Fake blogs, bribing bloggers, and corp speak. Can companies think of any more ways to screw up their public image?

In an article in iMedia connection, B.L. Ochman, one of my fave PR bloggers, gives us an overview of the social media campaigns that failed, and the ones that didn’t.

She profiles campaigns by companies like Ford, Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Sony, that got brickbats from the blogosphere, and those by Dell, Netflix and Lego, that led the way to a more enlightened handling of social media campaigns.

Ultimately the message that comes through strongly is:

• Be Authentic
• Build a Community
• Think Out of the Box

Read her excellent analysis of What Kills a Social Media Campaign.

In this WebProNews video from the SES on capitalising on social media, Converseon CEO talks about how search engines give social media significant weight, which means that negative feedback in blogs and other social media about your company or product could make up 60% of the top ten search results.

Monitoring the social media for brand reputation can help you “find the ripple on the water before it becomes a tidal wave.” The number of journalists reading blogs is phenomena, says the interviewl. I know this from personal experience because I’ve been interviewed twice by journalists who found me through my blogs.

The panel also discusses the ethics of incentivized word of mouth marketing and how flogs (fake blogs) are not the way to go for companies looking to include social media in their public relations strategy.

Sick of internet marketing JVs and squeeze pages? I just found this neat little email thingy that creates a self-destructing email address for you. Here’s how the 10-minute email works.

By clicking on the link below, you will be given a temporary e-mail address. Any e-mails sent to that address will show up automatically on the web page. You can read them, click on links, and even reply to them. The e-mail address will expire after 10 minutes.

Why would you use this? Maybe you want to sign up for a site which requires that you provide an e-mail address to send a validation e-mail to. And maybe you don’t want to give up your real e-mail address and end up on a bunch of spam lists. This is nice and disposable. And it’s free. Enjoy!

Well, it looks like list-building just took a blow. Especially the sneaky kind! I can just imagine all sorts of other people using this - terrorists, spies, perverts who signup on dating sites.

Via Michael Campbell

If you’ve been following my posts for any length of time, you’ll know that I never run with the pack. If everyone is running in one direction, I promptly pull up my socks and run in the opposite direction.

But there’s more to it than being an individualist. Over the years, I’ve realised that whenever a technique or a method is overused, you can bet it’ll lose its edge very soon.

Why? Because every other “make money online” scam artist will soon catch on and start plugging it to the heavens.

I stopped touting the hottest new marketing craze online when I realised that the key to making an honest living on the internet was not by telling other people how to make money.

It’s by getting into a few good niches that you’re passionate about and creating a great resource (read, content-rich website that pulls loads of repeat traffic) around that niche.

I’ve seen that when you create something of use to others and promote it well, you’ll get more traffic (and goodwill) than you ever expected. I like to think of it as creating good karma.

My own favourite niches are spirituality, self-improvement, relationships and women’s issues. So that’s what I focus on nowadays, rather than the “making money” stuff.

Another reason I got out of that market is that the internet is constantly changing. New technologies become yesterday’s news so fast it’s enough to make a marketing veteran dizzy.

A year ago, everyone was jumping on the blog and ping bandwagon. And now the “gurus” have (finally) caught on to the fact that social networks are the hottest “new” marketing craze. I’ll be writing more on that trend soon.

The biggest victim of this ever-changing scenario is Googe’s Adsense program. A while ago, Adsense was the favourite income source of publishers all over the web.

What no one will tell you however, is that Adsense incomes have been falling all over the web because of recent changes that Google made.

But you won’t find many people talking about that trend. Oh no!

After all, however would they sell all their page-generators, article mashers, PLR products and Adsense courses, if everyone realised that the dream of owning an “Adsense empire” has become more elusive than ever.

But a guy named Scott Boulch has just released a report that I believe will bring back something that is seriously lacking in the internet marketing world - common sense.

He reveals why Adsense is now just the icing on the cake as far as income is concerned. The real cake is… But wait. It wouldn’t be fair to reveal that just yet…

So check out his autopsy report on the death of Adsense here.

Internet marketers, be warned! There’s a rash of new products catering to (lazy!) Adsense publishers who want to beat Google’s duplicate content filters.

They claim to provide unique content for you either with public private label rights content or by generating hybrid articles using article creator software. Here’s why these are a very bad idea.

1. Search Engines Can Detect And Filter Hybrid Content

If you want to believe marketers touting Public Private Label Rights (PLR) and rehashed articles as the way to beat Google’s duplicate content filters, do so at your own risk.

According to Chris Knight, of the EzineArticles.com article directory, even software like the EzineArticles.com CASM (Content Association Sequence Matching) system can detect exact complex sentence matches in PLR articles.

Search engines like Google are even smarter. They use more than one way of identifying duplicate content, including methods of dating to identify the page on which the original content first appeared.

So if you think these “unique” article creation tools can beat search engines like Google in the cut-and-paste content game, think again. The best way to beat the duplicate content filters is to create unique content.

2. Article Creators Violate Fair Use Guidelines

There’s no doubt that it’s unethical to steal sentences from other articles, rewrite them and call them your own. Chris Knight also warns against marketers who claim that you can take and steal any exact match sentence from any author under fair use doctrine.

It’s the equivalent of taking bits and parts of other people’s songs, remixing them and releasing them under your own name. The word for it is plagiarism and it applies as much to written content as it does to music.

If you publish hybrid content created from another author’s articles you could be guilty of plagiarism too.

3. PLR Articles Will Kill Your Brand

Building your brand through article marketing involves creating trust by sharing original ideas and content.

If you’re caught using plagiarised content on your own site or submitting it to article directories, you’ll end up destroying the trust you built between you and your target audience.

If you do use PLR articles for your Adsense site, use common sense and don’t submit them to article directories as your own, even with modifications.

And if you really want to go about it the right way, check out Chris’ Article Production Strategies Seminar and learn how to leverage article syndication to grow your adsense sales and traffic.

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Priya Shah is a partner in the search engine marketing firm, SEO & More and writes an online marketing blog. Visit Article Writing Tips for more article marketing strategies.

This article may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact and all links are hyperlinked.

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I am soooo sick of eHostPros - the web hosts I was using to host a bunch of my domains because they were callous enough to suspend my hosting account for the SECOND time before even sending me an invoice for the payment. Did I say I’m sick of them?

Well, I’ve decided to move my sites to a new host, who gives me great support, so a bunch of my domains (including Blog Maniac) will be unavailable for the next 24 hours. Please bear with me till I complete the move.

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…

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

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