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Blogger Blogs, And The Hall Of Mirrors

In the now distant past, one popular attraction in a theme park (then, called an "amusement park") would be a fun house, or maze.

My favourite section of a fun house would be the "hall of mirrors" - a maze where all of the walls were mirrors. One person, entering the hall at one end would be seen in dozens of mirrors, all reflecting an image from other mirrors.

You would see one person, and would have fun trying to decide whether that person was right in front of you, or perhaps a few feet away from you, with his / her image reflected off dozens of mirrors.

If you went into a fun house maze with 2 or 3 friends, it would be like having a dozen friends.

A dozen friends or other fun house visitors would seem like a hundred, and so on.

Link farms are a popular way to increase total network activity.

Blogger blogs are used by some blog owners, as a "hall of mirrors".

One popular technique for artificially increasing traffic, to ones blogs, similar to GPT / PTC / PTS / PTV, uses link farms - where the casual visitor to one blog is induced to click on a link, which takes him to a second blog.

A similar link, on a second blog, takes the visitor back to the first blog, or on to a third blog. As in the hall of mirrors, one visitor is then counted twice, three times, or more. This is similar to "Next Blog" - but it is a "Next Blog" that is focused on other blogs in the link farm.

This activity, using symmetrically designed mazes, is known as "link wheeling".

Affiliate marketing networks let visitors click from blog to blog.

A variation of the link farm is an "affiliate marketing network", where a link contains a dynamic URL, which redirects randomly to another blog. This guarantees that the casual visitor sees a wide variety of blogs - again, though, blogs that are "affiliate" members.

By themselves, neither affiliate marketing networks or link farms are a problem. The problem encountered involves ads, which finance the affiliate marketing networks or link farms, added to the blogs. As with GPT / PTC / PTS / PTV traffic, these ads are being viewed by people who have no interest in the content of the blog being displayed, and no interest in the merchandise displayed in the ads.

They are simply visitors, surfing through the maze. As with the hall of mirrors, one visitor to the maze will produce a dozen clicks, each click leading to cash in somebody's pocket.

The advertisers end up paying 2, 3 , or 4 times for each visitor.

These visitors are more people who the advertisers pay for, and the merchandisers never see in their checkout lines. Again similar to GPT / PTC / PTS, this is more fraud.

If your blog is part of an "affiliate" network or link farm , with ads financing the blogs, that may be why your blog is now classified as spam - and that is why you are now here.

Gobble, Gobble.

Comments

Z.D. said…
Would you call affiliate network or link farm if you happen to have lets say ten fashion blogs, where each one points to other since they are all you blogs, and cover the same topic, in this case fashion?

I believe that in this case this shouldn't be treated as affiliate network or link farm, because people who came to visit your blog about fashion might be interested to learn even more information about fashion, available on your other blogs.

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