I’ve just become aware of bot blogging curtesy of these three links to posts I’ve just put up. I guess they’re part of the escalating SEO war. Anyway, if you look below the fold, my hope is that some geek will have explained what it’s all about, whether and the extent to which we should be alarmed, shocked or outraged and who we should be writing to to have it all fixed – if indeed there is something wrong.
Geekfree moment. We have noticed similar automated aggregating pings/trackbacks, but not from these three (which look as if they come from the same person). They are usually trapped by Akismet (a WordPress spam filter, if you are a non-wordpress person). Any similar spam filter should pull them out anyway.
I don’t think it is an SEO trick as much as it’s an adsense (and Amazon affiliate) exercise, as you can see. They are pure spam and, in addition, because they have no pagerank they could have a negative effect on Troppo’s own pagerank and therefore search engine position (I think).
Although preferable to the spammers who send a couple of hundred links to astonishingly imaginative varieties of sexual possibilities, they would interrupt a good ClubTroppo conversation.
Thx – I might knock them out when it’s obvious. And maybe Jacques can cook up something good to help catch them.
Nicholas, ‘courtesy’. Sorry, its bugging me.
Thanks Caroline – and sorry, I’m not a very good speller!
But why? WHY?? (having just fished a couple of these links out of my spaminator) — Who in heaven’s name is going to read these things?
Therefore, what is the point of using them at all?
Does anyone have an insight into the minds of the people behind these things?
I wondered that myself Helen, recently. So I wikipedia’d it:
Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs
Yes, but this is pretty old hat with Google, which is – as you would expect – a dynamic algorithm. I doubt it helps rankings much and it shouldn’t be that hard for the people at Google to detect it and if you get detected as a spammer by Google – then if you are in business and you rely on Google – well then your whole world falls apart. Google bans you and you don’t rank at 100. You don’t rank at 10,000. You don’t rank at all!
Our business spent a week banned by Google for some infraction – we could never work out what it was. It was a horrible experience.