SE Conspiracy

I learned very early on that email not getting through spam filters would be a major hindrance to my online businesses. Unfortunately, free email providers have cracked down so much that hardly anything gets through those filters now. If you are a legitimate business that has NEVER even once sent spam, your emails probably still end up in the ‘Bulk Mail’ folders at Yahoo and Gmail. It’s sad but true. MSN/Hotmail tends to be a little more realistic -as of the time of this writing.

I haven’t had the time to keep up on whether my emails were getting through over the past several years, and I just now made the time to overhaul my sites in this area.

What did I find?

Well, *gulp* I found that my forum has discarded roughly 25 registrations per month that did not see our email. One of my other businesses that caters to people who mostly use free email services have lost an estimated $500/month due to abandoned confirmations. Still, another one of my companies has lost its ability to generate any revenue due to emails not getting through. That company was actually “spam trap poisoned” -meaning that someone put in special emails used to catch spammers who continuously send spam to emails they shouldn’t. These are emails such as “donotspamthisemail@groups.yahoo.com.”

Basically, a “spam trap” was a good idea in the beginning. It was an email designed to be picked up by email harvesters (automated programs that crawl the web collecting email addresses from websites), and when the spammer would spam that email, the group would automatically submit a request to all of the blocklists and get them shut down fairly quickly.

However, these days, spammers can pick out which email addresses are spam traps and they then turn around and submit those emails into competitor websites. So, in my case, someone kept putting in several “spam trap” emails and when I would send out my double opt-in confirmation emails to it, my site would get tagged for spam. Now, I’ve had to spend considerable time and energy to get removed from those lists.

So, that’s no good. What can we do about it?

Here’s what I did tonight to combat the over zealous spam filters that are killing my legitimate businesses while doing little to curb overall spam:

1. I wrote new code for all of my sites that specifically tells people the exact steps on how to whitelist our email addresses and then provide an alternate way to request the validation email be sent out again.
2. I modified the email code across all of my sites to put a one-click unsubscribe and made it to where I keep the email to avoid re-registrations from people trying to spam trap poison me. I make the email inactive so it will never be emailed, of course.
3. I double-checked the security of my code, website account security, server security, and updated my passwords. This was done to help prevent someone from hacking any of my databases and spamming my users without me even knowing. It has never happened and I want to make sure it stays that way!
4. I applied to the various free email providers and requested to be whitelisted (see below).
5. I will be adding SPF records to my most important domains.
6. I am also considering a service such as Constant Contact for some of my more important lists –although, that will be a bit pricey for my 25,000 subscriber database.

Before you apply for the various whitelists, you should read over their terms to make 100% percent certain that you are compliant. Otherwise, you will waste a LOT of time and get nowhere.

For instance, you might think you are compliant because you don’t spam but it’s not that simple. Typically, you have to have the following:

1. Reverse DNS set up for each domain that sends your emails.
2. Dedicated IP address or you need to identify what methods you take to ensure that you are providing tracking to differentiate your emails from someone else sharing the same IP address.
3. Proof of how you collected your emails. This includes a timestamp, name, and method (i.e. email subscribe, form subscribe, etc)

When you are ready to begin this process, you can visit the following links to read over the guidelines and apply:

1. AOL – AOL Whitelist Guidelines
2. Yahoo! -Yahoo Bulk Email Sender FAQ
3. Gmail – Google Whitelist Policy*

*Google does not allow whitelisting. So, if you want to tell people how to manually whitelist you for their account, use the following steps:

1. Go to http://www.gmail.com and login to your email account
   *just like you would to check your email.
2. At the top RIGHT SIDE, click the link that says SETTINGS.
3. At the top of the screen that says MAIL SETTINGS, click the link that says FILTERS.
4. On the FILTERS screen, click the tab that says Create a New Filter tab.
5. In the FROM field on the CREATE A FILTER screen, type: yourdomain.com
   *Change NO other settings on this screen.
6. Click the button that says NEXT STEP.
7. Check the box that says STAR IT.
8. Click the button that says CREATE FILTER.
9. That’s it! Sign out from Gmail.

Whew! As long as it took to write all of that out, it is nothing compared to how much work this will have been once completed. However, these are some of the ills of working online, and -for some of us- the benefits of being able to work from home are more than worth it!

Today, I wanted to talk about how all webmasters are told they should not sell advertisements on their websites unless it is done the way Google wants it done. You know, I watched for years as other webmasters profited while I sat back and ‘did the right thing’ by not selling links. In hindsight, my sites in that market could’ve easily generated more than $7,500 per month in additional revenue. I had three sites at PR7 (naturally!), a couple of PR5’s and PR6’s, and several dozen PR4’s and below.

Over the two to three years that I refused to succumb to the pressure, selling text links would’ve netted me at least $225,000 in EXTRA income. Man. Now that I’ve actually sat down and done the math, I’m really disheartened.

So anyway, doing what Google told everyone was ‘the right thing to do’ cost me well over a quarter of a million dollars! But wait, wait! There is an upside and a benefit to doing the right thing, right? I -like a million others- believed that we would be rewarded for our good deeds in ‘trying to make the Internet a better place’ with traffic and visitors. Thus, we would be able to grow our businesses ‘the right way.’

