Clean URLs ... Advice ... and Persuasion ...

[virtuola]

Hey All,

The following will be painfully self-evident to this group ... I've
asked this question ... around. My client is ready and willing to
clean up their act, if only to the outside world ... and I want to
push them over the edge ...

What I'm looking for are your best pithy sayings ... that would
convince any hard-bitten Texas (I capitalized it, damn it) banker type
that it's time to "Clean up yonder, URLs".

So, What's your best ammunition ..

Joet

================================================================

Ladies and Gents,

I have a client that is troubled by their website being "Blacklisted"
by http://www.surbl.org/ ... when attempting to create ( Bit.Ly )
links for use on twitter and facebook.

As a reminder ...

"SURBLs are lists of web sites that have appeared in unsolicited
messages. Unlike most lists, SURBLs are not lists of message senders."

What happens is the Bit.Ly links bring up a nasty page ...


"Warning - this site has been flagged and may contain unsolicited
content.
The content of this web page appears to contain spam, or links to
unsolicited or undesired sites."


It seems that somehow my client is being penalized by Bit.Ly through
their use of SURBL to "vet" their links ...

And the response from the Bit.Ly guy was ....

"the way that url was formatted, I wouldn't doubt it is re-blocked.
Looks like some sort of phishing/virus url to me. With the cmd call
and curl, etc."

Basically, my client is being Blacklisted ... for the style of their
URL's ... It's a complicated high volume webisite, but like many
websites the command structure is ... Baroque.

Question: Is he right? Are ugly URL's grounds for being banned from a
certain, trustworthiness ... to be fair, the full reason SURBL bans
domains is that they believe these domains have been seen in a certain
threshold of spam ... as defined by them.

So, without giving away my client ... Here is their URL ... without
the actual domain ... it's only a demo !!


http://NotaRealDomain.com/?cmd=sb-register&rb=907073&cmp=7&cxid=0-0&fb=true&rwrd=1%20John%20Some&curl=www.FitForNothing.com&deno=1

Is that so ugly?

Are clean URLs required today ... for high volume websites?

Thanks in Advance ... All Mighty and Powerful web405 ....

Joet

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[Wim De Smet]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 2:40 AM, virtuola <joe.terry@...> wrote:

>
> Hey All,
>
> The following will be painfully self-evident to this group ... I've
> asked this question ... around. My client is ready and willing to
> clean up their act, if only to the outside world ... and I want to
> push them over the edge ...
>
> What I'm looking for are your best pithy sayings ... that would
> convince any hard-bitten Texas (I capitalized it, damn it) banker type
> that it's time to "Clean up yonder, URLs".
>
> So, What's your best ammunition ..

Two things:
1) It looks a lot more professional
2) Your clients won't feel like the have to use url shortening
services just to paste your url in an e-mail.

Seriously though, blacklists for urls in spam are an inherently bad
idea. They either don't scale or have huge quality problems. I think
the more important question is "do you want to be able to have your
URLs shortened by bit.ly, even though they appear to be morons?". If
the answer is yes and they'll block you for having weird looking
strings in your urls, then get rid of the weird looking strings.

regards,
Wim

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