# Website getting spammed



## 6126 (May 9, 2010)

This is really frustrating. For the last week the "Contact us" on my site has been getting spammed  I get a dozen or so emails a day for sun glasses.  The only solution I can think of is adding a captia. I tried adding a captia today with no luck. I would add it, publish, but then it wouldnt be there.  Called Godaddy for tech support and they couldnt add it either so their tech team is going to work on it. Has anyone else been spammed on thier website?


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## ewingpainting.net (Jun 2, 2008)

it just what it is when you have exposure, I get data people calling me weekly. its just part of the game.


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## 6126 (May 9, 2010)

ewingpainting.net said:


> it just what it is when you have exposure, I get data people calling me weekly. its just part of the game.


True. I get the calls too.


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## daArch (Mar 15, 2008)

Mike,

Does your "Contact script" give you the IP from sender(s)? If so, enter the IP(s) into the banned list on your server


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## Rcon (Nov 19, 2009)

I used to get contact form spam all the time - usually from some seedy site selling prescription drugs. 

So I reported all the offending links to Google and added jQuery form tools to the site. If you know how to work with HTML and JS it should be no problem. Takes a while to figure out how it all works though. But I don't get contact form spam anymore. 

Also, don't post your email address on your website (not sure if you do or not) because bots crawl websites looking for email addresses to spam. You can however safely add an email link to a website using a scrambler script.


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## Rcon (Nov 19, 2009)

daArch said:


> Mike,
> 
> Does your "Contact script" give you the IP from sender(s)? If so, enter the IP(s) into the banned list on your server


That's one idea but doesn't really work. I tried that too using a .htaccess file and had several hundred banned IP's on there but the spammers keep changing their IP addresses - so even if it does work for a while, they will be back.


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## parodi (Mar 15, 2010)

Woodland said:


> This is really frustrating. For the last week the "Contact us" on my site has been getting spammed  I get a dozen or so emails a day for sun glasses.  The only solution I can think of is adding a captia. I tried adding a captia today with no luck. I would add it, publish, but then it wouldnt be there.  Called Godaddy for tech support and they couldnt add it either so their tech team is going to work on it. Has anyone else been spammed on thier website?


Ron, Your email 

[email protected] 

is text. Any time these spambots see a @aol.com or an @gmail.com or @yahoo.com they read the text and fire off a spammail.

What I would do is make a graphic .gif with the same blue background with the same white text and insert that there where the current text is. The bots will never see it. 

The only problem with that is it could possibly make you lose points with Google because it is anti-accessible so you could put alt tags with the image saying <alt="Email Woodland Painting today for a quote"/>. Don't forget that Google is very PC and does not like elements that are not legible to blind people.

You will still get spam because the these recent spammers have the address but at least you can cut down on the number of new spammers scraping your address .


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## parodi (Mar 15, 2010)

Ron, 
Looking at the source for your home page I'm seeing some stuff that Google does not like. The four different colors represent 4 lines of code on your home page that insert graphics like .jpgs and .gifs.

Each time you see alt="" (I've made them bold) there should be descriptive text between the "" quote marks so that machine readers can read the text for blind people. You don't have any text there for the blind people and when you neglect this you are saying eff you to blind people and Google says eff you too you insensitive beast...do you park in handicap spaces at Walgreen's too? (a little humor there.)


<img width="460" height="274" *alt=""* width="460" height="274" style="width: 442px; height: 256px;" src="http://www.painttalk.com/images/304088_236560196388395_100001032483018_678634_8037530_n_usji.jpg" />


<img width="243" height="56" alt="" width="243" height="56" style="width: 256px; height: 56px;" src="http://www.painttalk.com/images/safe_image_7gzy.gif" />



<td align="center"><img alt="" src="http://www.painttalk.com/images/benjamin_moore.bmp" />



<img alt="" src="http://www.painttalk.com/images/img00441-20110320-1428_v47n.jpg" />

But here's a little tip for you and the advanced crowd here. Remember the added text is not seen by sighted people, it is only seen by machine readers and the search engines. 

I will rewrite one of yours for the sake of making you look like an upright netizen and I will also make use of the alt tag for the purpose of SEO to push the keywords "painting" "interior" "exterior" "Vancouver WA" :


<td align="center"><img src="http://www.painttalk.com/images/benjamin_moore.bmp" alt=" Image for Benjamin Moore Paint. Woodland Painting only uses Benjamin Moore coatings for interior and exterior painting projects in Vancouver WA " " />

There currently is no googlelaw against expanding alt text....for now.


