| LED Digest 2215: AOL Email Delivery Rates |
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7 posts on 4 topics, including Email Delivery Fall Offs, Improving
Rankings, Anchor Text and Linking, and Traffic Portals - Traffic Swarm.
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======== CONTINUING ===============================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 Reg. 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 ............................................. August 1, 2006 Issue no. 2215 ............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Email Delivery Fall Offs ==-- ~ Steven McCall "I never thought of GoodMail as much as I did HTML." <Moderator Comment> "It is very difficult to effectively filter email these days." ~ Pepper Kay "AOL tech support either does not have a clue OR couldn't care less." --== Suggestions on Improving Rankings ==-- ~ Mary Johnson "Make sure you have "ownership" to all accounts set up for your website." ~ Chris Nielsen "[We] belong to a very small group of SEOs that do not practice what I call 'targeted SEO'." --== Anchor Text & Linking ==-- ~ Michael Martinez "There is no evidence whatsoever that Google has made any changes to the core algorithm." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Traffic Portals? Traffic Swarm? ==-- ~ Tom Anson From: Steven McCall Subject: Email deliveries > Has anyone noticed a fall off on email deliveries lately? > I suspect that this all has to do with both AOL and Yahoo's > agreements to use Goodmail... - John Wagner, LED 2214 We too have seen this with our clients. However it hasn't been recent for us; it's been going on for quite sometime. I never thought of GoodMail as much as I did HTML. Are your newsletters or emails mostly text or HTML? I'm going to start sending out text emails again (did this years ago) with the only link being to the HTML newsletter which we'll now display on the site. Hopefully this will increase the read-through or open-rate of the emails. We'll see, of course. Steven McCall http://www.sundownerfacts.com <Moderator Comment> I can speak to this. One of the lists we host recently underwent huge changes. At the beginning of the summer it still had over 180,000 subscribers. Now it has, well... keep reading. It is an old list, having been published since 1998 or so (I'll just call it "List X"). A large portion of the subscribers to List X were the result of co-registration, a sometimes dubious enterprise in my opinion, that took place in early 2001. Early last month we began a controlled audit of all of our lists, including the LED and List X. What we found wasn't a shock to me, as I had suspicions about List X's subscriber integrity, but it was extremely surprising to the publisher. As we rolled out auto-deletions across our lists, the solid ones withstood the audit and the subscriber numbers barely changed. For example, the LED began with just under 41,000, and after the auto-delete cleanings retained over 99% of its subscribers. Today numbers have climbed over the 41k mark. But List X didn't fare nearly as well. It experienced massive attrition as auto-deletes bulldozed over 130,000 subscribers off the list! Today it has roughly 40,000 real-live email addresses, and 5% of these are currently being monitored as suspicious. The interesting thing about this is in the results: 75% of the auto-deletes were AOL and Yahoo subscribers, no doubt the bulk of the old co-registration strategy. Since I was suspicious of so many AOL and Yahoo subscribers being removed, I examined the removed addresses, and with the help of our email distribution software, bulk confirmed that all of them were in fact bad. Since we are on whitelists for AOL and Yahoo, I was glad to see that the recent Goodmail situation hadn't been the factor hiding behind the curtain. The lesson in all this is to build email lists the hard way: one subscriber at a time. How this relates to email delivery fall-offs I'm not sure, but I hope this sheds some light on another area of the publishing situation. I think there's a larger picture here as well, one we've covered in depth before: the problems inherent in email delivery amidst so much UCE and spam. It is very difficult to effectively filter email these days. Just last week I missed an important email from Yahoo and actually received a phone call from the company alerting me that it may have landed in the spam folder. An auto-response from Google Analytics also landed in the trash bin. And I am notoriously picky about reading and monitoring my email, as I have been running discussion lists for years where every post is valuable and needs to be received, read and filed. Solutions? First of all, good old RSS. Well, it's not old, but it's good! Real good. I'm setting up feeds for the LED Digest and the archives so that content updated on the site can be monitored more efficiently. I'll also encourage email subscribers to add the RSS feed to their bookmarks. Secondly, subject lines. They are very, very important. Emails need to be easily recognized. The From and Subject headers should be easily identifiable and catchy. Readership improves on the LED when there's a catchy or alluring tagline - sometimes more difficult a task than I ever thought it would be. Thirdly, whitelists and authentication. As John Wagner mentioned, getting on AOL and Yahoo's "good guy lists" should be priorities. An SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, is also important and should be implemented. As John mentioned, AOL requires a published SPF in order for you to be whitelisted. What does it do? Basically, it authenticates your identity as an email publisher. Find out more here and use the wizard to create one: http://www.openspf.org/ Here's an interesting article on authentication (old, but still useful): http://clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3388371 Here's another dated article on improving AOL subscriber readership: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3389391 Just some ideas from me. I'd love to hear more from LEDer's about this. -Adam -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Pepper Kay Subject: Email Delivery Fall Offs > We seed our mailing lists with our own accounts > and over the past several months have noticed a > drop off in mail being delivered to [AOL and Yahoo]... - John Wagner, LED 2214 Yes... I have items in my AOL spam folder every morning that are NOT spam... these items are the SAME items every morning and there is nothing the least bit controversial or noteworthy... I have been in touch with AOL Tech Support at least a half dozen times with no success ... I continue to receive 'advice' from them that is a rehash of everything I have already done - already do - and will continue to do so to alleviate the problem ... AOL Tech Support either does not have a clue OR couldn't care less. Thanks, Pepper Kay -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Mary Johnson Subject: Improving rankings Buyer beware! You may be paying to have SEO work done by others using "agency" accounts that you do not have rights to. This may explain why some "lose ground" when switching SEO firms. I have a customer who hired an "agency" SEO firm. Among other things, that firm was paid to set up Google Analytics for tracking. Aside from the fact that they never "validated" the report data (data was not correct due to setup complications with 3rd party shopping cart), what the customer did not know was that an "agency" account was used -- not a unique Google Analytics account "owned" by the customer. When that SEO firm was no longer under contract, the customer lost all access to the Analytics account and any money spent towards setup. Lesson Learned: Make sure you have "ownership" (username / password access) to all accounts set up for your website. This way, you are in control and can build upon work done by others instead of having to start over. Mary Johnson, Software Engineer Web Site Helper www.websitehelper.com "Web It Up to the Next Level" -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Chris Nielsen Subject: Improving rankings > Pay money to an SEO company to give your site > [a] lift. But they are a bit like drug pushers in that > once you stop taking the fix, your site nosedives. - James Miller, LED 2213 > When my clients stop using my services, their > sites remain just as visible in the search engines > as they always were, and in many cases do even > better over the years. - Jill Whalen, LED 2214 Sounds like a dream, or the ranting of a mad person doesn't it...? I think Jill and I belong to a very small group of SEOs that do not practice what I call "targeted SEO". This is the common practice of selecting only a small number of keywords or phrases and then optimizing to get the best rankings possible. While this can be very effective, it also generally requires a lot of time / money and may not be cost-effective for smaller clients. And because of search engines rule changes and competing sites, if continual maintenance and adjustments are not made, those rankings generally slip. By focusing on the content of your site and less on the "targets", you can optimize your site in a more general or diversified way and see the kind of results that Jill mentions. I felt I should contribute to this topic since it's what I've been doing for about 7 years after being inspired by some of Jill's early writings. I can confirm that the results she mentions are what I have seen for my clients as well. But I will admit there are times after a few years when a client's site traffic has started to decline, but this is generally when little or no updating has been done to the site. Thank you, Chris Nielsen www.nielsentech.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Linking > A site I run was #1 in Google (searching from the US) for over > a year for the term [mannequin Parisien] because of a single > link. My site is in English and doesn't contain either of those > words, but the link was from a French site based in Quebec. - Bob Gladstein, LED 2214 A lot of well-intentioned SEOs have groped blindly in the dark around these technical points for years. Google has documented how it handles link anchor text, going all the way back to the original Backrub paper published by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their algorithm has always weighted link anchor text in some way. Where SEOs continue to stumble on link anchor text is in failing to grasp the fact that 1,000 inbound links sharing the same keywords in their anchor text have the same effect as repeating those keywords on the target document 1,000 times. It's as simple as that. Yes, over the past year, things have changed. But just because they have changed doesn't mean that Google has suddenly started weighting things differently. They don't have to make such radical changes to an algorithm that only looks at data they control its access to. We know for sure that they have changed the mix by filtering the data. We therefore don't have to assume that they have changed the algorithm. There is, so far, no evidence whatsoever that Google has made any changes to the core algorithm. They've never had to make those types of fundamental changes. All they have had to do is filter the data going to the algorithm. But SEOs insist on concocting wild, unsubstantiable theories and passing them around. And the more often a wild, unsubstantiable theory is repeated, the more credible it seems, and the more believable it becomes. As I am sure you have seen me, Jill, and others say in various discussions through the years: you don't control the search results. Regardless of whether you change anything, everyone else is changing stuff. The database is constantly adding new content and dropping old content. So just because non-English rankings change for an English document that is linked to with non-English anchor text doesn't mean that Google started looking at link anchor text differently. You don't present enough data to draw any supportable conclusions. If that is all the data you have, you do yourself a great disservice by attempting to draw any conclusions at all. Michael Martinez http://www.michael-martinez.com/ http://michael-martinez.blogspot.com/ "Cuando Maria canta, ella canta para mi" ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Tom Anson Subject: What's this with Traffic Portals? Greetings, fellow LED-ers. I've been a long-time participant of this forum and have learned a lot over the years. In fact, probably everything that I've done right online has been linked in some way to this list. For this I'm very, very grateful to all of you. This past week, I was introduced to something that I just don't know what to make of. The company is called Veretekk.com (http://www.veretekk.com/). One of its big deals is in creating traffic portals. The idea is to offer free stuff online, advertising it on FFA sites, and when people come to get the free stuff, they are introduced to your business opportunity and sign up as a lead. I'm sure this is overly simplified, but it's the basic concept, as I understand it. Another thing that is used by this program (or the person I know who is using it) is Traffic Swarm. Looking over the Veretekk site and remembering (or mis-remembering) what I've heard about Traffic Swarm, I think I know what I should think, but my associate swears by this. She is very happy with her results (although I can't get anything specific from her). I honestly can't imagine how she could get anything worthwhile from this / these program/s, but thought I'd put it out there for your expert opinions (of which I'm sure there are many ;-) ). Tom Anson Anson Aromatic Essentials http://www.therapeutic-grade.com
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