| LED Digest 1931: Spam Ramifications, also Targeting SpamCop |
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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 adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................... February 9, 2005 Issue #1931 ............................................... .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== --== The Ramifications of Spam ==-- ~ Phil Tanny "...a typical Internet user now spends about 10 working days a year dealing with spam." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== RSS Feeds ==-- ~ Ken Evoy "SEO benefits? Yes, but not the way that it's being pushed right now. I hate to cause a stir, but..." ~ Joe Halbrook "I have since put up a page here for easy access..." --== Sacking SpamCop ==-- ~ Tom Aman "Having run foul of Spamcop...I adopt a slightly different approach." ~ Bill Davison "...is Julian Haught and his Spamcop vigilantes really helping or exacerbating the spam problem?" ======== NEW ===================================== From: Phil Tanny Subject: Ramifications of Spam Just read an interesting article on spam by Tom Jellers of the New York Times. The article reports: ------------------------ "In the year since the Can Spam Act went in to effect in January 2004, unsolicited junk email on the Internet has come to total perhaps 80 percent of all email sent, according to most measures. That is up from 50 to 60 percent of all email before the law went in to effect." "Industry analysts estimate that the total cost of spam to businesses in 2005, in terms of lost productivity and network maintenance, will be about $50 billion, - $17 billion in the United States alone." "A survey from Stanford University in December showed that a typical Internet user now spends about 10 working days a year dealing with spam." ------------------------ The article went on to report that filtering software has become significantly better at identifying spam, and that spammers have responded to this in a predictable manner, by sending more spam. These are just highlights of a good article, if this topic is of interest you can buy the entire article here: http://snipurl.com/cn0f [nytimes.com] I do not work or sell for the NY Times! :-) Phil Tanny http://links-for-you.com ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Ken Evoy Subject: RSS Hi to all, Wow! A couple of subjects dear to my heart recently... "dream affiliate programs" and now, RSS!! :-) > World Wide Brands (publishers of the Drop Ship Source Directory) > have provided a very elegant solution for their affiliates... and > has the added bonus of not requiring an RSS reader. How > about it Ken? - Steve Pronger, LED 1930 I like this a lot. There are three ways to actually use RSS... A) Our implementation is an easy, risk-free way to accomplish a fair amount without having to introduce anything fancy for affiliates. As you point out, it's a bit clunky, but it gets quite a bit done... 1) refers visitors to our new powerful www home page which clearly differentiates SBI! from all the noise 2) sets the affiliate cookie 3) gives you a shot at an immediate sale since they're ON the site 4) AND then reminds them to subscribe to the RSS feed (the Site Update feed is extremely popular -- it seems that a lot of folks like to poke inside our "minds" to see what we do, and why). After that, each time they see something of interest, they already have your cookie when they visit. World Wide Brands does some terrific stuff, both their product and their marketing. And they take RSS in a different direction, essentially publishing the feed on YOUR site through JavaScript ("JS"). The jury is out on whether PHP or JS is better to do this. My vote is on JS but I know this will cause a huge uproar among the PHP backers. From the affiliate's point of view, Steve, I like this because... 1) it's clean and simple 2) it's risk-free -- since the engines can only see that snippet of js with the worldwidebrands.com URL and your aff code in the source code of your entrepreneur_magazine.htm page, there's no risk of the engines concluding it is replicated content, a risk with PHP (more on this below) 3) I think it's a great idea for OUR leading feed, "SiteSell Sites Updates" ( http://rss.sitesell.com/sitesell-rss-feeds.html ). It is already immensely popular, our traffic increasing from this feed and growing by leaps and bounds -- we have just broken inside Alexa's Top 100 English sites, #96 at the moment... Steve, I think it would be a fairly simple matter, to make a dupe of this feed that affiliates could use to publish on their sites. I've sent this to the techs. If it's easily implementable (by affiliates, that is), there is a $500 prize in it for you -- as you know, we reward great ideas that we weren't considering. It's one of those "why didn't I think of it" ideas that I love others to get for me! :-) > I'd be keen to hear from any other affiliate marketers who are > experimenting with RSS. The jury is still out for me, but it's early > days. Ditto for using RSS as an SEO tool. This goes back to JS vs RSS for publishing RSS feeds on third party sites. Like I said, publishing a feed for affiliate purposes (above) is a no-brainer. I'm glad someone else's brain was functioning, Steve! Huge potential here. :-) Now, what about the "SE benefits?" It's obviously useful for getting new sites into Yahoo! Search and MSN Search quickly (by subscribing your own feed to My Yahoo! and now, to, to My MSN!). Here's information about that on a page that is still under development and NOT officially reachable from the our main rss.sitesell.com site (still under development)... http://rss.sitesell.com/rss-6.html SEO benefits? Yes, but not the way that it's being pushed right now. I hate to cause a stir, but... The whole hullabaloo about publishing original material via JS or PHP and getting "SE points" for it (on the non-originating) site. is a waste of time. If you use JS, the engines will note the URL of course, so at best, it will count this in the same way an inbound link would now count ("good" for the original publisher) -- the engines won't "see" the content on your site, just that JS snippet. PHP providers will say THAT is the advantage of PHP to publish original material on your site, since the engines WILL see the content on your site. But THAT is actually a danger and in the long run, will not prove to be of benefit. In case this is not clear, let's go to an example... Suppose I publish material on aardvarks and offer an RSS feed on it. YOU have an aardvark site. Should you publish my RSS feed on your site? The answer is YES if... 1) you are an affiliate and can earn some income and it fits your site, the way Steve Pronger just outlined! 