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## straight_lines (Oct 17, 2007)

I use Akismet on the blog for spam comments. Wufoo is what footbridge uses for contact information and it catches spam.


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## MarketingPros (Mar 29, 2012)

Woodland said:


> This is really frustrating. For the last week the "Contact us" on my site has been getting spammed  I get a dozen or so emails a day for sun glasses.  The only solution I can think of is adding a captia. I tried adding a captia today with no luck. I would add it, publish, but then it wouldnt be there.  Called Godaddy for tech support and they couldnt add it either so their tech team is going to work on it. Has anyone else been spammed on thier website?


Welcome to the club, we have a new member everyone. 

All kidding aside, this is part of the game. You will get contact form spam from anything and everything you can think of. You can either ignore it because it's not hurting anything you're doing, nor is it ever going away. Or you can spend time and money trying to prevent it.


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## 6126 (May 9, 2010)

Thank you very much for all the replies. Looks like Im not alone here. You guys have given me some great info. Thanks


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## mudbone (Dec 26, 2011)

Woodland said:


> This is really frustrating. For the last week the "Contact us" on my site has been getting spammed  I get a dozen or so emails a day for sun glasses.  The only solution I can think of is adding a captia. I tried adding a captia today with no luck. I would add it, publish, but then it wouldnt be there.  Called Godaddy for tech support and they couldnt add it either so their tech team is going to work on it. Has anyone else been spammed on thier website?


 Sounds to me like a sign that they know that your future is looking pretty bright.:yes:


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## parodi (Mar 15, 2010)

Woodland said:


> Thank you very much for all the replies. Looks like Im not alone here. You guys have given me some great info. Thanks


Mike, I like your website. I like that you are owner verified in Google Places. I also like that you are using youtube which is owned by Google and they like that too.
You are way ahead of the game when compared with many painters. Yet this morning when I searched in Google "painter Vancouver WA" you were not on the first page. (I am assuming that Vancouver is the main targeted area?) 

Whenever anyone starts to evaluate the ranking of a site the first place to look is at competitors' sites. Then ask the question, "Why are they ranking better than me?" You have some stiff competition from painters there. Also if you don't have Google Chrome now would be a good time to load it because, if you know how to ask, Google Chrome will TELL you a lot about what they are questioning. (Other times they don't tell you squat and you just have to read a lot on SEO forums to see what web developers are saying.)

So what happens when I search "painter Vancouver WA" ? The most important part of a site for the sake of search engines is the title of the site and that title is contained within the title tags. Here is what the top performers are using for titling in Vancouver.


CREEKSIDE Painting


<title>CREEKSIDE CONTRACTING LLC.</title>


CLARK COUNTY Painting

<title>Clark County Painting | Home Painting | Pressure Washing | Commercial Painter Portland Vancouver OR WA</title>

<meta name="description" content="Clark County Painting Pressure Washing Home House Painting, Commercial Painter, Pressure Washing Guaranteed Quality since '92 Vancouver Portland OR WA">

TITAN Painting

<title>House Painting Vancouver WA, Interior Painting Portland, Exterior Painting, House Maintenance, Power Washing, Painting Contractor – Choose Titan</title> 
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="-Yhsxyy_9_2qKRIZkKHfEEhyViaJX_Z2oprqjtmjxRk" /> 


KRIPPNER PAINTING

<title>Krippner Painting | One of the the largest painting contractors in SW Washington.</title>


I could spend a lot of time talking about titling a site but that is beyond the scope of this post. The good thing is your competitors are making a lot of mistakes but one thing they have that you don't is a title for the home page;


Here is your code for the home pageof your site:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />	
<meta name="description" content="Woodland Painting. Complete Interior And Exterior Paint Contractor Sevices. Seriving Woodland Washington And The Cowlitz County Area"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="Painting, Paint Contractor, Painting Contractors, Interior Painting, Exterior Painting, Woodland, Woodland Painting, Woodland Washington, Cowlitz County, Painters, House Painter, Exterior Paint, Woodland Painters, Battle Ground, Vancouver, Longview, Sherwin-Williams, Benjamin Moore, Paint Estimate, Best Painters, Power Washing, Deck Refinishing, Wallpaper Removal, House Painting, Residential, Commercial, Estimates, "/>

You have a better site description (other competitors have none), your meta keywords are sterling (but unfortunately search engine discount them completely nowadays).....But you have no title for the site. 

