Know the Malicious Ways that Spam Can Ruin Your Business

Spam can come in many forms, including “special” toolbars and comment spam designed to post comments on your site that are false and sometimes embarrassing.  In a recent post from Google, we’re told that Google will penalize our sites if too much spam is tracked to the site.  This could be disastrous for your business and frustrating for you. 

Here are two ways that unchecked spam can hurt and possibly ruin your sites:

• Rankings.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the main way that most marketers build their sites for quality traffic and great rankings.  But spamming techniques can ruin your good rankings by luring visitors to your site(s) by droves in an unethical manner.

Spamming techniques such as invisible text, stuffing unrelated keywords into your content, and duplicate content can alert search engines that you’re contriving to get traffic in an unethical manner, and they will “red flag” those sites and penalize the site owners.

• Credibility.  It’s so easy to lose your online credibility with spamming techniques.  Blogs are especially susceptible to these methods because visitors and participators in the blog don’t want to be inundated with useless content and multiple backlinks that have nothing to do with the purpose of the blog.

These spammers can use the legitimate backlinks on your blog to sell to other “black hat” Internet Markets, causing your blog followers to fall by the wayside like flies.

Your reputation and ethics are so important to anything you do online while building your site(s).  Keep appraised of spammers who are out for a quick buck and who can ruin interest in your online efforts.

Web Spam Vs. Email Spam

You should know that there’s a difference between web spam and email spam.  The simplest explanation is that email spam is out for you to purchase a product, and web spammers (comments and/or blog posts) want your visitors to purchase their products.  You’re not the target – but your clients are – and that can drive them off of your site or blog in droves.

There is a service that you can turn to that will automatically delete comment and blog spam so that you don’t have to worry about it anymore.  The service is called Akismet, and you can access it through plugins such as WordPress or the Akismet API.  All you have to do is register and API key (like a password) which is your own private access to your account.

Then, each time a comment, pingback or trackback appears on your site, the Akismet service tests it and either Okays it or turns it down.  You don’t have to do a thing – and, you can be assured that the spam designed to ruin your site and steal sales and customers from you is taken care of.  Click Here to Tweet this Post.

When you use a plugin such as Akismet to stop spam from invading your site, you’ll keep Google and other search engines from penalizing your sites and from losing credibility with your followers.

I’ve spoken about “black hat techniques” before, and web spamming is definitely one of the worst.  They’re hoping you’ll disregard them because these spam techniques use flattery, praise and other positive comments to catch you off guard.

There’s no way for you to know if these comments and posts are legitimate.  That’s why it’s a good thing to use a plug in like Akismet to check it out for you.  Just be sure you’re protected from these spammers who are thieves and who can run your business off the Internet.