse. Also, feel free to contact me privately, if you'd like to discuss this further. If you want to get started looking at RSS, I provide a fair resource page at this URL: http://www.info-for-life.com/2 Joe Halbrook http://www.cleanmymailbox.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: GJ Berg Subject: 98% of web sites do not service disabled Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6210068.stm Exerpt: --------------------- "In order to reach the minimum standards - tested against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) - websites needed to provide adequate text descriptions for graphical content so that visually impaired people could 'read' pictures. 93% of the websites failed to meet those guidelines. "A further 73% failed to make the grade because of their reliance on JavaScript for some of the website's functionality. JavaScript does not work with some screen readers used by those with impaired vision. "Ninety eight percent did not follow industry web standards for programming code, meaning the foundations for web accessibility simply were not there." --------------------- gj berg Go SHARKS!!! ------------------------------------------------------- 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "If one dream should fall and break into a thousand pieces, never be afraid to pick one of those pieces up and begin again." - Flavia Weedn |
