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Spammers - Getting Others To Do Their Work

We've known of resourceful scammerspammers, for years.

One long known scam, popular with home / small business blog owners, has been to award a badge for a "Most Excellent Blog" - and encourage the badge recipient to award the badge to friends with "Most Excellent Blogs".

The recipients of the "award" would proudly display the badge on their blogs. The "Most Excellent Blog" badge, of course, contained a link back to the scammers blog.

Recently, a spammer in a foreign country hosted an "SEO Contest" for other blog owners, where everybody participating was again, encouraged to put the "SEO Contest" badge on his blog or website. Again, the badge lead back to the spammers website.

Both examples of deviousness lead to mazes of interconnected blogs and websites, all of dubious relationship to each other.

Randomly connected blogs and websites are purposeless.

The blogs and websites involved had no real reason for interconnection - other than each being owned by a gullible contest entrant, or "award" winner. Meanwhile, the spammer sat there, watching his website swell with the readers, coming in search of informative and interesting content - and seeing more spam.

The former blog owners, participants in the "SEO Contest", later report.
Blogger deleted my blog! I need my blog, to make a little extra money!!
But there is no encouragement here, your blog is gone. Blogger Policy Review can't distinguish the spammers from the victims - that would require determination of motive. To them, it is all one big spam blog farm, in an ingenious affiliate marketing scheme.

Long ago, we had web rings. Now, blog hops and traffic exchanges.

Long ago, when the Internet was just a geeks paradise, one guy convinced half a dozen of his friends to link their websites to each other, sequentially, backwards and forwards.
Website A linked to Website B which linked to Website C ... which linked back to Website A.
The theory was that you could start from any point in the ring, surf in either direction, and view each website in the ring.

When other participants joined, they would break and insert into the middle of any convenient link pair.
Website A linked to Website AA which linked to Website B ... (and Website B linked to Website AA which linked to Website A ...)
This technique was called a website ring. My first website was linked into a ring, called by its creators, "The Ring Around The World". Now, we have "blog hops" and "traffic exchanges".

Blogger / Google has "Next Blog".

Google's version of a webring started as the well known "Next Blog". As the number of blogs and websites grew to approximate the world population, people decided that they would prefer to only view other websites that resembled their own - and Google tweaked "Next Blog", to link the current blog to other blogs of the same subject.

Blogs which derive traffic from schemes such as "Badges" and "SEO Contests" (and send their readers to the creators of the schemes) become yet one more type of righteous spam classification.

None of these schemes are useful, long term.

Folks, there is no legitimate free traffic scheme. You get traffic to your blog, from publishing informative, interesting, and unique content - and from improved search engine indexing.

Don't lose your blog, from following bogus advice.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This is one of the reasons I won't join blog hops anymore. I make screen shots of photos and logos I need, because I don't like all the linking stuff that goes on. You've got me thinking though, and I'm pretty sure I can figure out a way to clean up my blogs even more. This post has only verified a suspicion of mine, one I stumbled on last spring when I co-hosted a very large blog hop. It was an honor to be invited as a co-host, but when my page views went down instead of up, I became very concerned, considering how many extra comments I was getting. It too was a reason I quit participating in blog hops. Lessons learned the hard way, but at least they were taken to heart.

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