I’m just back from a relaxing weekend in Goa, stayed at the Taj Fort Aguada resort, with a lovely view of the sand and sea (and lots of activities to keep a hyperactive 6-year old occupied, thank heavens!) . We even had a Halloween party - pumpkin carving and everything. My daughter was delighted.

We’re celebrating the Festival of Lights in India. Its a time of joy and even the terror attacks in New Delhi have failed to dampen the spirits of people here.

So here’s wishing everyone a Happy Diwali. May your world be filled with light, peace and joy!

If you need proof that completely legitimate methods of - like article marketing and press releases - work to build quality links to your website, read my blog post about how we used them to get a brand new domain up to a PR 5 in under two months. And we don’t even have a proper template up…

I’m off to a beach in Goa for a much-needed weekend break, so I’ll answer mails and comments when I get back (on Monday). Have a great weekend, guys.

Just came across a couple of neat blogs by spam-haters. Added Sprocket to my Blogroll. His blog is hilarious. I love the way he takes off on the battle between spammers Rick Butts and Harold Don here. He even “outs” the spammers and their domain registrars by nominating a spammer of the week and providing their contact information for all to see.

Splogfighter takes on splogs by reporting them to Google and keeps a record of the number of splogs that were deleted by them. He also disagrees with Mitch Ratcliff’s suggestion on the need to “create pain” for Google and their advertisers, by resorting to click-fraud to force Google to fix Blogspot.

I think that was a little extreme too, but with spam reaching record proportions we could use more vigilantes like these guys to clean up the web, wot?

Its happening! The engines, namely Google, are striking back at sploggers and their malevolent creations, the splogs. Marketing Vox quotes a report by MediaPost that Google has taken measures to impede those attempting to use its Blogger service to create and maintain fake blogs.

Jason Goldman, product manager for Blogger, acknowledged on Blogger’s official corporate blog that the company had been targeted by what he called a “spamalanche.” Search engines, blog search engines and net advertisers are now working together to eliminate the economic incentive for splogs by identifying them at their source - by domain - and not indexing them.

Can CAPTCHA Stop The Spamalanche?

The “CAPTCHA” test is a method by which automated programs that post or create blogs can be foiled–where the user is asked to type in a sequence of letters from a line that people can read, but computers can’t decipher. Blogger is currently working on ways to reduce false positives and ensure that once a blog with word verification has been established as legitimate, the blogger will no longer need to solve the CAPTCHA.

Why Create Splogs In The First Place?

Splogs generally fall into one of two categories, notes Mediapost:

Link farms, which pack hundreds or even thousands of blogs with gibberish or recycled content, and contain multiple links to a particular Web site, which allow them to game Google’s PageRank algorithm, creating artificially high organic search rankings; and spam blogs that simply recycle content with AdSense or other advertising on them in the hopes of making money from errant users clicking on the ads.

Splogs most often get their content by scraping - the process of sending an electronic copying bot to take everything it sees, recreating it on an unlimited number of instant documents, writes Jim Hedger. Literally millions of instant sites have sprung up over the past twelve months, most of which are free-hosted Blogs, containing content scraped out from the original sites.

Why Splogs Are Evil

An article by the Wall Street Journal notes that the splogs also are a big source of frustration for several search-engine start-ups that focus on blog searches, such as IceRocket.com LLC, Technorati Inc. and Feedster Inc.

Jim Hedger makes some excellent points about how splogs are a menace to genuine bloggers.

Splog fraud is a big problem for Google and a growing concern for the other major search advertising providers such as Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN. It is also a problem for others working on the Internet. The way content is taken from one site and replicated to dozens of others can cause no end to technical and financial issues for honest webmasters.

Duplication of content can have an adverse effect on the search engine placement of all documents containing the similar items. Imagine losing your placements because someone else took the material you laboured over. Fortunately, Google’s historic record of documents is fairly good at weeding through which source first displayed specific content.

