TWSD: SEO Spamming

It’s no secret that I get a lot of spam. It’s no secret that some catches my eye enough to actually write about it here. Today’s spam is an email that actually made me laugh, though. Somewhere, some gardening site paid a lot of money for search engine optimization and got ripped off.
We own the site samspade.org. It’s down now, victim of a major hardware crash, but this was a site with a number of tools for tracking spammers. This morning, I got email about SamSpade.

My name is Tina from <some random gardening site>.
I am the SEO and marketing manager over here.
As you probably know, having backlinks from related sites helps increase your rankings in Google.
Well, I was just doing a search on Google.com for “Samspade” and your site popped up! This is you, right?

Home


Well, check it out…
Since we both target a similar audience, Google will give us BOTH extra love if we each place a simple link to one another.
Not a lot of work and plenty of benefit to both of us.
I know you probably get requests like this all the time, I know I sure do. So, to stand out, I went above and beyond by setting up a customized page telling my site visitors about your great site! 🙂

Poor Tina. Her SEO optimization software mistakenly keyed off of the “spade” in our domain name and decided that we sold weeding tools. Not so much. Of course, the company that “Tina” bought her software from is well versed in spamming, both SEO and email. The domains are all obfuscated behind whois protection. The domain the mail came from doesn’t exist. They’re using gmail as a contact address. They’re hosted on LiquidWeb.
Maybe it’s not poor Tina after all. Maybe this isn’t just some poor person trying to get a leg up. Maybe it really is just a major spammer looking to spam their new website. Poorly. And with no finesse.

Related Posts

When an open is not a sign of interest

A lot of people, including myself, are using opens as one of the measures of engagement. This, as a general rule, is not a bad measure. However, there are people who will open email not because they’re interested in it, but because they know it is spam.
Take, for instance, the email address I acquired in 1993. Yes, I still have this address. I stopped using it to sign up for lists in 1999 and stopped using it for most of the rest of my mail around 2001. This address, though, is on any number of spam mailing lists. The spam that gets through is usually sent by hard-core spammers. The ISP that hosts that mailbox uses Communigate Pro to filter mail, so much of the casual spam is filtered.
Generally, if I open an email (and load images or click through) on that account it is only in order to track down a spammer. For instance, I’m getting a lot of spam there from affiliates offering me the opportunity to purchase printing services for a very low price. I have actually been opening the mail, and clicking through. But I’m not clicking through because I’m interested in purchasing. I’m clicking through to see if my reports to abuse@ printer are resulting in any action against the spammers. (They’re not).
The thing is, though, I know that by clicking through on ads, I’ve now been promoted by the spammer to the “clicks on emails! it’s a live address!” list. Which only means I’m going to get more spam from them. Lucky me.
Using clicks and opens as a measure of engagement isn’t necessarily bad. But when using them you have to understand the limitations of the measurement and that what you may think it’s telling you isn’t actually what it’s telling you.

Read More

Content based filtering

A spam filter looks at many things when it’s deciding whether or not to deliver a message to the recipients inbox, usually divided into two broad categories – the behaviour of the sender and the content of the message.
When we talk about sender behaviour we’ll often dive headfirst into the technical details of how that’s monitored and tracked – history of mail from the same IP address, SPF records, good reverse DNS, send rates and ramping, polite SMTP level behaviour, DKIM and domain-based reputation and so on. If all of those are OK and the mail still doesn’t get delivered then you might throw up your hands, fall back on “it’s content-based filtering” and not leave it at that.
There’s just as much detail and scope for diagnosis in content-based filtering, though, it’s just a bit more complex, so some delivery folks tend to gloss over it. If you’re sending mail that people want to receive, you’re sure you’re sending the mail technically correctly and you have a decent reputation as a sender then it’s time to look at the content.
You want your mail to look just like wanted mail from reputable, competent senders and to look different to unwanted mail, viruses, phishing emails, botnet spoor and so on. And not just to mechanical spam filters – if a postmaster looks at your email, you want it to look clean, honest and competently put together to them too.
Some of the distinctive content differences between wanted and unwanted email are due to the content as written by the sender, some of them are due to senders of unwanted email trying to hide their identity or their content, but many of them are due to the different quality software used to send each sort of mail. Mail clients used by individuals, and content composition software used by high quality ESPs tends to be well written and complies with both the email and MIME RFCs, and the unwritten best common practices for email composition. The software used by spammers, botnets, viruses and low quality ESPs tends not to do so well.
Here’s a (partial) list of some of the things to consider:

Read More

Would you buy a used car from that guy?

There are dozens of people and companies standing up and offering suggestions on best practices in email marketing. Unfortunately, many of those companies don’t actually practice what they preach in managing their own email accounts.
I got email today to an old work email address of mine from Strongmail. To be fair it was a technically correct email. Everything one would expect from a company handling large volumes of emails.  It’s clear that time and energy was put into the technical setup of the send. If only they had put even half that effort into deciding who to send the email to. Sadly, they didn’t.
My first thought, upon receiving the mail, was that some new, eager employee bought a very old and crufty list somewhere. Because Strongmail has a reputation for being responsible mailers, I sent them a copy of the email to abuse@. I figured they’d want to know that they had a new sales / marketing person who was doing some bad stuff.
I know how frustrating handling abuse@ can be, so I try to be short and sweet in my complaints. For this one, I simply said, “Someone at Strongmail has appended, harvested or otherwise acquired an old email address of mine. This has been added to your mailing list and I’m now receiving spam from you. ”
They respond with an email that starts with:
“Thank you for your thoughtful response to our opt-in request. On occasion, we provide members of our database with the opportunity to opt-in to receive email marketing communications from us.”
Wait. What? Members of our database? How did this address get into your database?
“I can’t be sure from our records but it looks like someone from StrongMail reached out to you several years ago.  It’s helpful that you let us know to unsubscribe you.  Thank you again.”
There you have it. According to the person answering email at abuse@ Strongmail they sent me a message because they had sent mail to me in the past. Is that really what you did? Send mail to very old email addresses because someone, at some point in the past, sent mail to that address? And you don’t know when, don’t know where the address came from, don’t know how it was acquired, but decided to reach out to me?
How many bad practices can you mix into a single send, Strongmail? Sending mail to addresses where you don’t know how you got them? Sending mail to addresses that you got at least 6 years ago? Sending mail to addresses that were never opted-in to any of your mail? And when people point out, gently and subtly, that maybe this is a bad idea, you just add them to your global suppression list?
Oh. Wait. I know what you’re going to tell me. All of your bad practices don’t count because this was an ‘opt-in’ request. People who didn’t want the mail didn’t have to do anything, therefore there is no reason not to spam them! They ignore it and they are dropped from your list. Except it doesn’t work that way. Double opt-in requests to someone has asked to be subscribed or is an active customer or prospect is one thing. Requests sent to addresses of unknown provenance are still spam.
Just for the record, I have a good idea of where they got my address. Many years ago Strongmail approached Word to the Wise to explore a potential partnership. We would work with and through Strongmail to provide delivery consulting and best practices advice for their customers. As part of this process we did exchange business cards with a number of Strongmail employees. I suspect those cards were left in a desk when the employees moved on. Whoever got that desk, or cleaned it out, found  those cards and added them to the ‘member database.’
But wait! It gets even better. Strongmail was sending me this mail, so that they could get permission to send me email about Email and Social Media Marketing Best Practices. I’m almost tempted to sign up to provide me unending blog fodder for my new series entitled “Don’t do this!”

Read More