'Net Features : spam

Big List of Link Building No-Nos

Michael Garrity — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Link building is one of the most basic methods that Web professionals use to grow their businesses online. It’s a pretty great system because there are so many different ways to build links on the Internet, but it’s also really difficult because there are so many ways to build links, meaning there are a lot of ways to screw it up.

So, while getting links is an essential task for website owners, they should also make sure that they’re doing it the right way. Otherwise, their brand can be seriously (and in drastic cases, even irreparably) damaged. But with so many options for link building, how do you know what to do and what not to do? That’s easy! Just check out this Website Magazine guide to link building no-nos.

Irrelevant or Duplicate Content
If you’re trying to garner links from websites, the first thing you should do is make sure you’re worth linking to! That means producing original and valuable content that is going to have some relevance to the people visiting the pages you want links from. Also, avoid running duplicate content (either content previously published on your site, or that you’ve written and published elsewhere) and writing guest blog posts for irrelevant sites. This will make your site feel authoritative and be more attractive to high-quality links.

Don’t Spam or Leave Irrelevant Comments
Look, nobody on the Web likes a spammer, so don’t be that guy (or gal). It’s fair game for you to want to visit websites or forums that are relevant to your audience or niche and spread the word about your great site in hopes of building a few links, but that doesn’t mean you should just drop in context-less comments or replies that don’t really help progress any discussions or provide value to other readers, all in hopes that they’ll pay attention to you. Instead, take part in ongoing discussions to build your presence as an authority, and only add references or links to your site when it will add value to other visitors. And if you’re on a forum, you can even include a link to your site in your signature.

Be Social – Not Pushy
Social media marketing is basically a necessity on the Web these days; you’re just not going to get anywhere without it. However, just having a profile on Facebook, Twitter, etc. is not enough – you also have to be social and engage with your fans/followers and other big names in your niche. Be friendly and open, and under no circumstances should you simply and blatantly engage in self-promotion, or spam the walls (and news feeds) of your fans with promotional links.

Don’t Buy Crappy Links
The ultimate goal for people looking to build links is to find those that are high-quality and relevant to your site, so not only is it a waste for you to try to buy links from low-quality sources, it’ll also get you in trouble with Google, which keeps a cautious eye on low quality link sites that engage in a nefarious practice called “link farming.” When it comes to getting quality links, your site and content should be all you need. And while you’re at it, don’t bother with “trading” links with low quality sites just to have them. You’re better than that…

Slow Down on Submitting to Directories
Directories, either paid or free, are great because they can seem like they're these big fields where links grow just for you, but don’t be tempted to just submit your site to a bunch of directories the week it goes live. Remember, good links come naturally and are built up over time. Plus, search engines can totally tell when you’ve just acquired a lot of links by going directory crazy, and that’s going to do more harm than good for your site in the immediate future.

Don’t Over-Link to Your Own Site
If you’re a hard-working content marketer, chances are you’re producing articles and blog posts pretty regularly, including for other websites or blogs that you don’t run. Naturally, you may want to drop a link to your site once, maybe twice, in said article, if there’s a natural and not-totally-obvious way to do it (most authors save this for their bio section attached to the article). Be careful not to “over-link” to your site in these articles, though. Remember, you’re supposed to be offering relevant and valuable information to your readers, not promoting your website, so never drop in more than one link to your site. Besides, Google is open about the fact that it only reads the first link anyway, so more than one link is not only annoying, but also useless.

Link to Various Pages on Your Site
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when linking to their websites is to link only to their home pages. This is a bad idea, because (A) it makes users have to dig to find certain information, so just link to the pages you want them to see, and (B) it gives your site a bad deep link ratio and negatively affects how well your deeper “child” pages will rank on the search engines. But also, if your site has a canonical issue that gives you a “/index.html” URL in addition to your domain URL, make sure that when you DO link to your home page, it doesn’t send users to this index page (or any other home page extensions).

