Spotting sites with fake pagerank

Monday, October 01, 2007

Oh, once again, I'm resorting to looking at spam e-mails. This one caught my eye because it was sent to an address I rarely use. On the surface of things, it looks genuine...

Interested buying a PR4 text link? I have a PR4 blog [site name removed] and would like to offer you a sitewide Text Link for:
$90 for 1 year
$50 for 6 months
$30 for 3 months
A PR4 site normally cost you around $30 per month.
How does it work? When you buy this offer your link will be placed on the homepage as well as every pages of [site name removed].

I don't know the going rates of buying a text link on a PR4 site, but it sounds like not too bad an offer.

Firstly, I whizzed over to the site and noticed that there were very few blog posts, most of which were over a year old and only one in the last month. Hmmm...So I went to google and typed in the site name with the 'www' removed. It came up with about 62 links for the site which isn't a lot for a PR4 site, and the descriptions of the site didn't match the content. Google only cached this page on 27th September, so it's been changed in the last few days.

Next, I went to the Wayback Machine and saw what was indexed there - the last listing for the site was August 2006 and the site was very different from what it is now...hang on a second, some of the current blog posts go back to before August 2006...perhaps it being a WordPress site, the database was imported to give the impression of the site being older than it is.

Finally, I went to the whois record for the domain, but this gave me no useful information.

So what does this tell me? The site has been changed very recently, which means that the PR that Google has assigned to the site does not apply to the new changes. In fact, in the next pagerank update, chances are the site will lose out. If you paid any money to have your textlink on the site, you'd be a bit miffed if you realised that you'd paid for a fake wouldn't you?

Lesson to learn? If you do want to buy a text link from a site, spend a few minutes checking before you part with your cash, and if something doesn't add up, don't do it.

Labels: spam

My site could use higher placement?!!

Friday, September 28, 2007

According to a SPAM e-mail I received today:

"Your web site could use higher placement on the top directories like Google or Yahoo!
We are offering to review your site for no charge in order to show you how a higher position could improve your web traffic. Email us at sashton@gmail.com today and we will create your free site report. Please include your URL(s) and the best way to contact you with results."

Well, that's amazing! Firstly, I seem to be doing okay without the higher placement - obviously I'm not going to turn down appearing on the first page of Google, but it's not essential. Secondly, a higher placement could improve my traffic, but I think providing useful content is the best method and one I will always advocate - there's no point in being on the front page if people don't like the content of your site.

Then, I do find it worrying that someone is trying to offer higher positions in the Google directory - directories don't have ranking positions, and if you want to be in the Yahoo! directory, there is the small matter of the $299 fee. Perhaps this so-called SEO expert means Google or Yahoo! search engine.

And finally, they did manage to contact me to make the offer so asking for more contact details so they can provide me with a free report...I think not. If you're going to spam someone with an e-mail like this, don't send it to web designers and SEO professionals!

Labels: seo, spam

PayPal button to hide your e-mail address

Thursday, August 16, 2007

If you want to use PayPal 'buy now', subscription or shopping cart buttons on your website, PayPal very kindly generates the code for you to use when you fill in your details.

Most of the time, you can probably use their inbuilt encryption, but if you want to use certain options, you'll find the encryption can't be used.

This means that your e-mail address is lying unencrypted in the code of your website for any spammer or spambot to come along and find. This is a BAD thing and vastly increases the chances of you receiving offers for all kinds of products you never even knew existed.

So how do you overcome this? Very simply actually. In a post on e-junkie, I found a very quick and easy solution:

Log in to PayPal and generate your button code, pasting it into your webpage where you want the button to appear. Don't save just yet.
Scroll down to the bottom of the PayPal page and you'll see a link called "Referrals".
On this page, you'll see a link like https://www.paypal.com/row/mrb/pal=xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Copy the xxxxxxxxxxxxx part of the code and paste it over your e-mail address in step 1.

Labels: programming, spam, webdesign

My spammer list

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

It's not a good idea to publish your e-mail address directly on the Internet - lots of spambots come and harvest it and the next thing you know, you're on a million different spammer's lists.

Here's where I get slight revenge. I'm going to publish the e-mail address of spammers on this blog post and hope they get a taste of their own medicine. It won't be complete for all the spam I receive - I don't have enough time in the day to list them all, but right now, even one name will be enough for me!

