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The Evil Linking of Sploggers and Scrapers Messing With Your Content

July 2, 2007 by Lorelle VanFossen

The other day, I found a fascinating post on blogging programs that really held my interest, exploring why someone would stay with a specific program even when it made them unhappy. I noticed a reference to Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, but the link wasn’t to his name but on the word “of”.

Splog uses buried links to direct visitors to porn sites in stolen content

I thought that was odd and noticed that other strange words were in links: her, the, in, about, and he. Very odd linking pattern.

A hover over the links found that they were links to porn sites.

Suspecting this was a splog, I wondered if the author had intended to write this interesting article and stuff it with the nasty porn links or if this was indeed a splog. I selected a block of text with unique phrasing and ran a search in Google for the phrase wrapped in quotes. Indeed, I found the original author and then informed them of the scraping and copyright violation as well as the nasty links.

Getting Scraped is a Compliment

Many feel that getting your blog content stolen and scraped by a splogger is a compliment. It means they care enough about your content to “spread the word”. Or they think that it won’t hurt them, but benefits them due to the trackbacks and link love.

This is crap. Loads of it. Piled very high.

It’s a load of garbage because few splogs give credit to the original author. In fact, they have programs which strip the HTML links and tags so they are free to insert their own with no good links getting in the way.

Google’s new PageRank algorithm now investigates and considers links and content in many ways. It’s about keyword matching and relative content linking.

If there is a credit link back to your blog, and the links within the blog post are not inline with the blog contents, on the blog and the linking blogs, the discrepancy is noticed and can score against you. If the content from two different sites match, and the links within don’t, it can score against you.

If you are worried about duplicate content, then be more worried. If the duplicated content is matched up with your blog, then your site may get scored low for such duplication. It isn’t just the duplication on your blog but the duplication of your content off your blog.

Many a blogger’s PageRank has dropped due to splogs scraping their content, so help stop scrapers and sploggers from stealing and abusing your content. If others abusing your content is a compliment, it’s a painful one.

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: Blogging, plagiarism, SEO

Is Twitter The Next SEO Haven?

May 21, 2007 by J. Angelo Racoma

Blogs have come to be very SEO-friendly, because of their nature of being frequently-updated, and link-rich. This is the very reason behind the rise of such monetization programs like Text Link Ads and ReviewMe. It’s not really the potential inbound traffic that advertisers are looking for, but the potential SEO benefits from link-building.

Sadly, spammers and black-hat SEOs have also exploited this characteristic of blogs to mass produce splogs (or “spam blogs”) for purposes of link-building. Sure, Google and the other search engines have learned to flag and de-index spammy sites. But sploggers still go on, with many using scripts that automate scraping of content. Sadly, the prevalence of splogs has also prompted the search engines to consider lessening the “link juice” of sites that sell text links (but this is worth another blog post altogether).

With the newfound popularity of microblogging/presence networks like Twitter and Jaiku (and a host of others), these may well be the next haven for people looking into optimizing their sites for search engines. For instance, Neil Patel at Search Engine Land recently wrote that Twitter can be used not just for messaging, but also to generate traffic, particularly since Twitter allows for embedding links in tweets. Plugins like Alex King’s Twitter Tools even automate things for WordPress bloggers. You can set it to post a tweet automatically every time you publish a blog post.

Secondly, Twitter status pages themselves are starting to get indexed by the search engines, and I would think many of these have been getting good Google PageRanks on their own. To illustrate, the twitter.com home page has a PageRank of 8/10, which is considerably high. Robert Scoble’s Twitter page has a pagerank of 5/10, while my own Twitter page has a PR of 4/10.

I think in this aspect, Twitter has an advantage over Jaiku, because Twitter statuses and user pages are set as subdirectories (i.e., twitter.com/username), while Jaiku uses subdomains (i.e., username.jaiku.com). SEO-wise, subfolders are treated as part of the original domain, while subdomains are treated as separate sites altogether. Therefore, whatever SEO benefits twitter.com is getting will trickle down to its subfolders, including user status pages and tweets.

There are even times when Twitter or Jaiku status updates have been topping search engine results, like this one example by Chris Pirillo, in which Jaiku and Twitter updates that linked to a blog posting of his ranked even higher than his original blog posting itself. The same thing happened in another experiment involving Twitter and a blog post.