Change Up the Anchor Text
When you’re targeting a specific term that you want associated with your website, you may think it’s a good idea to use the same anchor text in your links over and over again. It’s not. In fact, this kind of narrow targeting will actually hurt you on the search engines. Instead, try to vary the anchor text you use to include OTHER relevant or related terms, or terms specific to the page you’re linking to. This will help your site rank for more terms, obviously. Plus, it would be helpful to include your company or website name in a percentage of your links, as well.

Global Email Spam Rates on the Rise

Linc Wonham — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 18:00:00 GMT

A new study by email certification and reputation monitoring company Return Path tracked more than 130 million IP addresses and nearly 20 trillion messages last year and concluded that 85 percent of them were classified as spam, posing an on-going challenge for ISPs.

The research used Sender Score, an index of an email sender’s reputation and a measure of the same metrics that ISPs use when making deliverability decisions. Businesses with high sender reputations or Sender Scores above 90 saw 95 percent of their messages delivered on average, whereas those with lower sender reputations, Sender Scores between 60 and 89 — the majority of businesses — saw delivery rates of only 68 percent on average.

Return Path studied senders’ reputations across the globe and industry sectors examining the major factors affecting inbox deliverability, including the following:

•    Unknown user rates or those email addresses no longer in active use
•    Complaint rates, when email recipients mark a message as spam
•    Spam traps set by ISPs to deliberately catch spammers

Industry Breakdown
While most industry sectors performed at or near global averages, there were significant outliers in a number of categories. There was a high frequency of spam traps among social networking senders.

One of the most important tools social networks use to grow their subscriber base is the address books of their current users. This presents a risk as most email recipients do not actively manage their address books, resulting in numerous unused or abandoned emails being present.

As a result, social networking sites were hitting an average of 20 spam traps, as opposed to the global average of 1 to 3. Social networking and gaming had the highest degree of unknown user rates, around 5 percent for the same reasons as mentioned above.

Banking, retail and social networking had the highest complaint rates, coming in at over 3 percent, whereas on average other industries had complaint rates of 2 percent.

Geographic Breakdown
There is a marked increase in the worldwide number of senders and a sharp decline in inbox placement rates (IPRs). While every country and region has different challenges, universally speaking, marketers with poor reputations have significantly lower chances of making it to the inbox.

When emails fail to reach inboxes, businesses fail to communicate, resulting in a direct impact on the bottom line.

North America’s Sender Score of 67 was the highest of any region. Canada had the highest reputation metrics with a score of 70, while the U.S. weighed in at 67. Despite having the highest sending reputations globally, both the U.S. and Canada have issues with complaints, unknown users and spam traps.

The U.S. also has very few restrictions around non-permission acquisition of email addresses, which puts marketers at risk for acquiring spam traps and receiving high subscriber complaints.

European Results
Reputation metrics in Europe were surprisingly poor given the strict laws around acquiring email addresses. In Germany, where double opt-in has been the law, the average Sender Score was 33, and complaint rates, unknown users and spam traps were all above average.

At a score of 47, France had one of the highest Sender Scores in Europe, but had the biggest problem with high unknown users and spam traps, at 10 percent and 11 percent, respectively, indicating that marketers have issues with list hygiene and keeping their lists up-to-date. Italy and Spain also had slightly above average complaints, unknown users and spam traps with Sender Scores coming in very low at 22 and 27, respectively.

The U.K. had the highest Sender Score of 51, but is struggling with unknown user rates of 6 percent and spam trap rates of an average of 6 per IP address. These findings indicate that European marketers are at high risk for blocking and filtering.

China’s low Sender Score of 36 is not surprising as it is an emerging market and senders may have a harder time understanding reputation factors and what it takes to get delivered to inboxes outside of China. While their reputation metrics appear to be low, it’s because a majority of their email is blocked and never delivered.

