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| The Axandra newsletter archive - 5 August 2003 |
| Welcome to a new issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.
This week, we're telling you how you can avoid that your email messages get caught by spam filters, and how to improve searching with Google's newest search feature.
Table of contents:
We hope that you enjoy this issue and that it helps you to get more out of your web site. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.
Best regards,
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| 1. How to overcome spam filters in your linking campaign |
| Exchanging links with other sites is a great way to build targeted traffic to your site. In addition, you will also obtain higher search engine rankings by increasing your web site's link popularity.
However, when sending link exchange request emails to other webmasters, some of your email messages will be caught by spam filters.
Webmasters of popular sites get hundreds of email messages every day. Often, 30-50% of those messages are unsolicited messages containing advertising (so called spam emails). For this reason, webmasters install anti-spam software
programs and sometimes these programs flag your email message as spam mail. This means that your link request mail will be deleted immediately and the webmaster will not even receive your link request.
It is very important that you don't spam in your linking campaign. Spamming doesn't work. You should write a personal and targeted email messages to each webmaster. To make sure that these messages aren't caught by spam filters, you should follow these tips:
- Your email message must not have a subject that sounds like advertising. Email messages with the infamous subject line "Let's trade links!" will nowadays be deleted immediately. Too many spammers used that subject line in the past and therefore it's not effective anymore.
- You should also refrain from impersonal salutations like "Dear Sir / Dear Madam", "Dear webmaster," or "Hi!". If you use personalized salutations, then you'll get many more webmasters to read your email message.
- It's very important that you take a look at the web site of the potential link partner before sending an email message. Try to find the name of the contact person. If the webmaster is called Richard, then write "Dear Richard". Ask yourself: Which email message would you trust more, one that says "Hello Internet user!" or one that says "Hello your-name"?
- Visit and surf through the web site of your potential link partners. This way, you can tell them what you like specifically of their web site, for example the easy to understand navigation, the green buttons, the artwork, the collection of special articles, etc.
- Only include links to your own web site in the email message. Never include links to other web sites or even advertising links. Your email message would look like another spam email and the webmaster would not link back to you (if the message wasn't caught by their spam filters before).
The web page http://eu.spamassassin.org/tests.html lists more than 200 things that identify common spam messages. These are texts that most spam filters are able to recognize.
Of course, there's no way you can learn this list by heart so that your link request emails pass most spam filters.
That's one of the reasons why we recommend using the software program ARELIS for your linking campaigns. It offers a brilliant feature that (optionally) tests your link request messages for common spam words and phrases and warns you when it encounters them. That way, ARELIS can help you to overcome most spam filters.
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| 2. Search engine news of the week |
Google debuts in Indian languages
"Google [...] launched a sister site in India that is available in four major Indian languages as well as in English. The new site offers Google users in India a choice of interfaces in Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and English. The site also lets consumers restrict searches to pages from that country, a Google representative said."
Google introduced new advanced search feature
Yesterday, Google introduced a new advanced search feature which allows you to not only search for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. Just place the "~" character directly in front of the keyword in your search query, for example "browser ~help" not only searches for "browser help", but also for "browser support", "browser tips" and "browser tutorials".
Microsoft.com revamps search
"Microsoft updated its corporate Web search technology this month with in-house software, its latest effort to catch up with innovations in the navigation tools market. [...] 'Searching Microsoft.com was a real problem; using Google would sometimes get you better results,' said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft."
Overture Germany increases minimum bid
In an email message to its customers, Overture Germany announced that it would increase the minimum bid to Euro 0,15. In addition, new customers are now offered a 30 day money back guarantee.
Search engine newslets
LookSmart reported second quarter 2003 revenue of US$38.4 million, representing an 83% increase from the second quarter 2002.
"Wotbot" is a new search engine that looks promising. You can access it in a US version and in a UK version. To add your web site to this search engine, fill out the form at http://www.wotbot.com/addurl.
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|
"Hackers turn to Google to find weakest links"
"Computer hackers have adopted a startling strategy in their attempts to break into websites. By using the popular search engine Google, they do not have to visit a site to plan an attack. Instead, they can get all the information they need from Google's cached versions of web pages, say experts in the US."
"Observers drool for Google IPO"
"Like Netscape in 1995 and eBay in 1998, some believe that a blockbuster initial public offering of stock in the hot private company Google could lead to another IPO wave. [...] but it's looking like 2004 before it happens."
"Google Localization Produces Patchy Results"
"Recently, Google Inc., turned on local language pages for India that has raised eye-brows. Many Indians turned on their browsers to view a page-full of junk."
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| ARELIS is the de-facto standard of the link popularity building tools. It automatically finds possible link partners for you, it creates link pages in the design of your web site, it helps you not to write link request emails that get caught by spam filters (as described in the article above) and it's simply indispensable to manage your reciprocal links campaigns.
You can download a trial version here.
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