Internet Content Filtering

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How many times have you realized that your email simply doesn’t arrive to your list or you suspect something is going wrong because you don’t get the response you are waiting for?, this is more common today than yesterday and will be critical tomorrow.

It’s frustrating for us that our Content is not deliver to the end-user, this is true for you and all the people dependable on email technology, the results plainly don’t come, whatever they can be.

Have you seen those funny email arriving to your email container with odd characters that some times seem like the sender is telling you rude words? Don’t take it literally, is an effort from the advertisers to deliver their best proposition trying to bypass the filters… some of them will arrive, some of them are taken out from you and put inside the waste container of your ISP.

Is there some hope for the small entrepreneur in this jungle of spam filters, viruses, and junk information?

Deliver Quality Content To End-user And Promote Your Products Without Annoying Spam Filters: RSS Gives you the Chance To Deliver messages To End-user

It’s A Fact: At present this is the best way to beat spam filters, RSS is the fresh road to walk, getting rid of the problems that nowadays attack the email option, this allows you to send your messages to the users with 100% sureness they will arrive, we don’t know if RSS is the email killer, its too early to state and coin this phrase, anyway some gurus say its here to bury email, some others think is only an alternative way to keep in contact with the end-user … the only true is: You can deliver your messages spam free.

But its not costless, you need to work, and work constantly and with quality, if any of these variables fail, all your efforts go to the drainage piping. Why? If the end-user are no more interested in your content he/she can kiss you good bye easily with a finger, the small one on the delete key.

RSS is The Secret Weapon To Deliver Quality Content

RSS gives the power to the end-user, this means marketers must be concerned with the content they deliver, for most of the sellers this is a hard alternative, but at the end the online world will see a lot of websites full of worthy content, the users will come again and again, and if this happen to you, your days will be longer and profitable.

Deliver quality content is the advertisers and webmasters payment, this is not negative, Search Engines go in the same direction, if you want a good SE position it most be due to your content, content tends to be the only parameter in the near future. Make your homework and you’ll see positive results in short time. If this not convince you, remember, email is living the hard way and if things go in the same direction it will go out of sight, at least like a marketing alternative.

What all this means for the end-user?

The end user just now is the winner, he/she has the control, are able to access any kind of information in accordance to his/her interest: news, marketing options, leisure sites, knowledge pages, new content is notified automatically, can subscribe/unsubscribe with total freedom, no more need to travel to the websites and waste time looking for something new….

About the Author

C Zarza
20+ experience in the information technology world,
He has built financial system for several years
Background: Databases, Web , Finances …
czarzac@gmail.com
http://www.nesswords.com

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The Misconceptions of Spam Filters
by Laurie Rogers Copyright July 2002

Unfortunately there are a lot of people online that all have
many misconceptions regarding Spam Filters. Today I’m
going to answer some questions that people have asked
me about my “Spam column” for DEMC Small Business
Ezine regarding them. With regards to spam filters, one
can never have enough knowledge, so I do hope that this
article will clear up any misconceptions that you may have.

1. Don’t spam filters ONLY apply to those who have NOT
opted in?

This is indeed a very sad misconception, Spam Filters do
affect EVERYONE who sends and receives email in some
way or another. Whether you publish a FREE ezine OR a
PAID ezine, it does not matter, if it is being sent by email
it affects YOU. The biggest problem with filters is that they
have NO way to detect that the email message is in fact
“Optin”, they actually base it on your headers.

Should you use a third party list server, your chances of
being filtered are even greater, because of that reason.
And this is how ALL filtering is based: By looking at the
headers in your email message, by using a point system
based on the contents in your subject line as well as the
body.

This can also be done by subscribing to a blacklist service
that will provide them with a list of domains or hosts that
have been identified as being used by spammers -such as
http://www.spamhaus.org or http://mail-abuse.org/ AOL,
Verizon and Accessus are widely known for using services
such as these. It should also be known that spam filtering
programs MAY also subscribe to these services, some do
and some do not.

2. I heard that spam filters don’t apply to autoresponders,
is this true?

Actually they do, because if you send email using a third
party list server, and put your FROM email address in the
field rather than a FROM address on the third party’s list
server - the spam filter will read it as being a “falsified”
email address or header. Because REAL spammers do
it all of the time.

3. Spam Filters do not target HTML ezines because they
can’t read the code properly, is this true?

Yes in fact they do, some more so than text ezines, this is
because HTML ezines are considered to be more virus
prone. And NOT all list servers and email clients “clean”
their email before it is sent. Meaning, even if you do not
have a virus on your computer, your ezine can still pick
one up during the process of sending through your list
server. This has been known to happen on “high traffic”
list servers as well as FREE list servers, such as Yahoo
Groups.

