Ding dong the King of Spam is Gone! Many advertising professionals and consumers alike rejoiced yesterday morning as they read about the arrest of Robert Alan Soloway for mail, wire and email fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. In short, Mr. Soloway is accused of spamming millions on behalf of himself and his clients who engaged his company Newport Internet Marketing Corporation to market their products through email blasts.
The good news is that spam may be reduced, the government is protecting the consumer, and illegitimate practices are clearly not being tolerated. So why is this important to all facets of electronic marketing, from email blasts to natural optimization? Generally speaking, those who have remained skeptical of any form of web marketing group all facets of the industry together. This portion of the population may see the arrest as an effort to safeguard them from any questionable web activity that has garnered attention, such as click fraud or keyword stuffing. Such a notion may then lead this crowd to feel more comfortable leveraging the web with search engine marketing, optimization and proper emailing, all of which may be considered relatively new tools.
The arrest can also be seen as a rite of passage for web marketing to become part of traditional marketing tactics. Direct marketing efforts though mail and phone are both regulated and monitored, for example no call lists and protection against mail fraud ease the consumer’s mind. Television and print are also policed and highly regulated to protect the consumer. This arrest proves that misuse of the web marketing platform through email in this case, is truly a serious matter and will not be tolerated.
We can all breathe a sigh of relief today, so rejoice with your clients and remember that doing the right thing always has its rewards!
Whenever a particular search engine optimization strategy is deemed to be less than kosher, a common condemnation is: “well, it might be interpreted as spamming”. For lots of our clients, that kind of comment isn’t viewed as helpful. Of course, they’re not spamming! What an idea! How could anyone see optimization for keyword search as spam?
Interestingly enough, identifying spam isn’t all black and white even for humans. When compiling the WEBSPAM-UK2006 database, researchers found that a central problem with many data sets in spam research was the lack of agreement between studies and even individual researchers as to what exactly qualified as spam. The identification process was analogized to that of confidently distinguishing pornography from art — in many cases, it is in the eye of the beholder.
So, what’s the answer? The growing focus on the duplicate content filters in search engine algorithms over the past few years have shown that things can change and can affect your rankings even when you didn’t do anything at all differently. How can you be sure that next year your efforts at keyword content optimization won’t suddenly put your site on the wrong side of the dividing line between good rankings and banishment?
We think the best way is to produce a quality site that you know your human visitors will appreciate. To do that, you need to keep on top of new developments in search engine optimization by reading blogs and online articles just like you’re doing right now. What do you think? Let us know.
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