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. _____________________________________________

Future Feministe Guest-Blogger is Looking for Suggestions Feministe - 14 minutes ago ... 2008 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Blogging, Feminism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, ...

Google Makes Tweaks To Blogger InformationWeek, NY - Jul 1, 2008 Called Blog List, the new feature "improves on [Google's] Link List page element by using blogs' RSS and Atom feeds to show update times, post titles, ...

Feminism and Religion, Part 311187 Feministe - 23 hours ago ... July 4th, 2008 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Guest Blogging, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. ...

Stuff.tv

Stuff.tv's top blogging tips Stuff.tv, UK - Jul 4, 2008 Remember to add RSS feed options and plenty of social networking buttons so that folks can share. Looking to make some moolah from your endeavours? ...

For July 4th, WashingtonWatch.com Debuts New Government and ... PR Newswire (press release), NY - Jul 4, 2008 WASHINGTON, July 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- "What better way to celebrate the founding of our nation than... um, by... blogging? ...

lazy blogging CNET News, CA - Jun 30, 2008 One directed a comment to Technorati's management and said, "Please fix RSS feeds on search queries first, before you do anything else. ...

study tools, CNET News, CA - Jul 2, 2008 It's a good bet a chunk of those active users are taking advantage of the service's built-in blogging tool instead of going to another service like ...

Introducing Inquisitr iQ Alpha The Inquisitr, Australia - Jul 4, 2008 The second page offers a summary of the best news in the blogging world, an early passion of mine. The third page is a summary of all the major meme ...

This Time Syndrome Feministe - Jul 3, 2008 This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Guest Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS ...

Samsung SGH-G800 PC Magazine - Jul 3, 2008 Add PC Magazine Cell Phones Product Guide RSS feed to your feed reader so that you don't miss another headline! Editor's Note: Product not yet tested by ...