Spam, Splogs and Comment Spam
Spam in all its forms is a costly problem to business. Spam is considered to be unsolicited junk messages that are usually designed to sell or promote something. Spamming can mean using unethical tactics to get high search engine rankings. Spam continues to plague the Internet in the forms of email spam, spam blogs (splogs) and comment spam.
Email spam is a time waster to businesses. Most use extensive filtering software to eliminate email before it arrives. As an example, at our web servers, out of 25,000 incoming emails, 20,000 were tagged as “definitely spam” and deleted before being delivered. Secondary filters identified and filtered an additional 3500 spam email. This means 94% of all incoming email on our server is actual spam and only 6% was legitimate emails.
Spam problems have made traditional email newsletters much less effective. They either don’t make it thru to recipients or people are overwhelmed with spam and don’t read them. Business Blog Marketing is now a much more effective way of reaching and communicating with your audience. They can either find you thru searching or subscribe for delivery by email or their feed reader.
Spam blogs or splogs, automatically extract information from RSS feeds and re-publish the posting. These are low-cost automated sites that usually make their money by getting viewers to click on ads on the splog site. These damage the original blog poster by stealing content and they are a problem to blog readers because they contain random links and content that turn out to be junk and a waste of time to visit.
Comment spam is a major problem like email spam where automated bots place promotional comments on random blogs in an effort to promote a product, service or website. Much like email spam, spam filters remove a high percentage of this nuisance.
Spam is the scourge of the Internet. Filters, blacklists and penalties from the search engines help keep this in check, but these are still major issues we must deal with.