by Christine Churchill
Sending Email At KeyRelevance we've always taken a strong stance against
search engine spammers - people who try to achieve a high search
engine ranking through tricks that game Google's algorithms.
Fly-by-night optimization like this could give the entire SEO
industry a bad name.
Nyms not only combats spam, it is one more layer of protection against other email threats viruses, worms, spyware, adware, phishing scams, and more. Better than a spam filter, Nyms puts you in control of your incoming email because it uses disposable, alias addresses. When your Nyms email aliases are shared with spammers, you can simply disable that Nyms alias and stop the spam from flooding your real inbox. spam filter to pinpoint where unsolicited messages are coming from and kill spam at its source.
Reading Email Well, search engine spammers should beware -- Google is out to
get you. Sources inside Google report that the search engine is
stepping up its efforts to catch people who use unethical
optimization techniques.
There are some things that you can do to make your online experience a little bit easier. There are some ways to keep spam from ruining your day. Spam filters are one of those things. Spam filters are an extremely successful way of managing or stopping unwanted emails, but occasionally they can work too well. While they can act very vigorously to keep your inbox from receiving spam, they can also prevent you from getting many of your wanted emails as well.
Storing Email Google has always taken a strong position against people who try
to artificially boost their rankings. Historically, though, Google
did not use widespread automation as a way of checking for spam
tactics, but instead relied on other Webmasters reporting spam
sites through their spam report page.
mail that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients. Thus, mail. Some definitions of spam specifically include the aspects of email that is unsolicited and sent in bulk. Spam filter is a program that is used to detect unsolicited and unwanted email and prevent those messages from getting to a user's inbox. Like other types of filtering programs, a spam filter looks for certain criteria on which it bases judgments.
Email Software Google has recently made changes to automatically check for
common spam techniques while indexing pages, which greatly
increases their ability to catch and penalize the spammers.
The new anti spam filters are easy to set up from the web based control panel Aplus.Net offers to its web hosting customers. The service is flexible allowing the user to select from several settings and to tune up the sensitivity of the filters. spam is not an exact science and that's why some legitimate mail may go to the spam folders if the filter is tuned to be very sensitive. That's why Aplus.Net gives the option to it's customers to review the spam folders, before erasing the spam.
Antispam Software One thing they're starting to catch automatically is invisible
text on the page. This old spam technique is used to artificially
boost a page's relevance for keywords by repeating them over and
over again. To hide this repetition from human visitors, spammers
place the text in the same color as the page background, rendering
it "invisible" to the user. That's obviously a big no-no, and no
credible SEO would ever use such a tactic.
of Cloudmark Server Edition spam filtering for Microsoft Exchange and you' spam, phishing protection for 15 days, free of charge.
Fight Spam I recently worked with a client who took a do-it-yourself
approach to search engine optimization. While I encourage my
clients to learn about search engine optimization, and always
communicate what I'm doing with their sites, a little knowledge can
be a dangerous thing. In this case, my client (on her
own and against my
recommendations) decided to go beyond professional optimization
techniques and added invisible text and hidden links to her
home page. The result? Within a
week the site dropped from a top-10 ranking to no ranking at
all.
Stoping Spam So what should you do if you or an unprofessional SEO company
you hired has used improper SEO techniques on your site? Well, the
first thing is to clean up the spam! If you immediately correct the
problem, Google generally penalizes the site for 30 days, although
it can be longer. However, if you did a really bad thing (like
cloaking) your site might be permanently banned.
Block Spam Overall, I think Google's changes are good. But I have to admit
I'm a little nervous about their detecting spam through automated
programs and not by hand. From my time at NetMechanic, I learned a
lot about the pros and cons of using automated programs to review
Web pages.
Spam Emails Automated programs follow a rigid set of rules that may not
adequately reproduce the common sense we humans use when reviewing
a page. There are some techniques that are completely innocent that
may be vulnerable to Google's automated spam-checking method.
Email Account One situation that worries me is Google declaring all hidden
links as bad and automatically checking every page for them. I
agree that most invisible links do fall into the spam category, but
not all.
Sending Email If you look at http://www.cnn.com/ you will find an invisible
GIF link telling you to "Click here to skip to main content." Is
this spam? Absolutely not. What CNN is doing is an accessibility
technique called "skip navigation" to make their site friendlier to
people with disabilities.
Reading Email This handy technique allows people using a page reader to jump
past endless lists of navigation and jump directly to content. This
is a good use of a hidden link. I believe that Google would support
this use and would encourage Web accessibility. It would be nice if
Google could provide some reassurance to Webmasters that these
"good use" techniques won't accidentally be penalized. Or maybe
Google could provide instructions on how to use skip navigation in
such a way as to not get into trouble. (Google, are you
listening?)
Storing Email Another automated spam check looks for duplicate pages
(sometimes known as "doorway pages") on a site. Google has gone on
record as saying "Don't have duplicate pages."
Email Software Google's stance on duplicate content is justified. Some
conniving individuals make "doorway" pages that have duplicate
content, but different keywords on each page. When found through
the automated tools, these sites may now be penalized.
Antispam Software Most companies don't purposely duplicate content on their site,
but it could be happening without their realizing it. For example,
many
marketing departments create
specialized "landing pages" for their PPC ads to test different
messages or to track their ads on different properties.
Fight Spam The problem is that many landing pages contain content nearly
identical to other pages on the site. If a company isn't aware that
Google frowns on duplicate content, this widespread practice could
be hurting the company's site.
Stoping Spam You can be smart about using your landing pages by making sure
you place them in a separate directory on your server and exclude
them through the robots.txt file so that Google won't try to index
them by mistake. (See The Robot Exclusion Standard for detailed
instructions.)
Block Spam Google's move to automated spam checking puts the burden on the
Webmaster to know whether they are doing something that might be
construed as spam. It's smart to know which things the search
engines frown upon, and stay away from anything that might get you
tarred with the spammer label.
Spam Emails If you don't know what to look for or don't have the time, hire
a professional SEO to review your site for potential problems.
Email Account If Google does mistake you for a spammer, what can you do? Your
best bet is to double-check your site for possible spam and then
try writing mailto:help@google.com.
Sending Email Christine Churchill is the founder of
http://www.keyrelevance.com, a full service
search engine
marketing firm. She is a frequent speaker at the Search
Engine
Strategies conferences and moderator of the Design and
Usability
forum at the High Rankings Forum.
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