Tapping into High Dollar Web Traffic and how to Get your Website around the Corporate Firewall

Posted by Methodical on August 30th, 2007 filed in Methodical SEO

I currently work for a Fortune 250 company, which is in the Insurance/Finance industry. Like many Fortune 1000 Companies, we use SurfControl to manage acceptable web usage for the Enterprise. SurfControl might be a quick clean solution for employers, but for web publishers SurfControl can be a nightmare.

As an SEO and web publisher, who has multiple side projects going, I have learned that some of the best traffic comes out of the corporate workforce. Depending on your niche, you too might be able to capitalize on the high dollar traffic that comes from the legion of Cube Dwellers who spend 8+ hours at their computers each day.

Banging your Head against the Firewall

If you are lucky you will have someone inside the corporate world that can test your site from the inside. One small benefit of being in corporate America is that I am behind the firewall on a daily basis, and I have been able to gather some insight on how to get blacklisted, and more importantly I have learned how to get off that list. But first, how do you get blacklisted?

Most Common ways to get Blacklisted

1. Have a forum that gets overrun with spam, and let it sit a few weeks. Even if you delete the spam, you are quite possibly dead in the water.
2. Have a page that is cash parked via godaddy. Note: I have not had any issues with the shared revenue service and getting blacklisted though, I have had issue with sites that are parked at godaddy and godaddy displays the godaddy free parked page.
3. Have a site with “Coming Soon” as the only content or either has no content at all.
4. Have a legitimate site which uses words that could trip their filter.
5. Have your site hosted on a C Block that is known for spam. Example: If your site is hosted by Dream Host then chances are you are blocked. Any server that hosts 1000’s of domains probably has a certain percentage of spam sites hosted on it, which will trip their filter a bit quicker than with some lower profile hosts.

Case in Point

A while back I had a legitimate site submitted to a web directory I run. I tried to approve the link, but SurfControl would not let me visit the site. The link was being requested from someone at an SEO Forum I frequent, so I knew that they should not have been SurfControlled. I decided to see what google would tell me. I knew that the site had a forum so I check to see if they had a bunch of spam entries that they were not aware of. The query [site:example.com sex], pulled back 20 hits. The funny thing was that the word sex was completely appropriate for this site because the forum is about breeding a particular animal, and the word sex was being used instead of the word gender.

Getting around the Firewall

I purchased a great little domain name a while back and had it sitting for quite some time. I finally decided to get around to using it, and after spending the weekend getting the site going, I returned to work on Monday and decided to look at my handy work. Lo and behold I was blacklisted! I knew immediately I was blacklisted because the site had no content for more than 6 months.

I was now faced with the fact that I was going to have to throw away the domain name and start with a name that was not as keyword rich as the one I was hoping to use. Out of pure frustration I headed to the SurfControl site where I hoped to find an email address, so I could request to have the site re-included.

Thankfully SurfControl has a place to request for a site to be tested. The nice thing is that it only took 3 days to get my site off their blacklist. If you want to get your site re-included then here is how you do it: Go to http://www.surfcontrol.com/, and on the horizontal navigation bar click the “Test Site” link. The Test Site link pops up the window below.

SurfControl test site form.

If you first want to see how it works then enter google.com and click the Test Site button. You will notice that they have google categorized as a search engine.

Once you have entered your site it will take no longer than a week for them to categorize your site.

Site Topology is Wrong

While entering your site through the Test Site link you might have noticed that your site was already in their list. Chances are they got the high level topology of your site correct, but if not you now have a choice to make. If they categorized you as a news source and you are really a blog then you are in good shape because some corporate settings don’t allow blogs where most allow news sites.

If you are a blog and they have you labeled in a high risk category then you will want to request to have them review your site. To do this, just submit your site on the “Test Link” and select the appropriate category. At this point it is up to Surf Control and you will have to take what they give you.

Example: Behind the firewall here at work I am able to view all cached pages that google provides. The problem is that, unlike google, both Yahoo and Live are under the Proxies & Translators topology, which for whatever reason is blocked at work. I have resubmitted both Yahoo and Live, to have them re-categorized as Search engines vs. them being under the proxies & translators but they have yet to change it.

Final thoughts

Surf Control is only one of many companies that filter web traffic in the corporate world. I hope to compile a list of some of the larger Surf Control type companies in the marketplace. If you know of another company that other SEOs and web publishers should be aware of then please leave a comment.