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The Design Center / Web Design & Review / SPAM / Deadly Sins / Heavy Duty Spam Site  

Page 3: The anatomy of a spam page...

A "Heavy Duty" Spam Website

zd.net This example takes a very different scenario, using less real "graphic" links or spam items, and padding the file with a debilitating swamp of code. Where the previous example was relatively honest with their spam, this example neighbors the nefarious.

We received a spam in the email box promising us the latest news on "Zap.com switching its Web strategy." Okay, it looked interesting so we fell for it.

Arriving on the page we find only 61 words about the story, and a whopping 9,744 words (59,115 characters) of SPAM! The page clocked in at 65 seconds to load, 44 of which were white screen, and two graphics which weighed in at 59K and 73K respectively.

The break in our thumbnail is where we cut out two more pages (out of 8) that were completely blank except for the blue margin background, and the links list in the right column.

If it weren't so sad, we'd be impressed! This page has

All we wanted was a little news. I guess that's what we got: a little news!

Interestingly enough, of the 175 links, 132 put you directly onto similar pages within the same website -- with similar download times and stats. Now if I put 132 links to other pages in The Design Center, we would be laughed out of town. Yet this is a very popular website with 6-digits of visits each day.

Worst of all, if I wanted to chase the Zap.com story I would be in for TWO more pages just like this one, with only fragments of the story on each page. With 1,607 individual lines of text in the html file, this is a superb example of a bandwidth embezzler. If I robbed of money the way this page robs you of your time and bandwidth you'd have me put in jail.

Okay, let's do the math:

59,115 characters of code (noise) to deliver 622 characters of content = a staggering 95-to-1 noise to content ratio.

You'll work nearly 100 times as hard to get the same amount of normal content! As you can see by our score card, the file sizes directly reflect this truth: 59115 to 622 = 95.040192926-to-1 ratio.

The resulting cache size of this single page approaches a megabyte. And, the numbers don't lie no matter how you slice the pie. So we would have to rate this site, generally, at above 10-to-1, or HEAVY spam site.

Now, the Conclusion: Zero Content


 

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