The Spam-ish Inquisition-will The Spam Police Knock On Your Door?

Long ago in the McCarthy era, many people were wrongly labeled “communist sympathizers”. Today, many people are wrongly being labeled as “spammers”. I am one of the wrongly accused. You may be next.

First of all the best legal description of spam is “unsolicited bulk email”. However, nowadays people are calling anything they don’t like that is published, spam. Though the lines are foggy, I believe spam to be something that is irrelevant published in a distracting or destructive manner. The key idea here is relevance. To me, to post a relevant comment on a blog and to include a link to another relevant item, is not spam. Yet there are many powers that be, armed with high tech spam tools, that disagree. In reality, they are worried that your message and links may be more powerful than their own.

Now I do write articles and on occasion, make money from them. Most sites would agree that is fine with them. Usually however they want you to only have links to small offers that probably wont make any money, and wont threaten their own moneymaking spam that they insert into your article.

I recently registered at a blog I found interesting. Within ten minutes I received an email that my account had been cancelled, “for spamming”. I had not even made a post. I just entered in my name , address and website as they asked. I never wrote an article, or commented on an article. So I wrote to the blogmaster and asked why they had deleted my account. They gave me a big discourse on their spamming policies. I responded that I had not written a thing on their website. A day later I received an aplogy letter from the webmaster. After he apologized, I deleted the account, on principle.

A short time later, I wrote an article on a sleep disorder. The article was informative and had only one link at the very bottom, to a new natural way to improve sleep. I pinged the article and made some backlinks to the article in order to reach people that were searching for help with this problem. I went to edit the article and to my displeasure, it was removed. This article was written on a web 2.0 site such as Hubpages, Squidoo ,Zimbio etc. Then came the dreaded email. They explained that my article was removed for spamming. Now keep in mind that there is only one outbound link at the bottom of this article. As was their practice, they had injected three rotating ads in my article. One of the ads they spammed in my article was for online dating. Oh the hypocrisy of it all.

They sited one of my backlinks, saying it was not relevant. The blog was about natural health issues, and my article was on a natural way to improve sleep and energy. Unrelated? I don’t think so. They also stated that I had many time more backlinks than normal . They followed that with the statement that they do encourage promoting the article. In any case, they unpublished my article. I had worked hard on it and had built up some good related backlinks.

So that’s the story of spam. If you write anything online and try to promote it a bit, they will probably label you a spammer at some point. You should also check your spam email filter, because many times there are good things in there that have been wrongly flagged. Finally if you really want to see that web 2.0’s idea of a unspammy quality article, just search for their wonderful article “Red Itchy Penis and Itchy Ball Sack”. I guess in their eyes , this is quality spam free content.

By: peterduncansmail

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Peter Duncan is a writer and business owner living in New York.