3. Aren’t spam filters ONLY used by large ISP’s?

Although it is very true that the majority of larger ISP’s use
Spam Filters (such as: AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Mindspring,
Verizon, Accessus, Sympatico etc.) you will find a lot of
smaller ISP’s use them as well. For instance, my ISP has
only 900 customers and they do use them, although I’ve
made it quite clear they are unacceptable on my account.
The most “popular program’ that ISP’s use is called Spam
Assassin.

I hope this article has cleared up any misconceptions that
you may have had regarding Spam Filters. You can learn
more detailed information about Spam filters by visiting:
http://spamassassin.org ests.html

Article by Laurie Rogers Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved

About the Author

Laurie Rogers is co-author of the Ezine Resource Guide, you
can check it out at: http://www.zineadz.com/erg.html She
is the owner of Optin Frenzy a list building program for ezine
publishers http://www.optinfrenzy.com You can also obtain
Laurie’s articles at: mailto:ezinearticles@optinfrenzy.com

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Spam Filters Explained
What do they do? How do they work? Which one is right for me?
By Alan Hearnshaw

Spam is a very real problem that many people have to deal with on a daily basis. For those that have decided to do something about it and start to investigate the options available in spam filtering, this article provides a brief introduction to your options and the types of spam filters available.

Despite the bewildering array of spam filters available today, all claiming to the best one of its kind there are really just five filtering methodologies in general use today and all products rely on one, or a combination of these:

Content-Based Filters
In the beginning, there were content-based filters.

These filters scan the contents of the and look for tell-tale signs that the message is spam. In the early days of spamming it was quite simple to look out for Kill Words such as
Lose Weight and mark a message as spam if it was found.

Very soon though, spammers got wise to this and started resorting to all kinds of tricks to get their message past the filters. The days of obfuscation had begun.
We started getting messages containing the phrase L0se Welght (Notice the zero for o and l for i ) and even more bizarre and sometimes quite ingenious variations.
This rendered basic content-based filters somewhat ineffective, although there are one or two on the market now that are clever enough to see through theses attempts and still provide good results.

Bayesian Based Filters
The Reverend Bayes comes to the rescue

Born in London 1702, the son of a minister, Thomas Bayes developed a formula which allowed him to determine the probability of an event occurring based on the probabilities of two or more independent evidentiary events.

Bayesian filters learn from studying known good and bad messages. Each message is split into single word bytes , or tokens and these tokens are placed into a database along with how often they are found in each kind of message.
When a new message arrives to be tested by the filter, the new message is also split into tokens and each token is looked up in the database. Extrapolating results from the database and applying a form of the good reverend s formula, know as a Naive Bayesian formula, the message is given a spamicity rating and can be dealt with accordingly.

Bayesian filters typically are capable of achieving very good accuracy rates (>97% is not uncommon), and require very little on-going maintenance.

Whitelist/Blacklist Filters
Who goes there, friend or foe?

This very basic form of filtering is seldom used on its own nowadays, but can be useful as part of a larger filtering strategy.

A whitelist is nothing more than a list of e-mail addresses from which you wish to accept communications. A whitelist filter would only accept messages from these people and all others would be rejected

A blacklist , conversely, is a list of e-mail addresses - and sometimes IP Addresses (computer identification addresses) - from which communications will not be accepted.

While this may seem like a good idea from the outset, a whitelist methodology is too restrictive for most people and, as virtually all spam e-mails carry a forged from address, there is little point in collecting this address to ban it in future as it is very unlikely to be the same next time.
There are bodies on the internet that maintain a list of known bad sources of e-mail. Many filters today have the ability to query these servers to see if the message they are looking at comes from a source identified by this Internet-based blacklist, or RBL. While being quite effective, they do tend to suffer from false positives where good messages are incorrectly identified as spam. This happens often with newsletters.

Challenge/Response Filters
Open sesame!

Challenge/Response filters are characterised by their ability to automatically send a response to a previously unknown sender asking them to take some further action before their message will be delivered. This is often referred to as a “Turing Test” - named after a test devised by British mathematician Alan Turing to determine if machines could think .

Recent years have seen the appearance of some internet services which automatically perform this Challenge/Response function for the user and require the sender of an e-mail to visit their web site to facilitate the receipt of their message.

Critics of this system claim it to be too drastic a measure and that it sends a message that “my time is more important than yours” to the people trying to communicate with you.

