Will Spam-Blogging Be The Death Of Blogging?
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. http://www.micropersuasion.com
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 the CEO of eBrand360. She writes on internet marketing, search engine optimization and business blogging. Subscribe to her free eCourse on Blogging for Marketers
This article may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact and all links are hyperlinked. _____________________________________________
Related Articles:
Protecting Your Business From Spam
Even being as careful as possible with my email address, I still used to receive more than 100 email messages a day, which is no exaggeration. Only about 10% of those emails were from people that I knew and the rest of the messages were unwanted email.
Free Spam Filter from SPAMfighter
SPAMfighter offers an effective spam filter free to private users.
Spam ? Problem Of Vital Importance On The Internet
Almost everyone who accesses the Internet and uses e-mail knows about spam. The common definition of spam is e-mail that is unsolicited, undesired by the recipient. Spam is sent out by automated programs to thousands or millions email addresses at a time. In most cases spam emails offer you different services, products (medicines, goods, software programs etc.), and ?get rich quickly? plans. You can simply delete them if you receive several unsolicited emails per day. But if you get tens or hundreds spam messages every day, it is a real problem. In order to understand how to deal with spam in your inbox, let?s examine some core questions concerning spam:
Tune Up Your Email Newsletter To Be Compliant With Anti-Spam Filters
In this article we?ll continue talking about how to create a healthy email message and give a few tips how to survive anti-spam filters. Anti-spam filters catch every incoming email before it is delivered into the inbox and review it. They use a scoring system to classify an email as spam or legitimate. These filters (you might have heard about SpamAssassin, SpamProbe, or SpamCombat) look for certain patterns in the message, and assign "spam points" to it based on certain criteria: words, phrases, or even colors.
Avoid Spam And Find MySpace Layouts
Using various MySpace layouts will sound very exciting, but at the same time users will have to check if the sites they access are free. This will include even links that are hidden in others profiles. While many users go to sites and start looking for layouts, they forget that there could be a lot of spam out there. Most of the designers who are part of MySpace layouts do indulge in free advertising.
Spam Check Your Newsletter for FREE
Spam is a bigger and bigger problem nowadays. Recently Ralph Wilson, Paul Myers, and other Internet marketing gurus have written about the problems that spam is causing honest, hard working Internet marketers.
Spam: How To Get Rid Of Spam From Your Email Inbox
Anyone who has ever opened an email account will have been subjected to spam. Probably almost as soon as the account has been opened. So how do you get rid of spam from your inbox without going crazy in the process?
Eleven2 Hosting Launches iPhone Email Anti-Spam Features
New anti-spam enhancements protect iPhone user inboxes and screen out 99.9% of spam emails.
Bayesian Spam Filters Explained
In a word Bayesian spam filters are "intelligent". Bayesian spam filters are intelligent in so far as they're capable of comparing two sets of information and acting on the result.
Managing Spam in 2005
In 1998, nearly 10% of all email traffic on the internet was SPAM. By 2003 that number had climbed to 50%, and the problem had gotten so bad that Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act)The specific requirements and penalties of that law, (which took effect in 2004) have done little to stem the tide of junk email we all receive.