Will Spam-Blogging Be The Death Of Blogging?
Guest Article by Priya Shah
Technorati reports that 30,000 - 40,000 new blogs are being created each day.
According to David Sifry, part of the growth of new blogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs.
What are spam blogs? They are fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites.
They contain robot-generated posts made up of random words, with the title linking back to the blogger's own pages.
Many bloggers see them as a way of getting their pages indexed quickly by Google and other search engines.
Sifry estimates that about 20% of the aggregate pings Technorati receives are from spam blogs. Most of this fake blog spam comes from hosted services or from specific IP addresses.
Those in the SEO world are well aware of this. There are even services like Blogburner that encourage creation of spammy blogs and spam-pinging to get your sites indexed quickly.
As a blogging evangelist, I wholeheartedly recommend blogging as an SEO tactic. But I also emphasize that you should use your blog for more than just SEO.
At the Spam Squashing Summit, blog services decided to collaborate to report and combat blog-spamming.
Technorati currently claims to catch about 90% of spam and remove it from the index. They also notify the blog hosting operators.
But I believe that they are fighting a losing battle. As I write this there are software and robots being created that will create spam-blogs more efficiently and in ways that will be harder to detect.
The SEO "black hats" are always far ahead of the technology and safeguards that these services can put in place.
Take down a few spam-blogs and hundreds more will arise.
Blogging evangelist and PR guru, Steve Rubel, sums up this dilemma rather well on his Micropersuasion blog.
He believes that its human nature for people to exploit new technologies, and that it's really up to the search engines to help put a stop to these by undercutting the economics of blogspam, much like they did with nofollow and comment spam.
We'll finish this tomorrow...
Technorati reports that 30,000 - 40,000 new blogs are being created each day.
According to David Sifry, part of the growth of new blogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs.
What are spam blogs? They are fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites.
They contain robot-generated posts made up of random words, with the title linking back to the blogger's own pages.
Many bloggers see them as a way of getting their pages indexed quickly by Google and other search engines.
Sifry estimates that about 20% of the aggregate pings Technorati receives are from spam blogs. Most of this fake blog spam comes from hosted services or from specific IP addresses.
Those in the SEO world are well aware of this. There are even services like Blogburner that encourage creation of spammy blogs and spam-pinging to get your sites indexed quickly.
As a blogging evangelist, I wholeheartedly recommend blogging as an SEO tactic. But I also emphasize that you should use your blog for more than just SEO.
At the Spam Squashing Summit, blog services decided to collaborate to report and combat blog-spamming.
Technorati currently claims to catch about 90% of spam and remove it from the index. They also notify the blog hosting operators.
But I believe that they are fighting a losing battle. As I write this there are software and robots being created that will create spam-blogs more efficiently and in ways that will be harder to detect.
The SEO "black hats" are always far ahead of the technology and safeguards that these services can put in place.
Take down a few spam-blogs and hundreds more will arise.
Blogging evangelist and PR guru, Steve Rubel, sums up this dilemma rather well on his Micropersuasion blog.
He believes that its human nature for people to exploit new technologies, and that it's really up to the search engines to help put a stop to these by undercutting the economics of blogspam, much like they did with nofollow and comment spam.
We'll finish this tomorrow...
posted by John V at 5:35 PM
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