360's first mistake was spamming, if they have indeed done that.
Their second mistake was trying to sue someone that provides a list of spammers. Spamhaus doesn't block spammers, ISPs block spammers. They should have tried to clean up their act with Spamhaus or went after the ISPs that are the ones that are really blocking them.
I don't know about you, but if Spamhaus had gone away I would have put a lot of effort into trying to create a peer to peer type of blocklist. As it is now I am starting to change email addresses on 50+ sites because I am so damn sick of deleting this crap and reporting it to ISPs or SPAMCOP.net. I'm not wasting any more time on it now, I'm just going to work to get as free from it as I can by using email forwards that I can change when I need to and posting current email addresses on my sites that need it for business use.
Being on the top of the rankings is great, but it depends on how one gets there. Not that I'm saying you did anything wrong, but something changed with your site, and for most sites that complain about this happening, they were heavily optimized for a small group of keywords or phrases.
This can be effective, but as many are seeing, if the rules change, you can lose it all. All of our clients are optimized for as many keyword phrases as possible, and while they may not rank overly high for any specific phrase (but they often do) they are not affected by large changes in keyword rankings. It's like being diversified in the stock market, some go up, others go down, but overall the traffic stays pretty much the same.
We also get clients into about 120-160 different search engines and directories. AltaVista and Yahoo used to be the 900 lb gorillas, and now they are hardly mentioned. Well, Google use to be small and (while I hope not) they could also slip from the top of the heap someday.
If you want to shoot me an email I could take a look at your site and offer some suggestions that may help. We also let people use our hand submission system if they are interested. It's a lot of work, but it's really worth it.
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360's first mistake was spamming, if they have indeed done that. Their second mistake was trying to sue someone that provides a list of spammers. Spamhaus doesn't block spammers, ISPs block spammers. They should have tried to clean up their act with Spamhaus or went after the ISPs that are the ones that are really blocking them. I don't know about you, but if Spamhaus had gone away I would have put a lot of effort into trying to create a peer to peer type of blocklist. As it is now I am starting to change email addresses on 50+ sites because I am so damn sick of deleting this crap and reporting it to ISPs or SPAMCOP.net. I'm not wasting any more time on it now, I'm just going to work to get as free from it as I can by using email forwards that I can change when I need to and posting current email addresses on my sites that need it for business use.
Being on the top of the rankings is great, but it depends on how one gets there. Not that I'm saying you did anything wrong, but something changed with your site, and for most sites that complain about this happening, they were heavily optimized for a small group of keywords or phrases.
This can be effective, but as many are seeing, if the rules change, you can lose it all. All of our clients are optimized for as many keyword phrases as possible, and while they may not rank overly high for any specific phrase (but they often do) they are not affected by large changes in keyword rankings. It's like being diversified in the stock market, some go up, others go down, but overall the traffic stays pretty much the same.
We also get clients into about 120-160 different search engines and directories. AltaVista and Yahoo used to be the 900 lb gorillas, and now they are hardly mentioned. Well, Google use to be small and (while I hope not) they could also slip from the top of the heap someday.
If you want to shoot me an email I could take a look at your site and offer some suggestions that may help. We also let people use our hand submission system if they are interested. It's a lot of work, but it's really worth it.