As soon as humanly possilbe I would insert this code in the HTML of your site right after charset=utf-8:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
*<title> Painter Vancouver WA | House Painting Portland | Deck Refinishing | Wallpaper Removal</title>* 


If you don't want Portland insert Cowlitz County Washington instead.

NEXT:
Load your site in Google Chrome and right click to "View page info" to see this:

*! The identity of this website has not been verified*

Titan Painting has verified theirs with Google....... <meta name="google-site-verification" content="-Yhsxyy_9_2qKRIZkKHfEEhyViaJX_Z2oprqjtmjxRk" />

You need to go https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and click on "Add site" and it gives you info on how to verify.
Bing (which is also Yahoo) also has a site verification function and you should to that too.

Do those two things and I'm betting you will be on page one within a month.


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## 6126 (May 9, 2010)

parodi said:


> Mike, I like your website. I like that you are owner verified in Google Places. I also like that you are using youtube which is owned by Google and they like that too.
> You are way ahead of the game when compared with many painters. Yet this morning when I searched in Google "painter Vancouver WA" you were not on the first page. (I am assuming that Vancouver is the main targeted area?)
> 
> Whenever anyone starts to evaluate the ranking of a site the first place to look is at competitors' sites. Then ask the question, "Why are they ranking better than me?" You have some stiff competition from painters there. Also if you don't have Google Chrome now would be a good time to load it because, if you know how to ask, Google Chrome will TELL you a lot about what they are questioning. (Other times they don't tell you squat and you just have to read a lot on SEO forums to see what web developers are saying.)
> ...


Wow, thanks for taking the time to post all this great info. I really appreciate it :thumbup:


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## parodi (Mar 15, 2010)

Woodland said:


> Wow, thanks for taking the time to post all this great info. I really appreciate it :thumbup:


You're welcome. 

If you read the big thread about the "Trifecta of Your Web Presence' you can feel good about everything you have done so far. Man, your painting competition in Vancouver WA, particularly in youtube videos, is really intense for a city that size. 

I really like this video:






IMO it is a great infommercial. One tweak to this is the title. I see that if you google "house painter Vancouver WA" Brent Lunde Painting's video appears as an avatar on Google One and your video is four entries down on page two. I think you can sneak up on him if you retitle your video "House Painter Vancouver WA | (your main county) | your zip code" 

For some reason both of you have arranged the words in your titles "Vancouver Wa house painter." Remember that search engines are actually "text matching " machines and click when they find the EXACT phrase that someone puts in the search window. The accepted format is business, town, state for almost everything. 

The reason I would put in the zip is that "Vancouver" is a tricky keyword because of Canada. Also "Wa" in the middle of the phrase instead of "WA" after Vancouver in standard format could cause ambiguity for the computer. It is ALWAYS best to feed a computer EXACTLY what it is looking for because computers don't really think.


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## Paradigmzz (May 5, 2010)

That's a fantastic video mike.


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## 6126 (May 9, 2010)

parodi said:


> You're welcome.
> 
> If you read the big thread about the "Trifecta of Your Web Presence' you can feel good about everything you have done so far. Man, your painting competition in Vancouver WA, particularly in youtube videos, is really intense for a city that size.
> 
> ...


Like this?


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## parodi (Mar 15, 2010)

Woodland said:


> Like this? House Painter in Vancouver WA 98683 - YouTube


Precisely like that. It sometimes takes a day (even one time an hour and a half) for Google to re-rank a video on youtube---however, I've had it take over a month! for title changes to get into their index.


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## 6126 (May 9, 2010)

I appreciate the suggestions. Now I just need to work on the website. I did finally get the captia added to the contact us form and it stopped the spam.At least for now.


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## 6126 (May 9, 2010)

parodi said:


> I see that if you google "house painter Vancouver WA" Brent Lunde Painting's video appears as an avatar on Google One and your video is four entries down on page two. I think you can sneak up on him if you retitle your video "House Painter Vancouver WA | (your main county) | your zip code"


Something must have worked. I got two calls this week from people who said they saw that video :thumbup:


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## caulktheline (Feb 10, 2011)

Woodland, nice video and it looks like you do quality work, but I have a question about the way you do doors. Do you come back with a brush and catch previously hidden overlaps and edges? Again, all due respect.


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