Spam Control - The Internet Without It?

Every single day 30,000,000 emails are sent around the world. 50% of those emails are spam. Blue chip companies and even Governments are taking drastic measures in spam control. The most recent evidence of this is the Canspam Act which was passed by the US Senate early in 2004.

If you look at what most people used the Internet for you'll find the vast majority of online activity is sending and receiving email. Email has become the lifeblood of modern society. An interesting social experiment would be to see what happens to a group of young professional people who suddenly have all means of electronic communication taken away from them. Email has become as much a part of our lives as the electric lightbulb, air transport and mobile phones.

What happens if we don't implement spam control globally? What would happen if all the mail server spam filters and regulations controlling spam were suddenly abolishesd? Chaos online! The online world would grind to a screeching halt as email servers become overloaded with the flood of spam. Global bandwidth would be consumed by as each spammer sends out hundreds of millions of junk emails per day.

Without spam control businesses would be crippled. Critical emails would be lost amongst a deluge of porn, viagra and breast enlargement type emails.

Without spam control home use of email and the Internet in general would suffer from massive delays in sending and receiving of email, a 100x increase in the amount of spam email received. Internet connection speeds would be adversely affected with ISPs struggling to keep their servers online while their bandwidth is being choked by spam.

IT analysts estimate that by 2006 the average internet user can expect to receive at least 1,500 pieces of spam per month. This is a conversative estimate. Agressive action is needed to stem the flood of spam. ISPs supporting spam must have their assests seized. Spammers must be prosecuted and their equipment confiscated. If we do not actively work to control spam then we only have ourselves to blame.

The Internet is a shared resource used by us all. Spam control must increase and improve in efficiency and effectiveness for us to retain control of our virtual lives.

This article was provided courtesy of Spam-Site which tests and reviews spam filters

Will Spam-Blogging Be The Death Of Blogging?

Spam blogging will force search engines like Google to change their ranking algorithms and eventually assign less value to links from blogs.

Technorati reports that 30,000 - 40,000 new blogs are being created each day.

According to David Sifry, part of the growth of new blogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs.

What are spam blogs? They are fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites.

They contain robot-generated posts made up of random words, with the title linking back to the blogger's own pages.

Many bloggers see them as a way of getting their pages indexed quickly by Google and other search engines.

Sifry estimates that about 20% of the aggregate pings Technorati receives are from spam blogs. Most of this fake blog spam comes from hosted services or from specific IP addresses.

Those in the SEO world are well aware of this. There are even services like Blogburner that encourage creation of spammy blogs and spam-pinging to get your sites indexed quickly.

As a blogging evangelist, I wholeheartedly recommend blogging as an SEO tactic. But I also emphasize that you should use your blog for more than just SEO.

At the Spam Squashing Summit, blog services decided to collaborate to report and combat blog-spamming.

Technorati currently claims to catch about 90% of spam and remove it from the index. They also notify the blog hosting operators.

But I believe that they are fighting a losing battle. As I write this there are software and robots being created that will create spam-blogs more efficiently and in ways that will be harder to detect.

The SEO "black hats" are always far ahead of the technology and safeguards that these services can put in place.

Take down a few spam-blogs and hundreds more will arise.

Blogging evangelist and PR guru, Steve Rubel,  sums up this dilemma rather well on his Micropersuasion blog.

He believes that its human nature for people to exploit new technologies, and that it's really up to the search engines to help put a stop to these by undercutting the economics of blogspam, much like they did with nofollow and comment spam.

But the trade-off is that such a move would also reduce any impact that blogs have on search results.

Fact: The more you abuse a technology, the less effective it becomes.

Spam blogging will force search engines like Google to change their ranking algorithms and eventually assign less value to links from blogs.

Unless they put in safeguards to prevent robots from taking over, its safe to assume that blogging will become less effective as an SEO tactic over time.

Of course, the spammers will then just have to find new avenues and means to spam the engines.

But why ruin a good thing in the first place? Blogs are much more than just tools for search engine optimization.

A blog can be a great tool for personal branding and building relationships with your website visitors and customers.

Instead of using blogs for spam, focus on building content-rich sites and getting high-value links to them.

Don't restrict yourself to just the SEO benefits of blogging.

Appreciate the value that blogs can add to your marketing and public relations strategy and use them the way they were meant to be used.

