Why spam is good news for your company
How can spam, the most unproductive form of email, one of the largest security threat to businesses and one of the most stressful problems in the office be helpful?
With all industries, there are cowboys that ruin it for all trades. Many of these cowboys themselves are fairly creative but mostly devious to try and con their customers into believing that they are providing a good service.
Internet marketing is not immune, especially Search Engine Optimising and I’ll explain why from two angles:
- Email spammers
- Search engines
Put yourself initially in the position of the email spammer. He is trying to grab the attention of the email recipient with catchy email subject lines to ensure the email is opened. Two million emails are sent every minute in the UK and catchy is an understatement. (Once the recipient’s email address is confirmed by images loading with the email, or an attachment being opened and a virus/trojan initiated, the spammer has a result.) The spammer initially had to spoof the sender’s domain, the IP address, create copy within the email that looked legitimate, find a correct recipient email address and create believable attachment file names. These actions present massive challenges to the spammer.
Now consider the role of the search engine. Although this is reactive in contrast to the spammer’s proactive approach, both are in the same battle. A search engine visits websites and collects the content of billions of pages every day. Its job is to determine the importance of each and every page. There are significantly more variables but they are proportionately similar. What media type is the page? How old is the page? Who is linked to the page? When did they link to the page? Is the page reputable? What is the content of the page? These are just some of the major questions.
Content is the variable that both these examples have in common.
Search engines have long been creating patents that can determine what are and what are not spam results. Some search engines are better than others and many patents seem to have been applied long after they have been shown in their result pages. These include:
- Methods and systems for identifying manipulated articles
- A Taxonomy of JavaScript Redirection Spam
- System and method for hierarchical segmentation of websites by topic
- Systems and methods for collaborative tag suggestions
The similarities between email spam and web spam are uncanny on many levels and there are attractive synergies to create an alliance to combat spam. The more powerful tools for filtering emails become, the less time businesses need to spend fretting about spam. This frees them up to focus on clean and more useful search engine results and being able to find reputable businesses like yours at the top of the search engines.
Written by Phil Yarrow
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