Mirror of Justice

How ‘Default’ Optioned Spam and Junk Email Filters Could Be Ruining Your Business

July 17th, 2009 at 08:53pm Under Business Law

You spent tireless hours creating your business model, even longer perfecting your website to be the best that it can be. Taking count of your competitors, positioning yourself with a uniqueness that surely could not see you fail.

You agonized for weeks over the perfect website hosting company for your business, and chose the one that guaranteed you 99% uptime (you want your website ‘up’!). You have staff in place, or indeed if working alone, know that you will be your own ‘one-woman’ customer support team.

You have made an executive decision, through the hundreds of business meetings that you have had with yourself (in your own head – whilst falling asleep, in the bath and eating lunch) that you will be providing email sales and email customer support only. After all, if it is good enough for eBay then it is good enough for you yes.

Everything is in place, the site is live, the search engine marketing firm has been contracted for $39.95 a month (you don’t have much of a budget just yet), the advertising is in place and you have decided to do this yourself to save extra money (after all you summarize, why hire a company to look after PPC when you can easily do it yourself right).

It’s Monday, the perfect ‘go-live’ day, 1500 hours and the site has been live 8 hours, your pride and joy is up and running and your dream of making an online business a reality is now yours. You are getting visitors and hey, you are even starting to get sales and it’s all looking good.

You have employed some of the best anti spam/junk mail filter software there is to avoid unwanted distractions whilst you respond to your new customers and your website hosting company also guarantees you the most vigorous defence at server level for unwanted email.

But…suddenly there is a problem, you start receiving emails complaining that you have not replied to other emails, which you had never received. At first you simply thought it was a ‘crazy’ customer or one of those lost emails that never get there that you know the traditional postal service are so well known for.

But….then there are 2 emails complaining of non-response, one from a customer who had bought from you the previous day demanding that if you do not respond immediately that they will charge-back the transaction! Where did that come from, you never received an email but you did receive this email – why was that, this really is coming more of a regular occurrence and something that you need to take action in resolving.

Now, not only are you losing sales by not receiving emails of a pre-sales nature but you are receiving emails from your customers complaining that once they buy from you that you cannot be contacted.

And so it starts, the beginning of the end, a bad reputation for customer support, charged-back transactions that cost you and your now struggling website business additional money and a realization that there seems to be a problem with email, but you do not know what it is.

Ok, so the above might seem a little extreme but we live in an extreme world where just one issue can make or break a company and as a small ‘one-woman’ online business who has spent so much money on search engine marketing, advertising and making your website the best that it can be, you really could do without such issues. You want to be a success, not gain a reputation as one whom provides terrible service.

Where do you look to resolve the issue?

No further than the spam/junk mail filter software you purchased and/or the service mail filters that your website hosting company put in place ‘for your protection’.

The very purpose for which spam/junk mail filters are implemented, being to protect your mailbox from unwanted email, can be the very same good intentions that cause you great issues with your customers and cause annoyance to distraction in resolution.

What is an unwanted email; yes the hundreds of spam emails selling the latest pharmaceutical product from yet another untrained and un-web-educated affiliate. Emails that you never asked for or indeed want – they are so annoying that you ensured that your home PC, which is also used by your 2 kids (12 and 15 years of age) employs the same level of spam email protection as your business PC. You didn’t want your kids to become privy to ‘adult’ spam themed emails that pop through every mail box from uncaring spammers across the world did you.

But wait, this is your business computer and your business website we are talking about now, not your home PC where spam and junk email filters are best put to use. Your business uses email as its main communication tool, is it really a wise idea to put your faith in a piece of software or your website hosting companies default mail filters. Should you not really take on the ownership of deciding what is and what is not junk email, and the question to really ask oneself is, can your website business really afford to put the decision of what should and what should not arrive in your email box.

Regardless of how ‘intelligent’ the spam filter is, how much control you have over it, or indeed how much control you do not have over it if a default feature of your website hosting email accounts, any website business worth its salt needs at the very least to consider all of the factors that make up this fundamental business decision – to filter, or not to filter.

Have you run all appropriate tests? Can you receive emails from Hotmail, Yahoo and other free web accounts? What happens if an attachment comes with the email, and are there any kind of content filters or ‘auto-responder’ issues to think about. What about the different ISP’s, can you receive from AOL users – or more importantly sometimes, can AOL users receive your emails.

Explore the next set of issues, perhaps you can receive all emails, but what happens if your customer is using s spam/junk email filter and they cannot receive your reply. The nightmare scenario then of you actually responding to your customers contact emails but because of their ISP or junk mail filter they cannot receive your replies, have you tested this, have you tested the content of your emails? If you lace HTML or URL’s within the content is that accepted…yes these are all issues that you should have considered before your website even went live but this is not a well documented or well discussed topic.

Yet, this should a subject of conversation, it should be a topic of interest and it certainly should be something that is addressed as part of every website implementation plan.

