Archive for February, 2016

Add a pink beating heart to your Gmail subject lines

Sunday, February 21st, 2016

Earlier today, I peeked into my Gmail spam folder only to see an email message with what looked to be a gif in the subject line. I have seen a lot on the Internet, but a moving image in a subject line was a first.

beating pink subject line heart

Upon closer examination of the email, it appears that the spammer in this case used =?UTF-8?B?876sjQ===?= inline in the subject line to create the beating heart effect. To add to the fun, the body of the message used inline Windows-1252 encoding, I suppose to try to get around spam filters. Below is a partial sample of the email encoding…

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=3D"Content-Type" content=3D"text/html;=charset=3DWindows-1252">
</meta></head><body><div style=3D"color:#5C5E93; =font-size:21pt">
&#105;=&#102;o&#117;n&#100; yo&#117;r &#112;&#104;o&#116;os i&#110;
=f&#97;&#99;eb&#111;&#1444;o&#107; . &#121;o&#117; a&#114;e=&#114;ogue!&#33;
</div></body></html>

There is a part of me that respects the ingenuity, although this totally got stuck in spam filters.

Also, here’s a tweet about the beating heart, according to stack overflow, the UTF encoding refers to a Google specific emoji set.

Posted in Internet, Email Marketing | No Comments »

Tweets can influence SERPs

Saturday, February 6th, 2016

Posted below are two screenshots for the first page SERP for Joy Larkin. (Heh, see what I did there?). First screenshot is when I haven’t tweeted in a while and the second screenshot is approximately 48 hours later after some tweet activity. My Twitter account does have my name on it.

You can see that time and number of tweets do influence position on the search engine results page.

Before.
Joy Larkin Google SERP before tweeting

And after.
Joy Larkin Google SERP after tweeting

Posted in Web Marketing, SEO | No Comments »

Quick Twitter SEO Observation

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016

Here’s a quick Twitter SEO observation. For the longest time, I had my about.me profile URL in my Twitter bio. It was ok (the analytics for the free version are less than optimal), so I decided to see if switching up the URL would improve SEO for Joy Larkin, as there are a few women named Joy Larkin on the Web, and of course, I wanted to rank first.

Last week, I added my LinkedIn URL to my Twitter profile. After a few days, my LinkedIn profile ranked first.

Joy Larkin SEO Google SERP

Being ever curious, tonight I added my cleverhack about page to my Twitter bio. Now I’ll watch to see if that gets ranked first for my name.

Posted in Internet, Web Marketing, SEO | 1 Comment »