It’s Spam. Ignore It.

You want to interact with your users.  Maybe you’ve just got a contact us form (or even just a mailto: link), maybe blog comments or even a message forum.  It’s an important part of building your presence online.

As such, it’s quite the thrill the first time you see a comment or get an email.  Hurray!

It’s spam.  Ignore it.  Seriously.

No matter how small you are, the bots and scripts are out there waiting to jump on your comments and your inboxes, and you will very quickly start getting junk.  This site has only been up for maybe a month or two and the rate of junk to good stuff is about 8:1.

Why Me?

You’re a tiny little shop that just opened its doors and doesn’t even have any traffic yet, why would the spambots bother you?  It’s nothing personal, really.  Don’t forget that the web is a big place, and links have value.  It’s not your blog that’s valuable by itself, its that link the bot wants to put on your site.  Because if it does that 10,000 times, that makes the search engines think that the site being linked has more value than it actually does. 

Is it all spam?  All of it?

Well no, not all of it. You’ll certainly get some real comments in the mix.  So how do you tell the difference?  Mostly, read them.  You’ll develop an ear very quickly for messages written by a real person, and those that have been written by a robot (and by that I mean a message-generating computer program, not an actual physical creation, in case that term confuses anybody).

Guidelines

* Comments that are completely generic, making no reference to the original post.  “Great ideas here! Thank you for posting.”  Spam.  Almost always comes with a link, though sometimes you’ll find them without – those are tests, to see whether you let them through.  If you do, the same bot will come back later and start putting in linked comments since it thinks you’re not moderating.

* Links.  Especially, unrelated links.  If you write a blog on Shakespeare, and people write comments with links to check mortgage rates or by Viagra, kill it.  Kill it with fire.

* Garbage.  Many bots are just bad, and generate broken links, misspelled words, and other errors.  These are easiest to spot, and little more than an annoyance.

* Get Rich Quick.  Anybody that offers, out of the blue, to share with you the secrets to making a million dollars online?  Delete.  One of the sites I work on got up and running a few weeks ago, then sent me an email he’d received in his inbox asking if it was real.  It was to help him optimize his SEO.  It was entirely generic, making no references to his site.  Spam spammy spam.  The truth of it is that most of the people trying to make money on the web these days are trying to do by selling you the secrets to making money on the web.  So if anybody claims that they’re offering you something that will make you money, but it looks too good to be true? It is.  Delete it.

* Stay on top of it!  Want to know how to spot a blog that’s no longer maintained?  You google for a topic, click through to a story, and that story which was posted a couple months ago has 3 relevant comments and then 27 comments that are Viagra ads.  That’s a site that’s no longer being maintained, so if you were thinking about adding a comment, or emailing the author to ask a question, or even putting that blog in your list of feeds to watch, forget it.  Not worth it.

Be patient.  Audiences build.  Nobody wants to be the first person to post on a story – but once somebody does step up and go for it, people follow along.  It’s like being the first person to try out a new restaurant.  Nobody wants to sit down at that very first table, but you don’t mind so much sitting down at the second table, because now you’re not alone.  Just keep doing what you’re doing, and you’ll start to see the customers come around.  Don’t get bummed out when 90% of it is junk in the early days, that happens to everybody.  Just keep deleting.

The Importance of WWW

I visited a site recently where, if you just type in the domain (like beforeyoulaunch.com) it does *not* work, requiring you to type “www” at the beginning. This is a horrible awesome sin in the web world, as most of your customers will not bother typing the www, it will never occur to them when they get a “404 not found” error that this is the problem, and will assume that they have your address wrong.

Before You Launch, make sure this works! Your hosting provider may even have a control panel where it will ask you that exact question – “When people visit domain.com do you want to put the www in”? Whether you actually require the www has more to do with web server configuration and is somewhat geeky, but anybody can test and make sure that both ways work!

Another site I frequent is about to go live, only with “site.blahblahblah” instead of “www.” Highly uncool. We’re working to get that fixed before he gets his business cards printed!  Once he gets that fixed I may ask his permission to use him as an example of some other things we can all work on.

“Subdomains”, as those are called, do have a purpose. If you have a legitimate reason to subdivide your traffic, it’s perfectly reasonable for example to put the primary site on “www” but then maybe have your discussion boards be off on the “forums.blahblahblah” subdomain.  Another good one is the popular deal-a-day commerce site <a href=”http://woot.com”>Woot.com</a>, which recently created <a href=”http://kids.woot.com”>Kids.Woot.Com</a>.   This is acceptable because at least people know that just typing “woot.com” gets them to the main page.  Imagine if every web site out there had some random dictionary word at the front and you had to remember whether you’re supposed to type kids or blog or forum or site …  Forget that!

Juggling subdomains with your primary homepage is also dangerous game to play with regard to your search engine optimization, and I’ll point to my own self as an example of stuff you can get caught up in. For my other site ShakespeareGeek, both versions work — shakespearegeek.com by itself, and www.shakespearegeek.com. However, if you notice they actually redirect to blog.shakespearegeek.com. This is because the site started as a blog, and I always tell myself that I will grow it into something larger. Thus, I reserve the top level domain for future growth. I need to get off my butt and change that.

The problem is that when people link to me, half of them are linking to www.shakespearegeek.com (the ones that type it in directly from memory), and half are linking to blog.shakespearegeek.com (the ones who cut and paste it from the URL). I don’t know for certain what Google and the others do on the back end in this situation, but it’s pretty safe that it’s working against me at least a little bit. The solution to this problem is to have www be a real site, not a redirect, and simply include the blog content behind the scenes (using one of those Ajax/widget tricks we’ve spoken of previously). That way everybody ends up pointing to the same URL, and I get the maximum bump from the search engines.

Neatness Counts!

To be fair this might be my pet peeve, but if anybody’s asking my opinion they’re going to get it. When you write copy, whether it is a lengthy product description or a simple headline, neatness counts. Spell your words correctly, capitalize consistently, and learn to use punctuation. Whenever I’m asked to review a site, mistakes like those are the first thing that jump into my line of sight. When people want to advertise on my sites and they spell words wrong, or worse put up headlines without capital letters, I tend to turn them away. I just can’t stand the lack of quality that shows.

You’re typically asking people to give you money. Look like you deserve it.