Search engines have several other reasons to be concerned about splogs. As many of them are created using the free-blog software offered and hosted by most of the major search engines, the proliferation of so many splogs consumes a lot of resources.

They also gum up search results with sites not actually relevant to search engine users. Lastly, they devalue the legitimate uses of blogs as communications and marketing tools, which might lead future blog readers or users away from the growing blogosphere.

Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek, a firm that monitors and searches blog content, said that spam blogs make it harder to convince companies to blog, and spam blogs are giving them a really easy out: ‘why would I want to deal with this?’

What Can You Do ABout Splogs?

Its not just the engines that are fighting back. There are a few knights in shining armour out there, like Frank Gruber, a blogger in Chicago who became frustrated while encountering splogs in search engines, recently launched a site called SplogReporter.

SplogReporter lets anyone submit the Web address of a suspected splog and has created an index to rate how “spammy” a blog is, and is building a database of splogs. Gruber says he may share the data with blog search engines.

Google engineer, Matt Cutts, blogged about how to report spam to Google. Use his tips to report spam and do your part in cleaning up the blogosphere.

And Finally…

I first wrote about spam-blogs in March 2005, and recommended that instead of using blogs for spam, marketers must focus on building content-rich sites and getting high-value links to them.

Don’t restrict yourself to just the SEO benefits of blogging. Appreciate the value that blogs can add to your marketing and public relations strategy and use them the way they were meant to be used - as cutting-edge and “cool” tools for communicating with your target audience.

Are you falling for the spiel of those who sell software that create spam blogs or splogs claiming that their automated blog creation tools can help you create hundreds of Blogger blogs, before Google can find and delete them?

Well, it looks like their swan song is going to be short-lived, cause they’ve irritated the HELL out of the blogospere and the big boys are going to be gunning for them soon.

I ranted about blog spamming software in an earlier post titled “Rise Of The Evil Blog-Spam Empire“, and today Marketing VOX alerted me to a CNET News report about spam blogs, which notes that

Blog spam - or splog - a problem that’s been brewing for months, finally boiled over this week and created a real mess, especially for Google, whose Blogger blog-creation tool and BlogSpot hosting service were used to launch the biggest splog attack to date, clogging RSS readers and manipulating search engine rankings.

The scope and sophistication of the attack mark a turning point in the escalating splog wars, and it’s not clear what the good guys can do about turning the tide.

The splogger used automated tools to create thousands of fake blogs loaded with links to sites (home mortgage, poker and tobacco sites among them). The intent was to manipulate search results and increase traffic to those sites by fooling search engines, which look for frequently linked-to sites.

The counterfeit blogs also triggered thousands of RSS–Really Simple Syndication–feeds and e-mail notifications, swamping RSS readers and in-boxes.

Unlike email providers, blogging services can’t easily detect and filter out spam. Google said in its official Blogger blog that it had deleted more than 13,000 fake blogs during the “spamalanche.”

Tim Bray, Web technologies director at Sun Microsystems, wrote in his blog in response to what he called the “splogsplosion.”

The software that’s generating these things is pretty sophisticated, you might think they were real at first glance. Uh, ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, I think we have an emergency on our hands.

In the process of cracking down on spam blogs, blog search engines like PubSub may end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater by excluding entries from Blogger-BlogSpot feeds in the normal results it delivers to users.

Chris Pirillo (whose name and site were among the keywords targeted by the splogs) asked Google to kill Blogspot and suggested that Google should institute an authentication system - a captcha of sorts - for every single post that gets sent through the Blogger service.

Watch out for the sequel:

Blog Wars III: The Engines Strike Back

Coming soon to a blog near you…

Yes, they do, says Jim Edwards in his new article, The Dark Side Of Blogs, posted on his I Gotta Tell You Blog.

In many ways, I consider Jim my mentor. He’s the one responsible for my coming out with my own information product, for which he even wrote the foreword. But as a committed blogger (or blogger who should be committed, depending on your point of view), I disagree with him on the points he makes here. Here’s my take on Jim’s article.

