Update: I've just compiled this post into an article that I posted here Will Spam-Blogging Be The Death Of Blogging?
Technorati reports that 30,000 - 40,000 new weblogs are being created each day.
Part of the growth of new weblogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs - 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.
Those in the SEO world are well aware of this. There are even services like Blogburner available that encourage creation of spammy blogs.
I blogged about blogs and spam-pinging before and I recommend blogging as an SEO tactic. But I always emphasize that you use your blog for more than just SEO.
According to Technorati's David Sifry:
Prior to January, spam wasn't much of an issue. I'd estimate that we currently catch about 90% of spam and remove it from the index, and notify the blog hosting operators. Most of this fake blog spam comes from hosted services or from specific IP addresses.
One of the results of the extremely productive Spam Squashing Summit of a few weeks ago is the increased collaboration between services in order to report and combat this spam. Right now, about 20% of the aggregate pings Technorati receives are from spam blogs.
Steve Rubel sums up this dilemma rather well (emphasis added):
As soon as people figure out there's ways to exploit new technologies, they do it. It's human nature. 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.
Of course, such a move would also reduce any impact that blogs have on search results. That's the trade-off.
More information on comment spam and the no-follow tag.
It would be easy for me to launch into a sermon here about how a blog can be a great tool for personal branding and building relationships with your website visitors and customers.
Instead I’ll just say that the more you abuse a technology, the less effective it becomes. And so blogging will become less effective as an SEO tactic over time. Then the spammers will just have to find new avenues and means to spam the engines.
Instead focus on building content-rich sites, real, high-value links to them and don’t restrict yourself to just the SEO benefits of blogging.
Blogs are more than just tools for search engine optimization.
# posted by Priya Shah @ 11:39 PM