Oh and it'll only be from e-mails that I believe haven't got forged headers, so I won't be exposing the innocent!

onlinerich2008@yahoo.com
reminder@domainrenewalonline.com
david_james14@zipmail.com.br
webmaster@promote-biz.net
barrcharleswilliams47410@zipmail.com.br
dous.l12@hotmail.com
prof_charles_solu3@yahoo.com - "dear honorable contractor" ?!!?
barrister_nelson_udo_2@yahoo.it

p.s. I've just wasted too much time on 419 Baiter...have a look...it really does play the spammers at their own game!

Labels: email, spam

Turn off ZoneAlarm mailsafe in Outlook

Friday, March 30, 2007

If like me, you use ZoneAlarm as a personal firewall to protect your PC, you'll want to have the latest updates.

After upgrading to the latest version today, I noticed a new function - 'MailSafe', which is a great idea as it allows for sorting spam from genuine e-mails, warns on viruses etc...

However if like me, you already have spam-filtering in place, you might not want to use MailSafe.

I tried to turn it off in the obvious way - start ZoneAlarm, go to the 'Email Protection' tab and click on the 'off' radio button. Next time I started Outlook? MailSafe still started - not good!

This is how I turned it off:

In Outlook, click 'Tools'
Click 'Options'
Click the 'Other' tab
Click 'Advanced Options'
At the bottom you'll see a few buttons - click the one called 'Com Add-Ins'
Click on the 'Buddy Toolbar' entry
Click the 'Remove' button or just uncheck the Buddy Toolbar option to disable

Labels: email, security, spam

New ways to stop email spam

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

E-mail spam is becoming more sophisticated - many spammers now use images rather than text itself to try and circumvent the spam filters that sit between your inbox and the internet.

According to BorderWare MXtreme image spam currently accounts for at least 35% of all spam. They describe image spam as "a technique where the spam message consists of an image and a small amount of text that looks like it is 100% text-based, when in fact it is an image that looks exactly like a regular email message."

They have developed "Intercept Image Analysis" which looks at over 30 different variables per image, to adapt, learn and defeat new image spam campaigns.

Labels: email, pp, spam

How to deal with spam!

Saturday, October 28, 2006

I've been away on holiday for just six days and as such, didn't go near an Internet connection in that time. After getting back earlier today, sleeping off the jetlag and having a nice cup of tea (!) I have just switched on my computer.

I have several e-mail accounts for different projects and in total I received over 350 e-mails of which about 75 have NOT been deleted on first glance. That means 79% of those e-mails were spam. Argh!

On the plus side, I use a nifty PC utility called ePrompter which allows you to simultaneously track upto 16 separate e-mail accounts. Once you have told the software (which sits in your system tray) which accounts to check and how frequently to check them, it notifies you when there are new messages and how many there are. You are then able to read the e-mails within ePrompter and delete them if necessary, without ever fully downloading them onto your PC. Any original e-mails not deleted are left on your e-mail account server so when you do open your e-mail program on your PC, you will receive your e-mails as normal.

The e-mails are displayed in text format, so nothing is downloaded e.g. tracking images making your computer more secure and retaining a greater level of privacy. In addition, in my e-mail program, it often converts different character encodings (usually associated with undesirable e-mails e.g. =?shift-jis?blahblahblah which is Japanese) and I have to open the e-mail to see the content. ePrompter is much better at showing character encodings in the title of the e-mails so it makes spam filtering an even quicker process.

To go through the list of titles and delete the spam ones, just click on the inbox of the account you are interested in, and use the space bar and 'x' key to run down the list - space to skip to the next title, and 'x' to mark it for deletion. To see an e-mail just double-click it. Using this method I managed to delete a considerable portion of the rubbish in just a few minutes.

To minimise spam I do adopt a few practises; the overall aim being not to ever send a message to the spammers.

Firstly, unless it is your office policy, do not use an out-of-office autoreply - if you receive a spam e-mail and you send a reply, you are telling the spammer that your e-mail address is valid, and that is likely to vastly increase the amount of cr*p in your inbox. Your e-mail address will be added to a list and sold. If you do have to or want to use an autoreply, do read this post from Digital Inspiration for further advice.

Secondly, if you receive an e-mail that you do not fully understand, or is full of nonsense or you are in the least bit suspicious about - DO NOT reply to it. This again is asking for your e-mail address to be added to a list for spammers to sell and use.