With all the hoopla around blogs, people forget that blogs, by their very nature, represent opinions, and opinions don’t necessarily represent the facts.

Too many people take the written word as Gospel Truth. Its not! Remember that behind those words are people, and people, by nature are opinionated, judgemental and subjective. Use common sense to reach your own conclusions about what you read online… and off.

People can and do post whatever they want because no “hall monitor” can call them down for blatant intellectual hooliganism.

This is true to some extent. But remember that the internet is self-regulated. Calls for curbing the freedom to write what we wish have been roundly condemned, especially by bloggers who view regulation on blogs as a violation of their freedom of expression.

In fact, in some countries where freedom of expression is minimal or non-existent, blogs have provided an outlet for people to reach beyond their country’s borders and share their views with the rest of the world.

And then why single out blogs for being hotbeds of opinion? You can say the same about books, newspapers or any media you come across today.

This diversity of opinion is, in fact what makes the human race so fascinating. Imagine how boring it would be if everyone had the same opinion about everything! Indeed there would be no scientific progress, no new discoveries…

Significant progress in human society is made by people who think (and opine) differently, who don’t follow the herd. Differences in opinion should be appreciated, not condemned.

But make no mistake, every person publishing a blog with any level of readership (not junk blogs used for search engine promotion) takes a stance on the issues, whether political, social, religious or business.

Less scrupulous blog publishers often exploit the social and psychological power of blogs to spread disinformation (intentionally wrong information) to further their agenda. This tactic rates quite popular on political blogs and has started creeping into business blogs too.

Again this applies to any media. Do you think newspaper publishers, TV moghuls and radio producers, don’t have an agenda? Of course, they do! And that agenda is to attract more advertising. Anything that keeps advertisers away is silently censored or never aired at all. It’s all about the money, honey! You’d be naive to think otherwise.

If blog publishers have an agenda (which they clearly do, because that is the purpose of publishing a blog in the first place), at least most of them are upfront and open about it. And bloggers are the first ones to “out” any poser or fake blogs. In that case I believe they’re more well-regulated than mainstream media, don’t you think?

Jim does outline some valid guidelines you should follow when reading blogs. But I would extrapolate this to any other source of information (newspapers, TV, radio, books, seminars) as well.

1. What is my purpose in searching for information on this subject?
2. Is this a credible source of information?
3. What ulterior motive, conscious or otherwise, do they have in publishing this information?
4. What alternative sources of information can I find to confirm / dispute the information on this blog?

The blog publishing phenomenon is already forcing MSM (mainstream media) to take blogs and bloggers seriously. Bloggers have broken stories, covered disasters, been sued and lauded for publishing news that MSM wouldn’t touch.

If you think that blogs are scary, evil things that mislead innocent readers, then be afraid, be very afraid…

This review has been deleted due to numerous complaints received about the software, lack of support and refunds.

Thank you for visiting.

I just wrote an article on the search engine benefits of blogs and RSS feeds. Of course, I used it to plug my new blogging whitepaper.

Read the article How Blogs And RSS Boost Your Search Engine Visibility here and feel free to reprint it on your own site.

I lay a great deal of stress on content as one of the mainstays of my SEO strategy. But just any old regurgitated content won’t do. Google has been trying to implement a duplicate content filter for a while now, and sites that host similar content are being weeded out.

I don’t need to mention that using someone else’s content is also illegal and violates copyright laws (unless it consists of free reprint articles that have a link back to the author’s site).

To avoid Google’s duplicate content filter and take your site to the #1 position, your content needs to be:

1. Unique

2. Relevant

3. Fresh and Updated

A well-written blog is one of the best ways to create fresh, unique content, and I’ve used blogs with great success to boost our online visibility and rankings.

To demonstrate exactly how you can use blogs to boost your SEO efforts, I’ve written a whitepaper on this sizzling topic. Request the free whitepaper: Boost Your Search Engine Visibility With Blogs And RSS.

If you wish to post about this on your own blog, please link to my blog post here.