2) you LOVE the material and essentially want to provide a service to your visitors by providing this excellent material. Please note... There is nothing new to this scenario (if you take a deep breath and step back) -- the "older" version of this is linking back to a site that you think your visitors should know about. Needless to say, if your site is commercial, this "link back" would have to be an excellent site and preferably one that does not compete with yours nor support (i.e., link to) competitors of yours. So, how will the engines treat it? Simple, if you think like an engine. They'll treat it the way they would treat a link to that content-generating site... as a vote of confidence. Nothing more, nothing less. If PHP is generating any advantage right now, it's temporary. And that will soon go the way of replicated content being PENALIZED. Either the engines learn to recognize PHP-generated RSS-publishing as RSS and NOT penalize it or they will object to tons of the same content stuffing their database, and they WILL penalize it. If they recognize it as an "RSS compliment" (just as a link to a publisher is a credentializing "compliment" that earns the publisher linkpop points with the engines), then it will end up in the same boat as JS-published material. Of little or no particular value to the "publishing third party" (except as an affiliate) but a "vote" for the original publisher and a service to the visitor of the site that offers this material -- it's basically an advanced way to publish third-party articles. I'm trying to summarize a very complicated topic. There was an entire, superb thread on this in our forums... http://forums.sitesell.com/viewtopic.php?t=2501 If you are not an affiliate, simply sign up at... http://affiliates.sitesell.com .. and read this tremendous thread. You don't have to promote SiteSell or anything and we weed out those who stay inactive for prolonged periods of time -- I wouldn't normally suggest this, but it is a superb thread... sharp, intelligent discussion that cut through a complicated issue. Bottom line? Great affiliate suggestion, Steve! I'll have to ask Chris and Robin to stop scooping us! We're big fans of theirs. Beyond the bottom line (actually, including it!), use with common sense and, above all... keep it real. :-) All the best, Ken Evoy http://webmaster.sitesell.com/ ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Joe Halbrook Subject: RSS > I looked at Joe's website and I didn't see anything > there that looked like an RSS template... - Tom Anson, LED 1929 Hi Tom and LED, My apologies. I simply forwarded the template to folks who had emailed me privately. I have since put up a page here for easy access: http://www.ez-feeds.com/samplerss.html Best of success! Joe Halbrook Permission Technologies http://www.ez-feeds.com ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Tom Aman Subject: SpamCop > My only defense against vigilante anti-spam was to find out who was > using Spamcop or other dumb solutions to stop my customer's emails, > and try to sell them a real spam-protected email account (we use > Postini). - John Brumage, LED 1929 Having run foul of Spamcop and a couple of others a few times, I adopt a slightly different approach. Aside from my business email account, I have a personal account and also maintain a few other free ones (hotmail, yahoo, etc.). When I find an email blocked by something like Spamcop, I try sending a message to the individual from one of the other accounts telling them that a legitimate email I was trying to send them was blocked by ...whatever..., and they should notify there system admin of this problem since it is very likely that other legitimate items will be blocked. When I do this, I do not include the original message (unless it is something really urgent). I have had good luck with this approach in getting the blocks removed (often the site in question will quit using the blocking service). > 1) Never buy anything from someone you think uses > spam.... no matter how attractive or timely the offer. - Chris Nielsen, LED 1930 Ran across some interesting stats the other day (I believe it was in the latest issue of PC World). I don't have the mag handy, but I believe I have this right: - 75% of Internet users report receiving SPAM (believe it or not there are some, like my wife, who do not). - the average number of SPAM emails received by these individuals is 18.9 - of those who have received SPAM, 4% report buying something as a result. So that means that, for every million Internet users, 750,000 receive SPAM and, of those, 30,000 have bought something. Small wonder that the SPAMMERS keep SPAMMING - there is good money in it!! Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Bill Davison Subject: SpamCop Site owners who have a large number of opt-ins / subscribers / customers and who want to communicate with them via email cannot. Why? Because Spamcop openly admits even the number of emails is part of their "grading" system. What's a site owner to do? One option is to buy a large block of IP addresses and set up their own private email server bank. The cost for this is far too expensive for small businesses. However, their only other option is to contract with a host email server who could care less about SpamCop's blacklist. Guess who they are? Most who have traced spam emails quickly learn most are being generated in the Orient. Have you noticed how many are being spewed out of Beijing? It's also obvious that the domain name owners of this spam are not Oriental. Yes, US and many other nations. The question then arises, is Spamcop by their ignorance, filling the pockets of hosting companies who condone spam? I think many of Spamcop's victims may agree. Then is Julian Haught and his Spamcop vigilantes really helping or exacerbating the spam problem? I think its a fair question that deserves an answer and I still would argue it deserves justice. Bill Davison bizwebpage.com ------------------------------------------------------- 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 wish they would only take me as I am." - Vincent Van Gogh |