Australia has typically high deliverability rates, which is somewhat reflected in their Sender Score of 56. However, with unknown user rates at 9 percent and having nearly 6 spam traps per IP address, marketers need to focus on how they acquire and handle new and old addresses, the report suggests.

An emerging market in which email marketing is still relatively new, Brazil is struggling with deliverability and sender reputation. Brazil sends out a lot of email that would be considered spam resulting in the extremely low Sender Score of 16. With a complaint rate of 3 percent, unknown user rate of 7 percent and average spam traps at nearly 5 percent, most Brazilian marketers have a long road ahead in resolving their deliverability and reputation issues.

The complete study and infographic are available for download.

Oh, Canada: Changes Made to Anti-Spam Bill

Michael Garrity — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:30:00 GMT

For the average email user, anti-spam measures are viewed as a good thing. After all, most inboxes are already crammed with daily deals offers, marketing newsletters, e-commerce receipts and maybe even the occasional personal email. No one needs some unsolicited nonsense cluttering things up even more.

For email marketers, however, anti-spam may sound like the kiss of death. Not that all, or even most, email marketing programs are spam-ridden, but often casual users and government regulators have trouble telling the difference.

Which is precisely why many email marketers were holding their collective breath in anticipation of newly proposed anti-spam legislation in Canada. Fortunately, after analyzing the bill, they generally agreed that it’s nothing to lose sleep over.

Many initially had understandable reservations when the legislation was first proposed last fall, but most now feel as though the bill has been drastically improved, in large part due to cooperation with the email marketing industry.

One of the biggest changes to the legislation deals with opt-in consent. Before, the bill insisted that all opt-in consent be granted in written form, but it has since been changed to allow for verbal permission as well.

The initial draft also required email marketers to let subscribers opt-out in a maximum of two clicks, but the new version changes the working to read “readily performed.”

Email marketers worried about similar measures being brought up in the United States needn’t, at least not yet. Much of this recent Canadian legislation was intended to have broader application, more intense penalties and has a greater reach outside of Canadian borders than the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act passed in 2003.

Google Says War on Spam Ranks First

Linc Wonham — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 18:00:00 GMT

Google principal engineer Matt Cutts posted a lengthy message on the company’s official blog Friday in response to recent complaints from users about the increasing prevalence of spam in search results.

The war on webspam, Cutts writes, is being waged as intensely as ever, in fact saying that Google’s search quality is presently “better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.”

The post goes on to say, however, that while “pure webspam” has decreased in recent years, users’ expectations of Google search results have increased. “People are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content,” he writes.

Content farms pose a relatively new kind of problem, says Cutts, because they can clutter search results with a shallow brand of content without falling into the category of traditional spam of years past.

Nevertheless, Google is as committed to the fight as ever and is “evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower,” Cutts wrote.

To add some clarification, he reminded users of the following principles of Google search results:

•    Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google
•    Displaying Google ads does not help a site’s rankings in Google
•    Buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results

Malware Up, Spam Down

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:09:00 GMT

It seems every bit of good news received about Web security is tempered with some bad.

McAfee unveiled its McAfee Threats Report for the Third Quarter (2010) today, which revealed that while spam levels decreased in volume this quarter (hitting a two year low) malware is soaring with an average of 60,000 new pieces of malware identified each day – quadrupling since 2007.

“Our Q3 Threat report shows that cybercriminals are not only becoming more saavy, but attacks are becoming increasingly more severe,” said Mike Gallagher, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Global Threat Intelligence for McAfee.

“Cybercriminals are doing their homework, and are aware of what’s popular, and what’s insecure. They are attacking mobile devices and social networking sites, so education about user activity online, as well as incorporating the proper security technologies are of utmost importance.”