For some low traffic e-mail users though, this system alone may be a perfectly acceptable method of completely eliminating spam from their inbox - one step above the “Whitelist” system outlined above.

Community Filters
A united front

These types of filters work on the principal of “communal knowledge” of spam. When a user receives a spam message, they simply mark it as such in their filter. This information is sent to a central server where a fingerprint of the message is stored.
After enough people have voted this message to be spam, then it is stopped from reaching all the other people in the community.

This type of filtering can prove to be quite effective, although it stands to reason that it can never be 100% effective as a few people have to receive the spam for it to be flagged in the first place. Just like its similar cousin the Internet black list (RBL), this system also can suffer from false positives , or messages incorrectly identified as spam.

Hopefully you are now armed with a little more information to be able to make an informed decision on the best spam filter for you.
For further information, consider reading the reviews and articles found at http://www.whichspamfilter.com

Alan Hearnshaw is the owner of http://www.whichspamfilter.com, a web site which conducts weekly in-depth reviews of current spam filters, provides help and guidance in the fight against spam and provides a useful community forum.
alan@whichspamfilter.com

About the Author

Alan Hearnshaw is a computer programmer and the owner of http://www.WhichSpamFilter.com, a site which provides weekly in-depth spam filter reviews, user help and guidance and a community forum.

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The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don’t let the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, distract you from the importance of good content.

I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing. Does Google, the world’s wealthiest media company, really only display web pages that meet arcane technical criteria? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point?

Apparently not.
Most Common On-the-Page Website Content Success Factors
Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.

I looked at Google’s top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffic delivered by Google.

The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features:

Updating: frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.

Spelling and grammar: few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word’s check feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? I can already hear the scoffing on the other side of this computer screen. Before you dismiss the idea completely, keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google’s algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same.

Paragraphs: primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.
Lists: both bulleted and numbered, form a large part of the text.

Sentence length: mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.

Contextual relevance: text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword. The page may contain the keyword itself few times or not at all.

SEO “Do’s” and “Don’ts”

A hard look at the results slaughters a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows.

PageRank. The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. Of course, this might simply be yet another demonstration that the little PageRank number you get in your browser window is not what Google’s algo is using. But if you’re one of those people who attaches an overriding value to that little number, this is food for thought.

Frames. The top two web pages listed for the most searched-on keyword employ frames. Frames may still be a bad web design idea from a usability standpoint, and they may ruin your search engine rankings if your site’s linking system depends on them. But there are worse ways you could shoot yourself in the foot.

JavaScript-formatted internal links. Most of the websites use JavaScript for their internal page links. Again, that’s not the best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do.
Keyword optimization. Except for two pages, keyword optimization was conspicuous by its absence. In more than half the web pages, the keyword did not appear more than three times, meaning a very low density. Many of the pages did not contain the keyword at all. That may just demonstrate the power of anchor text in inbound links. It also may demonstrate that Google takes a site’s entire content into account when categorizing it and deciding what page to display.

Sub-headings. On most pages, sub-headings were either absent or in the form of images rather than text. That’s a very bad design practice, and particularly cruel to blind users. But again, Google is more forgiving.

Links: Most of the web pages contained ten or more links; many contain over 30, in defiance of the SEO bugbears about “link popularity bleeding.” Moreover, nearly all the pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. Of course, it’s not clear what benefit the website owners hope to get from placing irrelevant links on pages. It has been a proven way of lowering conversion rates and losing visitors. But Google doesn’t seem to care if your website makes money.

Originality: a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, the content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: the reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually the majority of the page.
Recommendations

Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site’s content, particularly in the case of a search-engine optimization campaign. If you are an SEO, make sure you get a pro to do the content. A shocking number of SEOs write incredibly badly. I’ve even had clients whose websites got fewer conversions or page views after their SEOs got through with them, even when they got a sharp uptick in unique visitors. Most visitors simply hit the “back” button when confronted with the unpalatable text, so the increased traffic is just wasted bandwidth.

If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through the hands of a skilled copyeditor or writer before going online.

Update your content often. It’s important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can’t afford original content, use free-reprint content.

Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for the right to publish the content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a “duplicate content penalty” for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified.

In short, if you have a mature website that is already indexed and getting traffic, you should consider making sure the bulk of your investment in your website is devoted to its content, rather than graphic design, old-school search-engine optimization, or linking campaigns.

About the Author

Joel Walsh is the owner, founder and head-writer of UpMarket Content. To read more about website content best practices, get a consultation with Mr. Walsh, or get a sample page for your site at no charge, go to the SEO website content page: Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off