Splogs – someone save me from blog spam

Doing my monthly backlink checking routine (no big surprises despite the recent Google updates) I took a detour into Google Blog Search to see if link checking there was any more useful.  Lo and behold, our large B2B site had over 3,000 backlinks.  Great I thought, better than expected from the blogging community.  But, the euphoria was not to last more than the 2 seconds it took to scan down the first page of results.  Each and every entry was clearly the result of scraping activity – not a single valid result for 3 pages. For instance this is clearly not, and never has been, anything remotely valid. 

Sadly the old adage that “any publicity is good publicity” no longer applies in the realm of linking – the remorseless rise in splogs has the potential to seriously damage any site’s reputation with the ever increasing emphasis placed by indexes on quality vs quantity (I, of course, except MSN in this statement as who can really say how that poor, deluded engine works anymore).

Even more sadly, there is little we can do other than play the never ending game of hunt-the-bot in our log files and try to ban the blighters before they take more material.  However, even this will do little to stop this activity as a good 50% of all the offending sites I examined clearly used the free RSS feeds for source material.  Perhaps a more militant approach is needed, maybe IncrediBILL has the right attitude!

Now Digg has grown too big for it’s boots

There is little justification for Digg acting as it does.  Sure, ban spam pages designed to sucker in Adsense revenue but Squidoo, Digital Point forums, SEO News Blog?  It is hard to see any justification for these except that they proved too popular.  But is that not the whole point of community tagging?  Have I missed something vital here?

And the List of Domains Ditched by Digg Keeps Growing

Call me cynical ….

I love google alerts. Especially when one tells me we have new link-love for one of the sites.

Call me cynical, however, but Sports Direct Online » I was backpacking in the Sleeping Bear Dunes smacks too much as SEM spam.  And not too good an attempt either.  I assume it is some form of affiliate marketing/adwords wheeze but very poorly implemented.  It reminds me to revive a YAP (Yet Another Project) I have had on the back burner for months – an anti-bot mechanism for the sites.  From last month’s logs I estimated a good 20% of bandwidth was sucked by scammy scrapers and other scum extracting our content for nefarious purposes.  IncrediBill has the right approach – ban the lot!