Priya Shah is the CEO of eBrand360 and publishes an internet marketing newsletter. Her areas of specialization include search engine optimization and business blogging. Subscribe to her free eCourse on Blogging for Marketers

This article may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact and all links are hyperlinked.

There is Gold in that Spam Search Engine Tactics for the 21st

<b>There is Gold in that Spam Search Engine Tactics for the 21st Century<BR>Its not often youll hear anyone praising spam. Until today.</b></p><b>There is Gold in that Spam Search Engine Tactics for the 21st Century<BR>Its not often youll hear anyone praising spam. Until today.</b></p> <P>Ok, ok, ok -- we all hate it. When I check my e-mail box for the numerous domains that I own, I have hundreds if not thousands of spam messages. It had gotten to the point that I could not tell between real e-mail and spam. I remember not logging into one account or a week, only to find out when I did that there were over 1,000 e-mail messages of which 995 were spam!<BR><BR>First off, what kind of strategies can you use to fight spam? Here are a few that have worked very well for me:<BR><BR>1.DO NOT put your e-mail address on your website in plain text. There are several other ways to give your e-mail address out. The one that seems to work very well is by creating a small GIF or JPG image and placing your e-mail address in there then displaying the image on your website.<BR>2.Make use of FORMS. Rather than have your visitors e-mail the domain, create a form for them and have the form e-mail the domain OR another address. This is a very successful way for visitors to contact you. You could go one step further, and add a verification word to the form so that the form does not get abused.<BR><BR>Now that we have talked about two simple ways to fight spam, lets talk about why you may not want to chuck all your spam message away. Am I crazy? Nope, just some common sense niche building techniques at work here.<BR><BR>You remember those supermarket tabloids, right? Have you ever leafed through them? Have you ever read the advertising in them? You know, it is pretty expensive to place advertisements in those magazines mainly because of the distribution they have and because people buy them. Now do you think that an individual will pay thousands of dollars per year to advertise in the tabloid, it if was not delivering results?<BR><BR>Advertising is only placed in magazines, newspapers and tabloids if they deliver results. Companies spend tens of thousands of dollars (if not more) ensuring that their advertising is delivering the expected results. They track and monitor everything that they do, nothing is left to chance. But you knew all this already.<BR><BR>I'm not trying to equate tabloid advertisements with spam -- but I think you get the picture.<BR><BR>So how can you find gold in spam? Simple. When you check your message, see if there is one type of message that you are receiving more than the others. Filter past the gambling, and adult entertainment and focus on stuff that you and I could use every day. You will see e-mail advertisements for education, careers, divorce planning, private investigations and several other areas of interest.<BR><BR>If you have been paying attention to this, then you now know that maybe you should be targeting those niche areas. I say niche, because if you look at the content of the messages you will see that they are very specific. Some of the education messages I get are for particular schools, or programs like website development, search engine optimization, business management, small business development or entrepreneurship. Same with the career e-mails I get, they are always targeted at a specific profession nursing, truck drivers or other medical related fields.<BR><BR>So how can this help you? Supposed you are getting 100 messages per week about careers. You go through these and group them by profession. Once you have done this you notice that 75% of the messages are about nursing. You now have a profession you can target for additional research.<BR><BR>You first start performing some preliminary research to see if this niche is worth targeting.<BR><BR>If your research shows that it is worth pursuing, then look at what types of phrases are being used and who is in the top 10, 20 or 30 sites providing this type of information. Look at the pure search engine listings, but also pay attention to the paid advertising since this will give you a good idea if you will make money by targeting this niche.<BR><BR>Once you have done your homework, and find that this is indeed a field worth pursuing then it is time to start developing your website, and thinking about the type of content you will be offering to your site visitors. You may want to think about offering free courses on nursing, what it is, how someone can become a nurse basically what you would want to know before you decided to pursue this as a career.<BR><BR>It is very easy building your business, if you spend a little time and look at the unconventional ways of determining what business you need to get into that is, what niche you should be targeting. <BR><BR>A little research and your spam e-mail box could help you make a name for yourself in the world of internet marketing.</P> <p> <h1>ABOUT THE AUTHOR</h1> <br> <div><P>Mohammed Bhimji is the owner, and developer of Turbo Traffic Engine <A rel="nofollow" href="http://www.turbotrafficengine.com">www.turbotrafficengine.com</A>&nbsp; an application that makes it easy to develop niche portal websites that are optimized for the search engines.</P></div> </p>