And then there are the alternative uses of Twitter. For instance, Robert Scoble now uses Twitter for link blogging. And I think this is better than link blogging using a full blogging platform or even social bookmarking services like del.icio.us because of the push aspect of Twitter. Instead of having to check a site or a feed manually every now and then, I get Scoble’s links on my Twitter client (i.e., Twitterrific for the Mac, or even via IM/mobile if I choose so) whenever he posts links.

And it’s not only the push aspect. Each time I post a link on my Twitter status page, all of my followers’ friends pages get to display that link, too. If I have thousands of followers, not only does Twitter push the link to their clients (IM, desktop client, mobile phone, or even web), I also get thousands of new inbound links toward that link I just posted.

These, among other reasons, make me think Twitter, Jaiku and other microblogging/presence services may be ripe for the picking for SEOs. Unfortunately, spammers might also start to mass-produce tweets with links to their own sites. At least they won’t be disturbing anyone, unless they have friends/subscribers in their networks (which can be done with some social engineering).

Of course, sometimes this may not work as intended. For instance, Twitter is limited to 140 characters per post, and so most Twitter clients (including Twitter’s own web interface itself) use URL shortening services like urltea.com and tinyurl.com. I discussed the disadvantages of short URL services a while back on my blog, and my concern is basically about the URL shortening services getting the link love instead of your own domain.

Another problem might be Twitter’s infamous downtimes (albeit with cute downtime messages). There’s not much SEO benefit if a site can hardly be indexed because of downtimes.

Still, this is a new phenomenon worth looking into. Where there are web apps, there will always be people looking for ways to explore–and possibly exploit–these for their own purposes. Will Twitter–and other microblogging services–be the next SEO haven?

Filed Under: Editorial Tagged With: Blogging, Microblogging, SEO, Social Media

Wordtracker plays Keyword Challenge game at Internet World exhibition

May 2, 2007 by Andy Merrett

The UK-based online keyword research company Wordtracker has been playing a Keyword Challenge with delegates at the Internet World exhibition in London this week.

They reckon that most web site owners simply guess what their most important keywords are, and the game aims to show that’s just not good enough.

Playing in London now, and at previous conferences in New York, Las Vegas, and Chicago, the Keyword Challenge game asks people to guess which of two randomly chosen keywords is the most popular for a specific market sector.

From over 2,000 players, many who claimed to be experienced search engine optimisers, the success rate was just 54.9%.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: News Tagged With: SEO

How SEO Confronts Its PR Challenge In The Blogosphere

February 17, 2007 by Aileen Thompson

I got a lot of attention from the search engine optimization (SEO) community this past week for a post on “What Gives SEO A Bad Name” — the example I used, a parked domain appearing as a #2 Google search results, turns out to be Google’s fault, not the work of an unethical SEO. Or so it appears, based on some very plausible explanations posted by some smart SEOs in the comments of the post — but I can’t know with 100% certainty what’s going on inside Google’s black box, and that’s a problem for SEOs.

Some SEOs got upset with me for appearing to unfairly perpetuate negative perceptions of SEO — but if my post was a mistake, it was an honest one (I posted a correction). The point I’ve been trying to make to the SEO community, not always successfully, is that because they live in a black box, SEO’s PR challenge involves correcting a lot of misperceptions. Many of those misperceptions are unfair, but they are not always intentionally malicious — and they exist among potential SEO clients, like me

UPDATE: Speaking of great search ambassadors, Google’s Matt Cutts showed up on my original post and all but confirmed that my example is likely a problem in Google’s algorithm, although it’s pending investigation. Matt said that if it does turn out to be a problem in the algorithm, it could lead to a larger fix, which would certainly be a happy ending to this tale.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: Bloggers, Blogging, Public Relations, SEO

Flash is Nice, However Words Get You Found

February 12, 2007 by Lorelle VanFossen

The recent death of a family member has finally brought together parts of the family long separated for stupid reasons. Among them came a young man fresh out of college wanting a career in web design. His eagerness to impress me, once he found out who I was, was delightful. Together we raced to a nearby computer and his hands shook with excitement as he typed in his new portfolio domain, thrilled to get an expert opinion and review.

Well, all I can say is that it was pretty.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: Blog Design, Blogging, Education, SEO

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