Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

I find it fascinating that Google has someone who speaks out as much as Matt does about SEO and search marketing in general. I don’t think there are many other industries where there is such a reciprocal back and forth between company and customers. Thanks for the insights (and great one-liners) Matt!

So I was doing some research today for a client project and I found this link below listed in Yahoo’s search index.

Any idea why they would continue to publish this result, even after identifying “Dangerous downloads”? I mean, don’t you want to provide the best customer experience possible to your users?

Does anyone have any insight into why they are doing this?

So I continue to get twice daily emails from Performance Bike. I know they are trying to do good, but the volume and inability to unsubscribe only angers me more. As I have noted in the past, it only takes one email communication to upset a customer enough to turn them off completely to your brand.

To further the situation, the “Report Spam” feature in Gmail doesn’t seem to care what I do. If I hit “Report Spam”, it moves that message to Spam and then the next day I get two more. I think we’re approaching a CAN-SPAM violation here.

Taken from the CAN-SPAM website:

It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a “menu” of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor’s email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it’s illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.

So what is my recourse here, send in a report to the FTC? They say to email spam@uce.gov, but I can imagine how inundated with spam that email address is on a daily basis. Shame, shame on the FTC as well for not obfuscating that email address on their own page.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Attention all email marketers: Make your unsubscribe link easily visible and easily found, or feel my wrath.

When I first started doing email marketing a few years ago, I stumbled around with design problems, browser issues, spam blockers and the day-to-day headaches associated with this fluctuating medium. Through some personal stumbles and research I have done, I have seen both the really good uses of usability in email marketing and the really bad.

The Really Bad
The most blatant abuser of the lack of unsubscribe policy is the hardcore spammer. These are the jumbled jargon of words you receive that pertain to nothing. There is no visible way to do anything in the email and in 99% of cases, there is no unsubscribe link or method obvious to anyone. In fact, the point of many of these spam emails is to have you respond saying “UNSUBSCRIBE” in order to validate that a real person was on the end of this spam solicitation.

Read more

Managing multiple websites, I see a lot of spam each and every day. I have been combating it lately by using a number of different methods: math, captchas, and other simple human tests. Recently, our largest message board has been getting pegged with dozens of spam postings every hour and it’s to the point where we can no longer keep up with it. The message board is meant to primarily serve the US and Canada and many of the spam posts are coming from countries outside the US and Canada i.e. South America, Thailand, and the Netherlands. So what I was thinking is, well, what if we just block all IP addresses outside of the US and Canada.

That is the easiest solution, but is it the best? We would have to purchase a database or find a web service that provides a direct IP to Country conversion and then apply that to the message board registration process. The way the message board functions is that you must register to post comments. So if the person is outside the US or Canada, they can read all the comments they want, but can’t contribute to the conversation.

Pros:

1. Cuts down on spam posts immediately, at least until a spammer spoofs a US IP address, or we start getting a bunch of spam posts from the US.
2. Eliminates the time needed to sift through the spam posts from outside the US.

Cons:

1. Does not allow participation by anyone outside the US, even though they may have legitimate, pertinent information to share.
2. Creates an isolationist feel to the message board, which may or may not stifle traffic and participation.
3. Have to maintain IP to Country database, as IP addresses change hands all the time. Probably also have to provide a mechanism for people to contact you to have their account added manually or via some other process, in the case they actually do have good ideas.

What does everyone think out there? Good idea? Bad idea? Let me know in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Marxchivist

You must be trying to get whitelisted, because nobody really cares about RFC compliancy unless you are a spammer or trying to get whitelisted. For the average user, RFC compliancy is a non-issue.

I compose the email, I send the email, the email is received. Done and done.

For the spammer email marketer, RFC compliancy is very important. It means that your email message complies with the rules and regulations set forth in the RFC 2822. RFC 2822 is a very long document, which I can boil down to a few points that are relevant to email marketers:

1. Don’t mess with To:, From:, CC:, BCC:, Subject: lines. Big no-no. The recipient has to know where this message came from and that you are indeed the sender. No cloaking or other nastiness.
2. You must specify your real address. If you are a company, this has to be the company address. If you are an individual working as a company, same deal.
3. You must give them, your recipients, a method to unsubscribe, whether it’s phone, fax, email, web page, or smoke signal and it has to be “relatively” easy to complete the process, which means no jumping through 25 hoops to get off a mailing list.

Got it? Now go play nice with the children.

So not only do I have to deal with spam at my job, but I now have to deal with job spam? You have probably seen these Monetti emails arrive with “Canada and USA employment perspectives” and “International Loan Concern have new vacancies in USA” subject lines. How bad does Monetti need employees that they are spamming people around the world?

The bit about “International Loan Concern” touched off my Simpsons alarm. Perhaps you recall the Mr. Sparkle commercial. Classic!
Well done Monetti, well done.

More info: here

*** TORA *** TORA *** TORA ***

WTF? Gmail image spammers have reverted to spamming Stock tips using WWII Japanese references? Is that what it’s come to?

Also, what’s up with the “hi, It’s Jeff”, “hi, It’s Joey”, “hi, It’s Francois” spams?

I have no idea what Gmail is doing to try and filter those, besides IP address. Can’t really filter based on anything else, as most of the message is just random text.

And what is the point of those? I assume just probes to test if the message got through or not, because they have no action item “Visit www.hi-its-francis.com” or “call 555-555-5555″, so what else can it be for?

In case you have been living under a rock, you know what spam is. A question recently came up of how do some companies (see Overstock.com, Buy.com, Angie’s List etc. etc.) get through spam filters and restrictions and others do not. The answer dear Watson is that they pay. Dolla, Dolla bills y’all.

Two solutions are Goodmail Systems (which works for AOL and Yahoo) and the ever popular Sender Score Certified (which works for Hotmail, MSN, Roadrunner “and 34,000 other ISP’s”). So if you are looking for the reason why you are getting messages from these companies and not others, it’s because they have a high speed route right to your inbox. A good analogy is the Illinois Tollway… You’re driving along minding your business, and all of a sudden a huge roadblock ahead. What’s with all this traffic? Well, you can either be a sucker and wait in the toll line with all the other “mail” or you can pay $399 a year and be “certified” by these mail services and zip on through the iPass lane.

Get the drift? So if you have $399 a year to spend, as well as $1000 annually for Sender Score Certified, you too can break on through, break on through, break on through to the other side, hey, hey, hey, hey, HEY!