Archive for the ‘Spam’ Category

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I love blogs and blogging, but with all good things, especially those online, it comes with a whole new host of problems. Search engines love blogs and therefore so do spammers. Spammers love blogs only because blog spamming techniques work, thanks to the search engines and bloggers themselves.

Last year Google introduced the “nofollow” attribute for links. Using this attribute on a link is supposed to inoculate the linking site from any negative association to the site being linked to. It’s to be used when you are not in control of the link being posted (as in blog comments) or when you don’t want your link to a site to be considered as you “vouching” for that site in the eyes of the search engines. I think the most accurate description of the “nofollow” attribute is that it’s a link condom.

The nofollow was merely a band aid fix to one kind of blog spam, but not a solution to the real problem. But since there is not just one kind of blog spam there is no single solution either.

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I don’t have a problem with people emailing me requesting link exchanges so long as they are not automated messages blasted to me and hundreds of others who never visited my site. Usually those can be picked out within half a second of looking at the email and deleted just as quick. But this one here caught my attention:

Subject: Link exchange with your site http://www.searchengineguide.com/degeyter/006390.html

Dear Webmaster,

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I don’t mind being put on somebody’s email list, considering of course that I actually gave them my email address to begin with. But I also would like the opportunity to unsubscribe to that list at my convenience. I don’t want to keep picking on GoDaddy, because I really have no beef with them other than my really really bad hosting experiencewith them several months back.

But today I got a Valentine’s greeting from GoDaddy (how sweet of them) in my mail box. I can use my cloudmark toolbar to mark it as spam, but I know that I signed up with GoDaddy so I’ll do the polite thing and unsubscribe through their own system.

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The Internet is full of all kinds of great information, resources, marketing tips, tools and so on. It can also be a great source to help you put together your web site’s content, as you can find many industry related articles that are free to be republished, usually provided that you attribute the author to the content.

We often distribute articles to various industry news and information sources and find that those articles are republished on many additional sites. This is good as it gets our articles out to a much larger audience, and each contains a link back to our site so the readers know who wrote it and can then find out more about us.

There are, however, some lower forms of content republishing that occurs online, everything from outright theft from your website to republishing pieces from various forms of free content as a means to create search engine rich, but otherwise useless, pages.

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Yahoo and Cisco are developing a new solution to fight email spam.

The partners have pledged to develop a specification combining their respective cryptographic-based security offerings: Yahoo’s DomainKeys and Internet Identified Mail from Cisco.

The new product will be called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and will be offered royalty-free to the industry.

The goal behind this technology is to be able to trace spam emails back to their origin so they can be shut down.

“The spam problems is so large that no one company can solve it, so it’s good to see major companies like Yahoo and Cisco combine their strengths and make the technology widely available,” said Yankee Group senior analyst Andrew Jaquith.

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