Will Spam-Blogging Be The Death Of Blogging?
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.
But the trade-off is that such a move would
also reduce any impact that blogs have on search results.
Fact: The more you abuse a technology, the less
effective it becomes.
Spam blogging will force search engines like
Google to change their ranking algorithms and eventually assign
less value to links from blogs.
Unless they put in safeguards to prevent robots
from taking over, its safe to assume that blogging will become
less effective as an SEO tactic over time.
Of course, the spammers will then just have
to find new avenues and means to spam the engines.
But why ruin a good thing in the first place?
Blogs are much more than just tools for search engine optimization.
A blog can be a great tool for personal branding
and building relationships with your website visitors and customers.
Instead of using blogs for spam, focus on building
content-rich sites and getting high-value links to them.
Don't restrict yourself to just the SEO benefits
of blogging.
Appreciate the value that blogs can add to your
marketing and public relations strategy and use them the way
they were meant to be used.
Priya Shah is CEO of the blog
publishing firm, Connect10. Subscribe to her free Marketing
With Blogs email course. Request the whitepaper Boost
Your Search Engine Visibility With Blogs And RSS here.
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