For the technically-minded, Changes in Spam Levels this week Posted by simonw illustrates the level of disruption and may grow an interesting discussion from server managers – it seems the reduction is less than the 75% reported in some news services, but still significant.

This is great news for all good internet users. It’s disappointing if the spam hosting service won’t have to pay any of the costs they’ve inflicted on other computer users in some way. The only practical negative that I’ve noticed so far is that much of the stopped spam was pretty easy to identify and filter out, so the reduction in spam reaching my “unsure” mailbox hasn’t been anything like 50%. Still, less spam hitting the filters means less computer power used, which means less electricity and network data transfer used, which means lower costs for us. Yippee!

And finally, I smiled at this comment over on the WebmasterWorld discussion:-

“Our spam email has dropped so much in the past 2 days that I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with our email accounts.”

In general, it’s a little disappointing when you get a “null pointer” from a private company, but it’s particularly annoying from a university. University mistakes like “technology transfer programmes” (that stop software becoming free software available to social enterprises) are justified by a need to get more money – but clearly this particular university has money to waste. How about others?

If there was a way to subscribe to email or blog news of their research publications, I probably would have subscribed. Instead, I’ve just ranted here (without rewarding them with a link) and now I’m going to recycle the flier. I’ll probably have forgotten the three-letter acronym by next week. It’s simply bad marketing. It’s paper spam. Please, if you are putting things into conference handout packs, ask yourself why? What are you hoping to get out of it? How are you going to measure its success?

Spam for Breakfast is No Fun At All

Trust me – Waking up to spam for breakfast is no fun!

Like everyone else who works with the Internet, I have seen a massive increase in the amount of spam I receive over the past years.

Furthermore, I regularly have frustrated clients asking if I can do more to filter the spam on our dedicated servers before it gets to them and, if not, what they can do to tackle the time consuming problem.

The problem with increasing the spam filter on our servers is clients begin to lose emails they want to receive.

I hate to sound like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but I can only see spamming getting worse. Furthermore, I can never see a time when spam software is just one step ahead of the spammers of the world.

The best thing I can recommend is to put in place a good quality anti-spam & anti-virus software program that automatically searches for regular updates and manages spam filtering with intelligence – that is the more spam it handles the more learned it becomes of your settings.

Anyone active on the internet will undoubtedly receive more spam emails today than they did one year ago, so what we are aiming for here is a manageable process that effectively filters the majority of your spam, learns from its actions, and regularly updates itself against new attacks, allowing you to get on with managing your business.

Yes its frustrating that I receive 100s of spam email each day but it no longer takes up too much of my time since changing from Norton Internet Security to Zone Alarm Internet Security Suite.

Neither I nor my companies belong to any affiliate scheme or make any commission from promoting Zone Alarm, but I can honestly say, it works for us.  And if it becomes as ineffective as Norton became for us, we’ll be asking you for your recommendations!

I know some of our clients are now using Zone Alarm; and considering the lack of calls, I assume its working for them too.  I know at least two use AVG Internet Security.

So, as far as good advice goes, consider buying the best solution not the cheapest and make sure it offers, and you sign up for automatic updates.  And be aware the best anti-spam software won’t necessarily stop you receiving spapm but it will at least manage what can otherwise be, an uncontrollable situation.

1. JavaScript or other crawler-unfriendly navigation that may impede indexing

This one is best avoided at design-time, by including Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Level A in the design brief, but if you’ve ended up with JavaScript-based navigation on your site (check by doing “View Source” and searching for the code for your home page link and so on – if you can find it, then it’s probably not javascript) and it’s based on some template system, a webmaster can probably do a whole-site edit to put the navigation links in the page properly – or at least add a useful <noscript> tag.

2. Navigation that buries important pages within the site architecture.

The structure of the website’s files and the structure of the link menus do not need to match, so if there’s a page that you feel is important, get your webmaster to add it to the navigation links across the whole site.

3. Duplicate “pages” getting indexed under multiple URLs.

This usually happens for one of two reasons: one is inappropriately-parked domains, which is mistake 6 below and often fairly easy to fix; the other is a misbehaving web application, which you’ll need to get a programmer to fix.

You can do a simple test of your web application by starting at your homepage and following links to a particular page; then open a new browser window and try to reach the same page by different links (or a site search) and compare the address bars (the bit of your browser showing http://) – do they match? If not, you’ve got this problem.

4. No keyword phrase focus in the content or conversely, keyword phrase stuffing

You can use a good word-counter on the text to see how common different keywords and keyphrases, or use the “webmaster tools” section of some search engines to see what they’re focusing on.

Keyword-stuffing can be fairly easy to see. If you “View Source” on a page and there’s a large block of keyword-intensive text somewhere in it that doesn’t appear it when viewed in a browser, then it’s probably stuffing. Many sites regard stuffing as a sort of spam, so you don’t want to be found doing this.

To fix these problems, rewrite the page text appropriately.

5. An optimized home page, but that’s it

Repeat your checks from problem 4 on a few pages other than the home page to discover whether you suffer from this. Also, see whether your website statistics show search engine visitors arriving at a variety of different pages (these are sometimes called “Entry Page” statistics).

6. Additional domains owned by the company are not properly redirected

If you usually use .co.uk, but you also have a .com domain, try visiting a random page on your website, then click in the address bar and replace the .co.uk with .com – what happens?

If the page is Not Found, then your domains aren’t properly redirected and you need a Redirect adding to the second one.

If the page displays but the address doesn’t change itself back, then your domains are probably pointing at the same webspace but aren’t properly redirected, which will mean you’re probably making mistake 3 above. Usually, the simplest way to fix this is with a conditional redirect. On Apache webservers, you can add a .htaccess file containing something like:-

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=permanent,L]

That even works on BT Business web hosting, by the way. If it doesn’t work, try asking your web hosting provider to enable mod_rewrite for you or ask them to suggest how to achieve the same result.

The above list of mistakes was published on Search Engine Land last week. The correction methods are all things used by my webmaster cooperative.

Anyone who uses a BT Yahoo! Mail account should have received an email from BT explaining that, as an account holder you will need to make some changes to continue sending emails from alternate addresses.

BT are asking that all customers verify the mail accounts so that they can be passed as safe email addresses. If you don’t verify the mail addresses your outgoing emails may be blocked and you might get an Error 553 message.

For more information visit www.btyahoo.com/verify.