Copyright
© Priya Shah
Spam
blogging will force search engines like Google to change their ranking
algorithms and eventually assign less value to links from blogs.
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.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Priya Shah
is the CEO of eBrand360
and publishes an internet
marketing newsletter. Her areas of specialization include
search engine optimization and business blogging. Subscribe to her free
eCourse on Blogging
for Marketers
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