Should I avoid using the word "Spam" on the home page

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For the newsletter subscription I want say something along the lines of, "We won't Spam you" will this affect the site in terms or rankings, keywords or getting blacklisted?

Aswerty

I really don't think it'd impact on ranking or keywords based on what I know of SEO. There is no chance of you being blacklisted from anything by just using the word spam in a sentence.

What might be a worry is that you're bringing up the topic of spam to people you want to sign-up to a newsletter. Personally I'd lean more towards wording such as Get 1 or 2 emails about <topic> per month and Unsubscribe anytime which gives the user a sense of the amount of emails they'll get along with the knowledge that they can just unsubscribe whenever they want to. No need to bring up negative associations such as spam. I even seen things like We won't use your email for anything nefarious but you'd need to know your audience with that one.

Ultimately though, there's no glaring issue with using the phrase "We won't Spam you".

tricky D

Wouldn't quite 100% agree on the usage of a negative. From a Neuro Linguistic Programming perspective phrases like 'we will not spam you' risk being perceived without the 'not' and the word spam has its own negative potential. I try to avoid any use of negatives and negative words preferring something like 'We respect your privacy: view our privacy policy' with privacy policy linked to with the last 2 words. Negative words in a privacy policy aren't as worrisome as that's block content as opposed to call to action content which needs as much impact squeezed out of it as possible..

There's plenty of psychology going on for newsletter sign-ups which is very often poorly exploited. As above I prefer to explicitly state the frequency of newsletter shots like 'Sign up to our monthly newsletter'. Another tip is the using a call to action in the placeholder text eg. 'Enter your email address' as opposed to just 'email address'. The submit button text is also important in the same way.

Other tip are to link to an archive so the user can get a proper idea of what they are signing up for and avoid giving a text/html option as some inexperienced users risk getting confused.

Also consider using aria-required="true" in general and tabindex="1" if it's landing page type of sign-up.

The use of the above might be affected by the mailing solution you use requiring a minor bit of hacking.

<section id="newsletter-signup-container">

<form id="newsletter-signup" name="newsletter-signup" method="post" action="zzz">
<label>Sign up to our <a href="zzznewsletters/index.html">monthly newsletter</a></label>
<br>
<input type="email" placeholder="Enter your main email address here" size="36" required aria-required="true"> 
<input type="submit" value="Sign Up!">
<br>
<aside>We respect your privacy; Our <a href="zzzprivacy-policy.html">Privacy Policy</a>.</aside>
</form>

</section>

Never use the word spam in the newsletter itself, it is a keyword and in keywords combos used by the anti-spam filters.

Websites4u

I would steer away from using it if you dont have to. sometimes one could read that as "we will spam you". i wouldnt refer to it. Sign up to our newsletter should suffice.

if you were a website offering a spam service or no spam service you have to refer to it, in this case, i think leave it out, Keep it simple!

Websites4u

I would steer away from using it if you dont have to. sometimes one could read that as "we will spam you". i wouldnt refer to it. Sign up to our newsletter should suffice.

if you were a website offering a spam service or no spam service you have to refer to it, in this case, i think leave it out, Keep it simple!

Trojan

tricky D wrote: »

Wouldn't quite 100% agree on the usage of a negative. From a Neuro Linguistic Programming perspective phrases like 'we will not spam you' risk being perceived without the 'not' and the word spam has its own negative potential. I try to avoid any use of negatives and negative words preferring something like 'We respect your privacy: view our privacy policy' with privacy policy linked to with the last 2 words. Negative words in a privacy policy aren't as worrisome as that's block content as opposed to call to action content which needs as much impact squeezed out of it as possible..

+1 on avoiding the negative keywords. Although, meta, I wouldn't even mention the topic of NLP for the same reason

I like "We respect your privacy" and "We (heart-emoticon) your privacy" in that situation.