Spam is usually not good. Sometimes it can be instructive to receive and read the spam, but don’t click on the links! Recently though, more and more, I discovered more kinds of spam(besides the typical viagra, cialis, enlargement of…, OEM software, windows 7, etc):
- phone spam – calling from BT(British Telecom) to check the billing details/phone line/internet line; the caller: usually someone with an accent from India; if you want to ask them about their company, though they pretend they call on behalf of BT, they don’t say too much. Usually, they wanna talk to the manager/responsible person. Average: 10 calls a day(at the company office).
- email spam – intelligent email spam:
- someone “invites you to see the profile on facebook”, yet when u log in, your details are sent to someone else…
- IRS phishing – a series of emails saying that u didn’t pay your taxes to the US government(yet we are in the UK!);
- HMRC phishing – “Issue: Unreported/Underreported Income (Fraud Application) – Please review your tax statement on HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) website (click on the link below)” – spam/phishing link;
- AvMed spam – “Your AvMed Statement is attached office. Please review and confirm our details match your records.” – with a pdf attached, which is a OEM software add. Smart!
- Banks phishing – until now we received fake emails/phishing emails impersonating: Allience & Leicester, Bank of America and NatWest. Something about: we have a scheduled maintenance, so please update your contact details via this form online(and the link is some strange mozilla&chrome-rejected one!).
- Microsoft Outlook critical update – “Update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express (KB910721)” - when the update / new outlook was out, they also sent this email with a strange link in it… - blog comments spam – we all know that, starting with “good website” to “I will bookmark it” and more: “I agree with this, but what do you think about this medicine-website, etc?”. Thank God for Akismet. Still, there are some who pretend to be legit, and… they escape!
- twitter spam – spam accounts, spam tweets mentioning your account and some link, spam DM, spam RT, spam everything – lots of spam. Still, from time to time twitter cleans up the twitter-sphere of some of these…
- google wave spam – I don’t have a google wave, but by observing and listening, I realized that if someone knows your wave account, he can just start waving at u and send u stuff! There’s not yet a security system of approving friends on google wave implemented…
and there are other kinds of spam also. These are the ones I encountered recently while being online and working at the company. Ingenious people – why not use their creativity for constructing something useful? Good question!
the people and google are after your content, whether SEO or not!
November 7, 2009
stefan4m facebook, google, new online, twitter blog comments, directory submission, DMOZ, facebook your article, get feedback, good content, google eats content up, niche directories, promoting your website, search engines, SEO, social media, spam in directory submission, tweet your website Leave a comment
I still can’t believe that there was a time when I had a long compiled list of search engines and directories where I would register / subscribe my website once I put the site online, so that, eventually, google would see it! Starting with the DMOZ and continuing with the altavista, yahoo, etc. There were at least 2 weeks before google saw your efforts and crawled your website. And then, if you wanted to have a new page to be indexed by google, you had to put a link on the front page/on a page with a high pagerank….
Nowadays, though one needs SEO(search engine optimization), and though you need to register with some local niche directories(depending on your business), google is after your content! So, in a way, you don’t have to “fight” too much – all you need to do is to put out the content that you think people need/love – or set up the services/functions people would love to have, and the people(social media…. social networks…) will “push you” up in google(just tweet your article/page/site, or put a link on your facebook/myspace). On the other hand, once you have a link from another website to your new site/page, it’s a matter of a short time until google “eats up” your content. I have seen a new wordpress blog site being indexed by google in 2h.
And one more tip: because there’s so much spam in the directory submission / SEO / even social media area, go along with the common sense in promoting your website(make sure your webpage has a title, some keywords, headings and paragraphs, logical links, some anchor links, solid structure, related links; get some of your friends opinion/feedback on your website, facebook/tweet it, see what their reaction is; also submit it to some related directories, comment on other blogs, etc). You know why? Because you don’t want “bulk traffic/random loads of people”, but you want your content/ideas/services to be known by real people who would also give you feedback to help you/communicate with you how to go on. At least that’s the new way things work nowadays online…