NOTE - also be on the lookout for phishing attempts. These are e-mails purporting to be from (e.g.) eBay, PayPal and banks. They look authentic and ask you to confirm your details, state that your account has been suspended, that a new e-mail address has been added to your account or something similar. The phishers want to collect your login details so will misdirect you to a fake login page they have set up (the link in the e-mail looks authentic but the location it takes you to is not). If you are not sure about information an e-mail you have received, go to your account directly in your web browser - do not use the link in the e-mail - and see if there are any messages upon login.

Thirdly, if you can set your e-mail program to receive messages from unknown addresses in text-only format, this will increase your security and privacy. HTML e-mails can contain an invisible tracking image, so the sender can see if you have opened the e-mail. Whilst this can be used for harmless reasons, it can also be used maliciously. Using text-only e-mails from unknown sources can reduce this risk.

Labels: email, spam

Why I turned blog comments off

Thursday, October 05, 2006

I was recently asked why I people couldn't leave comments on my blog posts, and why if they wanted to get in touch, they had to use my contact form.

The reason for this is that there are plenty of unscrupulous programs out there that people use to 'comment spam'. This means that they fill in a few details and a link to their own site or blog, choose a keyword and press 'go'. The program then goes and finds all blogs that it can with that keyword and leaves a comment.

It sounds nice in theory but has several drawbacks:

1) It can leave comments on completely unrelated sites - if you had a blog about a serious medical condition but mentioned web design in one single post, would you really want several hundred comments saying "hey nice site about web design. check out my site etc..", no? I didn't think so.

2) A lot of people can't even use the software properly so you get comments left that make even less sense.

3) I DO NOT WANT Viagra, Cialis or any other medication, anatomy-extending device or anything else you could possibly spam me about, thank you.

And most importantly:

4) Most blog programs now automatically insert the rel=nofollow tag into any links in comments. This means the links have absolutely no value in the search engine's eyes - they will not index or follow the link and therefore you have not gained a backlink. The only way this link is useful is if someone follows it and visits your site. My guess is that 99% of link spam doesn't get followed.

To summarise - if you would like to comment on anything in my blog, please get in touch via the contact form. Whilst this doesn't allow comments to be viewed publically, it does mean that I control the quality of the blog.

Labels: blogging, spam

Outlook Express - Autoresponders & Spam filters

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

An auto-responder is literally an automated e-mail response. It's an incredibly useful tool if you're out of the office or want to automate electronic product deliveries. The first section of this tutorial will explain how to send out the same response to everyone and the second part will look at how to tailor your responses to different circumstances. Finally, the last part will look at how to filter your incoming messages for spam!

*** Sending out the same response to everyone ***

Create your message:

In notepad or similar, type the message you want people to receive.
Save this file to a location on your hard-drive; give it a relevant name!

Goto Tools > Message Rules > Mail

Choose 'new'
In section 1 (conditions) tick the 'for all messages' box.
In section 2 (actions) tick the 'reply with message' box.
In section 3 (description), click on the blue underline 'message'

Navigate to where you saved the file from (1)
Select this file

In section 4, choose a name for your rule.

That's it!!!

*** Sending out different responses ***

If you look at the different components in creating a new rule, you will see that there are many different ways of customising your response e.g. if you have different e-mail addresses, you can create corresponding subfolders in your inbox and automatically direct the e-mails to it's subfolder.

To automate delivery of your electronic ebay products, the easiest way is to use a link-hiding program to disguise your actual download location, take payment with PayPal and then use Outlook Express message rules to send an e-mail to the winning bidder with the download link:

For each product:

Set up an EzyLinkExpire link

Create a message (See step 1 above) containing the download link

***Tip*** Why not suggest the recipient check out your other products?

Create a message rule:

Where the Subject line contains 'Notification of an Instant Payment'

and the message body contains 'Put in your auction title here'

and Reply with your link-containing message

You're done!!!