Do not let a spam or junk email filter ruin your business. Get it setup properly, with thorough implementation and gain knowledge of how to operate it correctly. Don’t let technology take over by simply selecting the ‘default’ option.

This article was produced by http://www.servicewrap.net/. Search engine ranking and marketing service provider – without real visitors it will not matter if you have email communication issues.

NOTE: Not all website hosting companies implement anti-spam filters by default. If in doubt, ask. This article does not assume that spam/junk email filters will ruin a business, only that the business in question should be thoroughly knowledgeable of any issues when running such software – and where implementation and spam control is available that these are properly set up.

Last Gasp Of Black Hat SEO!

July 16th, 2009 at 12:20am Under Appeals and Writs

Yes indeedy! Judgment Day is visited unto the black hat seo brethren with a mighty vengeance that was foretold from the day the first scroll of code was writ in script!
Okay, enough with the pseudo biblical babble and down to business. Just in case you are not conversant with the term black hat seo, here’s a brief explanation:
Black hat seo methods are search engine optimization techniques and strategies that fall outside the guidelines and purview of the major search engines with the intent of manipulating the position of one’s website to a far more strategic location on those search engines’ results index.
The objective of this type of seo is to game the search engines in order to attract a ton of internet traffic in as short a time frame as possible. The opposite of black hat seo is known as white hat seo. Most cream-of-the-crop black hat seo practitioners have cloaking, coding and programming skills and employ(ed) self-designed software to game the search engines.
Black hat seo techniques by their very nature are short-lived and the black hatters are well aware of this. You see these techniques involve (or at any rate used to) capitalizing on a weakness or loophole in the search engine algorithms or manufacturing such a weakness and then aggressively exploiting that flaw before the search engines caught on. In other words black hat seo has always been a race against the search engines, with the black hat webmasters ever trying to stay one step ahead!
OLD SCHOOL BLACK HAT SEO TECHNIQUES
Being a step ahead of the search engines used to be relatively simple for the sole reason that the search engine algorithms of the day really were rather basic and crude compared to the situation of today. Some of the more pervasive and better known techniques were keyword stuffing which quite often went hand in hand with the application of invisible text.
Invisible text is merely text that is the same color as the background color of the web page on which that text is located, thus being invisible to the human eye, but readily accessible to a search engine robot. People who used such techniques would stuff their website homepage (or any page whose position on the SERPs they wished to manipulate) with their most sought after keyword, in some cases inserting that keyword hundreds of times as invisible text.
Of course the search engines got smarter, caught on and quickly fixed such loopholes.
Generally, as a rule, black-hat seo webmasters never used their main sites to pursue their shady techniques because they were well aware that the penalty if caught was death; death in the sense that any website found employing such black hat seo methods, was banned and forever removed from the universe of know search! So as mentioned previously, the black hatters never adopted such shady techniques on their main websites but instead used disposable websites with multiple back-links pointing back to their main sites.
Which naturally begs the question, since the search engines were quite capable of crawling those back links, why didn’t they then penalize the destination website huh?
Good question indeed, and here is the answer; because then it would be very simple for a competitor to get rid of their competition by getting that competitors website banned by setting up such a black-hat operation with the destination URL being that of the competition and not that of the black hatter’s website!
With that comforting piece of knowledge in mind the black hat seo webmasters were able to conduct their business, traipsing a step ahead of the search engines and making a killing. Besides when the search engines caught on the black hatters didn’t have to close shop right away for that particular black hat op; there was still plenty of money to be made from gullible marketers who believed in overnight success and riches.
All the webmaster had to do was provide evidence (screenshots and testimonials) of how much money they were making from their system, and before you could say ka-ching, more money was rolling in from that defunct system through sales from people eager to duplicate the black hatter’s success.
THE BIGGEST NAMES IN BLACK HAT SEO RESIGN THEMSELVES TO WHITE HAT TECHNIQUES!
Alas for the black-hat seo brethren, soon enough the search engines had closed the one-step-ahead gap to a half-step ahead! Fast forward to today and there is no step-ahead gap! The search engines are way too smart and getting even smarter still, so much so that there really is no profit to be had anymore from darker-than-shade-of-grey seo techniques. Perhaps that explains why so many cream-of-the-crop black hatters have finally conceded to pursuing white hat seo techniques.
But remember what I said about extra-monetization of defunct seo techniques; there are plenty of gullibles out there who are willing to shell out hefty sums in hopes of fast-tracking their internet marketing campaign. And make no mistake black hat seo software usually commands a hefty price sticker on the premise that it is going to make the purchaser a bucket load of money in next to no time at all. But you and I of course know that such will not happen!
REMEMBER TO BE FOREWARNED IS TO BE FOREARMED!
So if you stumble upon some advert that makes obviously outrageous claims yet still seems seductively appealing like the following example: “Internet Marketer Gets $67 Million In Google Pay-Per-Click Ads Free” just rein in that raging beast of temptation deep inside you that can barely restrain itself and recite the following: “A Fool And His/Her Money Are Easily Parted!”