Archive for September, 2008
Over the weekend it emerged that Google had performed a major deep crawl and updated PageRank (PR) data for sites in their index. Many webmasters seem to be as confused as ever as to why in particular their sites have seen PageRank increases or decreases, but one thing seems to be ringing a resounding bell across many SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) forums.
Webmasters in the SEO forum at Digital Point, for example, are expressing their surprise that sites which they spent considerable time optimising and promoting seem to have had their PR decreased while sites they relatively neglected saw PR go the other way.
Some webmasters are suggesting that the only possible reason for this is that Google could now be taking a dim view on the excessive promotion of websites using social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon and Technorati.
Google may now be considering the over marketing of sites within these channels as attempts to spam their index in order to unfairly rank higher in search results. The search giant is constantly tweaking its algorithm in order to filter spam and ensure the integrity of its search results continues to remain the most relevant and most highly regarded in the industry.
Spam filtering measures such as this, if the claims are founded, are just another in a long line of major directional changes Google have implemented into their search engine results spam filter to prevent the poisoning of their index. In the past they have dropped the relevance of the keyword tag, penalised sites which enter into controversial link exchanges and, even developed measures (allegedly) to prevent spammers who create short term sites benefiting from high search result placements in order to sell their dubious spamvertised products (search engine poisoning). These are just a few.
If it is indeed true that Google have rewritten their algo to weed out social bookmarking spam, could this spell the end of the social bookmarking phenomena which has surged in popularity in just a few short years, heavily due to the popularity of the medium with SEO experts and webmasters?
We will be watching developments closely and welcome your comments in the meantime.
In his excellent anti spam blog, Terry Zink discusses measures that can be taken by the webmail giants such as GMail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail to prevent the phenomenon of automated spam bots successfully breaking CAPTCHA to create new accounts and send spam from those services.
Zink rightly suggests that the industry needs to look into some sort of secondary measure to prevent this happening. After all, spammers only need to break CAPTCHA once to win, while service providers must constantly battle to lock them out. However, we feel that his suggestion of sending a link which needs to be clicked in order to complete the email account signup process is seriously flawed. While this may be the perfect solution for newsletters and mailing lists it would not be suitable for email accounts as it assumes too readily that the person signing up (assuming it is a real person) already has an email address at which to receive that link.
While many of us nowadays do actually have more than a handful of email addresses, it is important to remember that there is always a generation of new internet users (students, children at home, people in developing countries, etc) who are signing up to these services for the very first time.
In these cases, where could you possibly send them that authentication link? Anti spam measures must continue to prevent the successful delivery of spam to our inboxes, while minimising the inconvenience to real people. The cops and robbers analogy is perfect to explain this.
The robber can indiscriminately shoot and cause harm to achieve his purpose while the cop must attempt to apprehend the robber yet keep innocent members of the community safe (and relatively unrestricted) during his pursuit.
That’s the anti spam fight in a nutshell.
We didn’t have to think very hard about starting this blog. While we really want to concentrate our efforts in improving our spam filter and at the same time keep it affordable, we realised that we need to find better ways to connect with our clients, potential clients, and the general internet community at large.
Our product is a hosted spam filter service. What this means is that we do all the spam filtering for you. A quick and easy change to your domain means that your emails are redirected to our servers (presently in the UK, Europe and the United States) where they are checked for spam, phishing and viruses. Obvious spam is blocked and rejected immediately and stuff that we’re not sure about is marked (or ‘tagged’) as spam (not in the subject line but invisibly in the message ‘headers’) and forwarded on to your email server. Your email programme can read the invisible tag and redirect those that are tagged to your junk folder. We think our spam filtering service is the most simple to use and straight forward. You don’t have to install, configure or update anything.
Our spam filtering service is very simple but we think it’s very powerful at the same time. We are constantly working on new spam rules and looking for ways to catch more spam messages. We feel that for the small business, or consultant, or even the home user with their own domain, it’s the best value hosted anti spam service out there.
We intend to use this blog to keep you up to date with news on our developments and also inform you about the latest goings on in the anti spam industry. We will also use this blog to advise you on the latest techniques spammers are using to try and get to your inbox. Notice that we used the word “techniques” where others might use the word “threats”. We want to keep this as simple and straight forward as possible. Phishing and malware (software with malicious intentions) may pose serious concerns but we are just dealing with email here. We don’t want to scare you into a panic with words like “threats” and “attacks”. It’s important to keep a level head about this whole thing and we feel that through this blog and the information we can provide (or “arm”) you with, you’ll be better informed and better able to deal with spam as a whole.
Actually, that’s our job, isn’t it?
If you want to link to our blog so as to keep up-to-date with what we’re doing and stay informed with all the various ways to “combat” spam, you can subscribe to our feed using the links at the bottom of the page.
If you want to link to this blog from your web site please use the following code:
<a href=http://www.remoteantispam.com/blog>Spam Filter Talk</a>