One of the most sophisticated pieces of malware in Q3 was the Zeus botnet, the malware at the root of U.S. small businesses losing $70 million at the hands of Ukrainian cybercriminals. Recently, a Zeus botnet was unleashed that is aimed at mobile devices and designed to intercept SMS messages to validate transactions, putting at risk consumers bank accounts. McAfee also saw an increase in email campaigns attempting to deliver the Zeus botnet, under the disguise of organizations like eFAX, FedEx, Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration, United States Postal Service and Western Union.

Botnet activity also remained strong in Q3, the most popular of which, Cutwail, accounted for more than 50 percent of traffic in every country. Cutwail bots engaged in distributed denial-of-service attacks against more than 300 websites, including United States government departments such as the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation, and businesses websites such as Twitter and PayPal.

McAfee Reports Historic Levels of Malware

Linc Wonham — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:00:00 GMT

According to Web security firm McAfee’s second-quarter data, Malware reached its highest levels ever in the first half of 2010. The company found 6 million malicious files in the second quarter, making for a total of 10 million malicious files over the first six months of the year.

The most frequently used malware included threats on portable storage devices, fake anti-virus software, software specifically targeted at social media users, AutoRun malware and password-stealing Trojans. McAfee reported that approximately 55,000 new pieces of malware appear every day around the world.
Spam rates appear to have leveled off after reaching nearly 175 billion messages per day in the third quarter of 2009, but there was a spike in spamming that surrounding the FIFA World Cup held in South Africa during July. During that time, cybercriminals used a variety of methods to promote scams and search-engine poisoning globally.

The most popular forms of spam in the U.S. were delivery status notifications or non-delivery receipt spam, which was also the case in Great Britain, China, Australia, Italy, Spain, Germany and Brazil. Argentina had the world’s highest number of different spam topics with 16, according to McAfee’s report.

Cloudmark on the Move

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:01:00 GMT

Messaging infrastructure and security solution provider CloudMark announced that Web hosting leaders Hostopia and DigiWeb will be using its services.

DigiWeb will be using CloudMark's hosted and managed security solution Cloudfilter to provide spam, phishing and virus protection to over 48,000 web hosting, domain and data center customers across Ireland. The addition of CloudFilter is the first in a proposed suite of cloud-based solutions that Digiweb plans to roll out in 2010. According to the announcement, Digiweb anticipates the demand to be high.

“Spam is a serious issue for hosting providers and their customers, taking up significant time and IT resources,” said Jamie de Guerre, chief technology officer at Cloudmark. “By using our CloudFilter solution, hosting providers such as Digiweb can ensure the security of customers’ email infrastructure, improving the user experience and delivering real peace of mind.”

Hosted email and Web service provider Hostopia will be using Cloudmark Authority™, combined with Cloudmark Sender Intelligence, will be providing its four million email customers the messaging anti-abuse solution.

“At Hostopia, we constantly strive to provide our customers with the highest quality hosted web and email services, and we found that Cloudmark Authority was the clear choice to protect our environment,” said Dirk Baghat, CTO of Hostopia. “While our previous commercial grade technology worked well to combat spam, we wanted to further advance our solution to enhance our messaging infrastructure. With Cloudmark Authority, we can achieve improved performance while delivering the most advanced protection against spam, phishing and virus attacks.”

Q1 ’10 Internet Threats Report

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:53:00 GMT

CommTouch released its Internet Threats Trend Report for Q1 2010 and, no surprise here, spammers have become adept at using the familiar Internet names to give an air of legitimacy to their deception.

This quarter’s trend report analyzes the percentage of spam that actually emanates from Gmail. Five to ten percent of all spam appears to originate from Gmail according to the report. The report is based on the analysis of more than two billion email messages, as well as the GlobalView™ URL database within CommTouch’s cloud-based global detection and classification centers.

“Spammers and cybercriminals use experimentation to reach their goals,” said Asaf Greiner, Commtouch vice president, products. “They are always testing new techniques to lure their victims, from using familiar formats and domains to creating entirely new ways to entice action.”