“At the end of the day we are likely to be punished for our kindnesses.” – Ronin (1998)

So, how are my sites doing now-a-days? Hmm. Well, I have had ZERO traffic from Google for over a year and although I should have started looking out for MY best interests back then, I decided to wait it out and give them the benefit of the doubt. So, as of today, my portfolio of sites is still getting roughly …umm… ZERO traffic from Google and their value for selling links has diminished to the point of possibly generating $1,000 per month -if I’m lucky. And, even then, that could end at any moment when Google blindly wipes out another million websites from its ranking index, just for fun.

I’m sure many people who still have some Google traffic (by no doing of their own despite their beliefs) will swear by Google’s generosity -if you stay the course. I’m sure they would say that I must not know anything about marketing online or I must’ve employed some kinds of “black hat” techniques. Sadly, no, I never employed any tricks and I do know how to market online. I’ve made quite a bit of money marketing online for myself and others.

Ah well. Most people were born and raised to look out for themselves, but I guess I missed that day in class. For me, the moral of the story is that I must -to survive- start to look out for myself and myself alone. If I can better someone else or another business in the process, then great. If not, too bad. I am on the right path now, but is it too late?

Google must be in the holiday spirit, because they actually gave me some good news for once.

They have removed my forum, Get Paid Hwy, (visit site) from being disabled for serving adsense ads. Hooray. Surprisingly, I just took a minute to read through their policies and noticed that they disabled that domain more than a year ago because of an obscure policy.

I corrected the issue (i.e. removed a little content) and sent an email asking to have the domain ad serving re-enabled. Two days later, they agreed. Wow!

That’s really good news for members of my little community because I have finally been able to turn the forum into an Ad-Revenue Sharing forum. That way, helpful active members will be rewarded financially -directly into their bank accounts!- for their efforts in helping others learn how to make money online. That’s something I’ve wanted to offer for a long time, and I thought it wouldn’t be possible. But, Google has made my day today and now I can move forward and help a lot of people make even more money from my forum. Hoorah!

Has anyone else felt that Google is coming off like an overbearing tyrant lately?

If you are not a webmaster, you probably think, “What? Google? Don’t they just help people find things on the web?” But, for us webmasters, it’s a bit of a different story. Behind that red curtain is a little man pulling some BIG strings.

The Internet has been maturing quickly over the past few years and it’s users have matured with it. In turn, webmasters have seen increasing competition and strive to draw attention in a burgeoning marketplace that somehow seems to grow more crowded each and every day. Competition is fierce and low-cost advertising has become all but extinct.

So, what’s an eager entrepreneur to do to advertise their site?

Basically, you have a few advertising options but most are ineffective. It would seem that resorting back to buying links and banners on websites is the grass roots of the Internet. I mean, in the beginning long before Google (hard to believe there was a time before Google, isn’t it?), the only thing we had were links and banners. In fact, they are the ultimate foundation for all things Internet.

Quite a commotion, however, has been stirred recently due to a rash of “de-listings” related to businesses buying and selling text links. Who’s place is it to tell people how they can or can not advertise their businesses? Google was founded on the idea of “Link Popularity”, but it sounds like they are unable to cope with “Purchased Link Popularity” to the point that they are just grabbing at straws now.

Realistically, it is up to the Search Engines to write an algorithm that takes into account things like purchased links and advertisements. It is not up to the Internet to bend to Google’s will or any other search engine’s will for that matter. I keep getting this overwhelming impression that webmasters are supposed to believe that “whatever is good for Google is good for the Internet.” It is arguable that people should not sell “PageRank”, because it is not a reliable indicator of true importance and because it can be manipulated. However, if you take away the “PageRank” or any other indicator of importance, what do you have left? Is the page then more or less important than it was before? No, not at all.

It is nice to be able to glance at some sort of indicator and get an idea of how important a website is considered, because that could help decide whether or not to advertise on it. But, uh-oh, that means we might be tempted to buy a text link or a banner on an important site. Is that bad?

Back in the day, Sergey Brin and Larry Page had the epiphany that links were a trustworthy judge of importance. As with everything, things change. People adapt, and so the webmasters adapted. As webmasters matured in knowledge of marketing, they began to realize the importance of the most basic forms of advertising. Perhaps a good many have tried to take the easy road to success and manipulate their way to the top, but the root of the problem is that -like all things- search engines and their algorithms must evolve.

Continuing on the current path will simply cause millions of webmasters to stop outbound linking to sites (at least not without rel=nofollow or using some other tricks), and that could potentially lead to a lot bigger problems than we have now.

The bottom line is that search engines must evolve and adapt or simply become obsolete. If that happens, who will be there to clean up Google’s mess?

In response to the recent rash “de-listings” against sites listed in the Text Link Ads inventory, I decided to launch a new niche marketplace that specifically highlights “Search Engine Safe” advertising.

Ultimately, that means it allows advertisers who will be using our automated code or be placing advertisements with a rel=nofollow tag.

It is interesting to note that I do not agree that rel=nofollow is something that webmasters should be forced to do, but I saw an opportunity and designed this marketplace around it.

Take a look at: http://www.javvy.com/

We will be updating and adding many listings over the next month or so. So, stay tuned!