*** Spam filtering ***

A different use of Outlook Express is as a spam filter. Create a new rule:

Conditions:

Where the Subject line contains 'security alert' or 'Credit Union' or 'Update your CU account' or '$aving$' - carry on adding words that you frequently receive in spam e-mail titles

Click on the word 'and' and select 'messages match any one of the criteria'

Where the message body contains 'Opt-in Email Special Offer' or 'credit union' - carry on adding words that you frequently receive in spam e-mail messages

Actions:

Delete it
and Highlight it with Red

Labels: email, resources, spam

Get Safe Online

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Get Safe Online in its own words "...will help you protect yourself against internet threats. The site is sponsored by government and leading businesses working together to provide a free, public service."

It's split into 3 sections - Protect Your PC, Protect Yourself and Protect Your Business to be relevant to everybody from home users to small business owners.

It's sponsored by the UK Government, BT, Dell, eBay, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Message Labs, Microsoft, the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, Secure Trading and Yell.com so you know that the site knows what it is talking about!

Take a look, and also consider these free* software packages to protect your PC:

Adaware - Removes spyware
AVG Antivirus - Removes viruses, worms, trojan horses and other nasties
Spybot Search & Destroy - Removes spyware
ZoneAlarm - Free Download- Firewall software

(* free to personal, non-commercial users)

Labels: email, resources, security, spam

E-mail campaigns...Part 2

Friday, October 28, 2005

Last post looked at the legal side of e-mail and newsletter campaigns. Now to look at how to implement them at no cost. Using your desktop e-mail program is the simplest method, followed by a hosted solution. Finally, there are some very good free scripts out there but are slightly more complex to set up.

*** Using Outlook Express, or another desktop e-mail program ***

1) Copy your list of recipients into the BCC (='Blind Carbon Copy') field in a new e-mail. [TIP: If this is not visible, go to 'View' and select 'All Headers']

2) Put your e-mail address in the 'To' field

3) Type your message and off you go!

4) To see who you sent it to, right click on the message in the 'Sent Items' folder and choose 'Properties'.

Advantages
- No recipient can see the e-mail address of any other recipient, so you maintain privacy.
- You know that it's been sent because you'll also receive a copy.

Disadvantages
- You have to deal with unsubscribes and bounces manually.
- Limited customisation options.

*** Using a hosted solution ***

We've found Listapp to be a very simple and effective newsletter service. The setup is very straightforward, and it automatically generates the code for people to (un)subscribe, for both your e-mails and webpages, as well as letting you customise various options.

Advantages
- Simple to setup and maintain.

Disadvantages
- Limited customisation options.

*** Hosting your own script ***

If you can host your own scripts and have some experience in setting them up, PHPlist is by far and away the best free script we've seen.

Advantages
- Fully customisable.
- Automated bounce and subscribe options

Disadvantages
- Setup not for the faint-hearted! You must have knowledge of FTP, CHMOD and editing script files.

Labels: email, programming, resources, spam

E-mail campaigns...Part 1

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

So you've decided to set up an e-mail campaign/newsletter. That's great, but have you checked that it's legally compliant?

E-mail marketing is exceedingly powerful - it's focussed marketing allowing you to set up a relationship with your prospects and it's pro-active - you have control.

Your main objective is obviously to capture and use e-mail addresses, but only after you have obtained permission. If you do not obtain permission, you are spamming and therefore breaking the law.

Opt-in lists can be built up from your website, offline materials, joint ventures and existing contacts. When you're starting out, some of the mailing lists that you can purchase (advertised as "100,000 opted-in leads" or similar) look very tempting. However, even if they are opted-in, they have not opted-in to your list, and whilst they may have ticked a box agreeing to receive third-party mailings, you don't know what service they signed up from e.g. if someone agreed to receive 3rd party mailings from a pet food company, what use is that to a clothing manufacturer??!!

Side note : You must have received spam (or UCE - 'unsolicited commercial e-mail') before - it never comes from the same person more than once and offers you all sorts of items or services that you don't need. If you receive several of these a day, or if you're really unlucky, hundreds, you'll understand how irritating spam is.

In the UK, there are two main legal areas to comply with, both regulated by the Information Commissioner - www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk

1. Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (EU Law)

- The sender must not conceal their identity
- The sender must provide a valid address for opt-out requests
- The sender must not send out messages without having prior permission unless there is a pre-existing business relationship

2. Data Protection Act (UK Law)

- The person holding the personal data in electronic format ("Data Controller") must register with the Information Commissioner
- Registration is annual, costing £35

Part 2 will tell you how to set-up a mailing list/newsletter for free!

Labels: email, legal, spam

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