The Dark Side of Blogs
Posted on August 10, 2005
David Sifry, the founder and CEO of Technorati, has a post about the dark side of the blogosphere in his series about the State of the Blogosphere. In the article he discusses the growing number of fake and spam blogs. David D. Perlmutter, a journalist at Editor & Publisher, recently referred to these as clogs. Sifry admits that some of these spam blogs and fake blogs will slip by but they are working on techniques and algorithms to fight them at Technorati.
The people who build spam and fake blogs think that they can get some kind of advantage - usually by getting additional search engine rankings or affiliate income by building these systems. In essence, they believe that there is an economics that spurs them on - and at Technorati, we've been working together with leading players to eliminate that economic incentive. We're working with the folks who run web advertising systems and at major affiliate programs to alert them of spammers as quickly as possible. We've been building real-time systems to identify spammers and fake blogs and sharing that information with other web search engines so that link farms and keyword stuffers see no increases in search rankingsSifry also said there will be a second Web Spam Squashing Summit this September. He gives details about the first Summit here.
The post was about the dark side of the blogosphere but David Sifry didn't say anything about blog content theft, where bloggers steal content from blogs and feeds outright without providing a link back to the source. However, he did mention some fake blogs created with automated programs that do someone of the copying of blog posts. Verbatim blog plagiarism could probably be spotted fairly easily by the blog search engines.
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