What is Spam?
Besides being a much-maligned luncheon meat, the term spam covers many undesirable, deceitful promotional activities on the Internet. Spam often elicits a strong negative emotional response. Companies associated with spam activities can damage their online brand and/or get themselves blocked from certain online venues for life. It is important to understand what spam is in order to avoid these consequences.
Spam is primarily found on the search engines, Usenet newsgroups and most visibly in your own email inbox.
Search Engine Spam
When spamming a search engine (also called spamdexing) a website tries to fool the engine into thinking it is more relevant for a particular search term than it is. Search engines don't like to be fooled because it makes their search results less useful. The major search players have taken a tough stance on these practices and will quickly ban or significantly penalize any site they think is trying to manipulate its results unfairly. Examples of spamdexing practices include:
- cloaking
- fast redirects
- excessive keyword repetition
- same color text on same color background
- using keywords that don't apply to your site's content
- trying to artificially boost link popularity by participating in link farms
Newsgroup Spam
Spam has almost made Usenet newsgroups unusable. Most are flooded with completely unrelated, unwelcome messages making it difficult to find the on-topic discussions. This means that any newsgroup struggling to remain legitimate is highly sensitive to spam. The slightest whiff of a promotional message or of a similar posting on a large number of newsgroups will result in the righteous wrath of the membership crashing down upon you. There is similar sensitivity on email discussion groups, chat rooms and online bulletin boards, but these are generally moderated and it is less of a problem.
Email Spam
Everyone receives email spam in the form of unwanted messages in their inbox. It threatens to tarnish the value of this communication channel just as it did to Usenet newsgroups. Also called Unsolicited Commercial or Bulk Email (UCE or UBE) the formal definition of spam is just that - untargeted bulk mailings of commercial email that the recipient never agreed to receive.
The most blatant practitioners of email spam do some of the following things:
- harvest email addresses from websites, newsgroup postings, mailing lists, your own browser as you surf and many, many other places (some spammers claim that if you post in public areas or have your email address on a site then they can legitimately use it);
- hide their identity with cloaking technology or by forging message headers or return path information;
- include an opt-out option somewhere within the body of the message which if you don't use they feel gives them permission to keep sending you information (but if you do use, may simply confirm your address is real and can be included and resold to other spam mailing lists).
Commercial or not, any unwelcome email can elicit the same response - a quick trip to the trashcan without even opening it. Likewise, using spam techniques in other venues, whether deliberate or accidental, can carry lasting negative consequences. Besides hostile consumer reaction, technology is improving to block spam on the search engines and from email inboxes and laws are evolving to deal with these issues. All of these factors will serve to constrain spam activity, as will the increasing availability of legitimate opt-in vehicles. Anyone doing business online must be sensitive to all of these issues and tread carefully.
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Did you know?
By 2003, eMarketer estimates that 97% of all email received will be some form of marketing, 75% of which will be unsolicited.
Source: eMarketer
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eMage Sites of the Month
The Classification of Search Engine Spam
A long and somewhat academic white paper by eBrand Management that attempts to set out the guidelines and principles for classifying search engine spam. Pretty comprehensive and will be of particular interest to search engine experts.
Up to Their Necks
This News.com special report details how companies are taking desperate measures to combat email spam. It also includes links to other great resources and stories about spam and its consequences.
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eMage Tip of the Month
Be wary of rented lists. If you are going to buy a list of potential customers who have given permission to someone else to receive information that is related to your company, it doesn't mean that the customer wants to hear from you. You don't like it when your name gets on a mailing list for some obscure product when you used your charge card at Radio Shack. So why would you bombard unsuspecting surfers with unsolicited information about your company? And even if you provide an up-front out, like an email message titled "click here to opt-out", you're still sending spam.
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