Annoying Trend Watch: Technorati spam blogs
I use a Technorati watchlist to keep track of mentions of me, this site, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (Note: last three links are feeds.) Technorati follows blogs, so it’s a nice way to gauge what topics people find interesting enough to write about. For instance, teenage girls tend to point out that “JohNny DePP iz SOOOOO HOOTTTTT!”
Over the last two weeks, I’ve noticed a disconcerting rise in the number of faux-blogs. They look like blogs, and they’re hosted on genuine sites like Blogspot. But they have no actual content, just a bunch of gibberish targeting a certain term, like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I assume they’re computer-generated. Here’s an example.
So why would anyone make a useless blog like this? Presumably, to drive traffic to other sites. The left-hand column on the example blog has links to various other sites, each of which either sells something, or has Google ads which make money on a pay-per-click basis.
It’s really annoying, because up until now, Technorati has been a terrific clutter-buster. I don’t know if the spam-blog problem is readily fixable. Unlike Google, which has algorithms to help it weed out junk sites, I think Technorati basically relies on self-reporting. The system would need to find a way to detect which blogs are real, and which ones are fake. That’s a tall order.
Articles
April 25th, 2005 at 1:51 am
They’re less to drive traffic, more to get the linked-to sites higher up the Google search rankings.
Blogspot is full of these sites - they can be generated free and easily. Given Blogger’s continued creakiness, I can’t imagine that it’s a priority for them to look into this, I’m afraid.
April 25th, 2005 at 4:12 am
It get’s even more stupid if you try one of the links from that site: http://johnny-depp-posters.blogspot.com/20050215johnny-depp-postersarchive.html
jørn
April 25th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
This phenomenon is really irritating, but I must admit it’s clever. It reminds me of Jeff Goldblum from “Jurassic Park,” “Nature finds a way.” Well, I guess spam finds a way, as well.
April 28th, 2005 at 11:58 am
I agree with JonnyB - there is a huge movement by SEO consultants to try to increase search engine rankings for their customers (and justify their fees) by creating these false blogs and news sites that are monitored by real and regarded services, such as Technorati. The sad part is that these tactics work, so we will continue to see more of them until Google and Yahoo revamp their ranking system.
Besides, John, we know you really want that Johnny Depp poster for your bedroom, right?
June 8th, 2005 at 4:36 pm
I just discovered one of these wretched spam blogs today–it does nothing but quote paragraphs, verbatim, off of my legitimate blog (URL above) and use it to get people to click on their ad farm. Of couse, it comes up higher in Technorati than my blog, not to mention that it is so prolific that it throws the entire search out of whack if you search for the term “dolls”. I really hope something can be done about these spam blogs before they ruin blogging.
July 8th, 2005 at 3:24 am
At
http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2005/06/01/hunting-spamblogs/
I suggested a way users/readers could build a public blacklist of spamblogs. Apparently, the idea doesn’t work: there is no immediate reward for denouncing a blog as spamblog as long as blog search engines don’t use it, and for the time being, their presence on del.icio.us even increases their visibility…
I assume the only way to combat spamblogs and related feeds are simple “report as spam” buttons in the Technorati interface itself (comparable with what you have in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail etc…)
July 13th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
Will Technorati.com Remove the Spammers?
In my work helping several clients on blog relations strategies for Backbone Media I’ve been using Technorati.com more often than ever before in the last few months. For eight months I was Director of Marketing for 48hourprint.com where I was…
August 26th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
[...] Apparently, the idea of building a public blacklist of spamblogs on del.icio.us or other bookmarking services hasn’t taken off. If I had given it more thought then, I should have seen why: there is no incentive for denouncing a blog as spamblog as long as blog search engines don’t use it (a chicken and egg problem: they won’t do this before some substantial amount of data has been collected ). And even then, there’s no immediate reward for doing so. What the user wants (as I suggested at other complaints on spam blogs and technorati spam), is a simple simple “report as spam” button or link in the (web/email/rss) interface itself (comparable with the email spam buttons in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail etc…) so that annoying blogs or feeds are filtered from the resultset immediately. Definitely something to look forward in a next Technorati release, see the David Sifry’s comments on this blog search wish list. So far for the idea of having a public blacklist, because I’m afraid none of the services (Technorati, Feedster, Pubsub, Yahoo Myweb2.0,…) will be motivated to share its results though (the ability to effectively filter out spam being a major competitive advantage!)… [...]
October 8th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
FYI - Today is October 8th at 10:40 PM, California time, which is almost 2 1/2 years since you wrote this post. I thought you would be interested to know that this post ranks on the first page of Google for the search term “how to spam technorati” which totally makes me laugh because clearly you were trying to rank for “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. Maybe you could use this to your advantage?
February 25th, 2008 at 3:29 am
My solution is to disrupt them by having the “bad words” option on the bulletin boards I monitor replace “technorati” with the phrase “In our experience, technorati blogs are linked to only by spammers: we are therefore disrupting this webaddress: please contact the administrator if this a legitimate link”.
I’ve been building up a list of standard words and phrases used by spambots, and these days it’s quite frequent for a spam post on my boards to be partially or wholly disrupted by “bad words” interventions that break the URLs and make nonsense of the message.