Other highlights from the Q1 Trend Report include:

- Spam levels averaged 83% of all email traffic throughout the quarter, peaking at nearly 92% near the end of March and bottoming out at 75% at the start of the year.

- Pharmacy spam remained in the top spot with 81% of all spam messages, maintaining last quarter’s average, as did the number 2 topic, replicas, which maintained its average of 5.4%.

- An average of 305,000 zombies were activated daily to inflict malicious activity.

- While Brazil continues to produce the most zombies, its numbers decreased in the first quarter. In Q4 2009, it was responsible for 20.4% of global zombie activity. In Q1 2010, that number dropped to 14%.

Your E-mail Reputation Matters

MaureenA — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:44:00 GMT

Pay attention to how you e-mail, says Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). It released a new white-paper, "Message Sender Reputation Concepts and Common Practices," to explain how the habits of e-mail senders are now used by providers to distinguish spam from regular e-mail. This practice opens up the traditional blacklisted or whitelisted e-mail concepts, which in turn can deliver more targeted e-mails to recipients. MAAWG believes that by evaluating habits of senders vs. the actual content in e-mails more flexibility will be created and allow more e-mails to reach recipients that are incorrectly tagged as spam.

The providers combine habits with other technologies to determine good vs. bad e-mails, said Michael Adkins, co-chair of the MAAWG technical committee and AOL senior systems programmer in the release. Check out the white paper to learn more about what providers are doing to determine reputations. Previous best practices from MAAWG include sender e-mail technologies and subscription methods.

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Spam Data Trends from Google/Postini

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Google has released an overview of spam trends and events for the first quarter of 2009, and it makes for some fascinating reading.

Thanks to its Postini acquisition, which now powers Google's security and archiving service, some strong insights can be gained into the minds and actions of spammers.

Spam has returned to levels not seen since before the blocking of the McColo ISP in November 2008. The volume of spam grew in the first quarter, increasing an average of 1.2% per day.

Location-based spam, a new variety, has emerged. Users click on a link in a spam message and are directed to a page that contains fraudulent news headlines describing a crisis or disaster in a major city nearnby, determined by the geolocation of the user's source IP. Users are prompted to click on embedded videos which in turn downloads a virus.

Payload viruses (spam messages with attached viruses) have spread out from primarily Sunday-based attacks to every day of the week with no known pattern. Payload viruses also saw an increase of nine-fold in March from their February numbers.

Domain Registrars: Worst Spam Offenders Notified

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:41:00 GMT

KnujOn, a project developed to respond to Internet threats (specifically email-based threats) recently announced the results of a cluster analysis of the top 10 worst domain registrars in terms of spam and junk content hosting domains. ICANN, the authoritative body which manages domain registrars announced that it has sent compliance notices and notices of concern to those registrars reported for the majority of websites advertised in spam emails.

More than half of those registrars named had already been contacted by ICANN prior to publication of KnujOn’s report, and the remainder have since been notified following an analysis of other sources of data, including ICANN’s internal database. Many of the 10 worst registrars are based outside of the US and Canada (two Chinese registrars took the top spots - Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software and BEIJINGNN) but there are several companies that are quite noteworthy if only in name alone (e.g. eNom and Moniker).

ICANN relies upon the Internet community to report and review what it believes to be inaccurate registration data for individual domains. A dedicated online system called the Whois Data Problem Report System (“WDPRS”) was developed in 2002 to receive and track such complaints. "ICANN sends, on average, over 75 enforcement notices per month following complaints from the community. We also conduct compliance audits to determine whether accredited registrars and registries are adhering to their contractual obligations," explained Stacy Burnette, Director of Compliance at ICANN. "Infringing domain names are locked and websites removed every week through this system."

If those registrars, including those publicly cited, do not investigate and correct alleged inaccuracies reported to ICANN, ICANN's escalation procedure may ultimately result in the termination of accreditation, preventing them from registering domain names in the future.