phantomLine™ — insider insights

Feed to Bleed — Poison the Spambots!

Another, more aggressive anti-spam measure is feeding web site harvester bots with bogus, i. e. undeliverable email addresses — this will inundate their databases with useless trash and will hopefully deter them from visiting your site again.

Blocking the Spambots

A very professional method of weeding out email harvesters or extractor bots consists in blocking them from access to your web site altogether. This is usually worked by UserAgent because typically there will be no fixed IPs you could work from as most of these extractor programs are client based.

Spam Fighter's Toolkit

Fighting the never ending tide of spam mail can turn into a very frustrating experience if you don't know the real tricks of the trade. After all, there's a whole lot more to it than simply responding to a (usually bogus) From: address with a peevish complaint!

How to protect your meta tags efficiently from snooping competitors with only two lines of code

Here's some horrible scenario for you:

imagine optimizing your web pages' meta tags for weeks and resubmitting them over and over until you finally make it to the top with some of the major search engines. Sure, meta tags may not be everything when it comes to achieving a good SE ranking, but as a webmaster you will nevertheless be well advised not to ignore them and instead to design them with the utmost care and proficiency.

A week or so later, your site has dropped dramatically in favor of your competitor's web presence. (Remember: this is not about prestige! Rather, what we are talking here is gain or loss of hard revenue dollars!) So you check out their pages and lo!, what do you find: the foul playing crooks have actually stolen your meta tags code from your very own pages, have fiddled with their content a bit to further optimize it, and bingo! — suddenly you're on your way down and out.

Fancy that? Hardly. Want to sue them for copyright infringement? Forget it: not only could this law suit cost you an arm and a leg, especially if the culprit is incorporated somewhere overseas. What's worse — it is quite unclear whether any court, local or foreign, will actually consider mere meta tag entries protectable intellectual property, let alone rule unequivocally in your favor. (Abuse of trade marks is another story, of course, but that's not our concern here.)

So what else can you do not to let this happen? Do not despair, help is nigh! :-)

Simply read our free tutorial featured below, adjust your page code accordingly — and off you go, back to the top again!