Monday, May 05, 2008

Spam Blogging

I've backed off blogging a bit lately because unfortunately my blog has been flagged as a spam blog by google. Apparently this can happen when a blog has a lot of links to other sites. If you visit Wikipedia (not going to post a link because that would be spam blogging) you can read all about blogging and spam.

In fact references to each other's blogs can be called a "mutual admiration" blog society. So my links to other bloggers and vice versa are being interpreted by Google's anti-spam robots as spamming. We are all writing about a pretty arcane subject, to the rest of the world at least. Articles about Revit stuff to most people is little more than gibberish unfortunately.

They (Google) don't make it impossible to blog but it is tedious because every time I want to post or just save I have to enter a nearly indiscernable series of text from a randomly generated image. I find some of them really hard to read and end up trying a few times before I get them correct. Very tedious and takes the "fun" out of trying to post an article pretty quickly. Which is why I posted this instead of the actual article I was working on.

To me this points out how hard it is for a computer to really evaluate content. The "robots" are too ignorant to be able to "see" that I've been blogging about this subject for over three years and have been doing nearly exactly the same thing the whole time. I suppose a spam blogger is consistent and patient too but I'm too ignorant or impatient to consider trying to make money by spamming. I don't even put adsense on this blog...it soooo isn't about the money....

Sooo...if you are a blogger too, be careful about the number of links you create that point to other sites else you'll get flagged too. Perhaps a reason to move my blog to another tool like Typepad or Wordpress and host it myself? I thought I'd explain my inactivity at least.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The major problem with Google page-rank "unlimited power" is that it is imposing his rules on websites and blogs and basically shaping the look and content of a large slice of the Internet. This is starting to affect the content and usability of many pages in a very negative way.

For example, in order to try to please the Google algorithm I had to change our website (Novedge) in several ways with some compromise on the user experience.
In the meantime, I notice how quickly spammers learn to create pages that Google loves. Just run a search on the "blog" section of Google and you will see how ridiculously dummy is the Google bot and how good are spammers in tricking the page-rank algorithm.

Unknown said...

Yes, this is a pain in the arse! I noticed it a few weeks back, that suddenly I was being asked for word verification from a series of words which I couldn't understand. Often, I was finding that it took three attempts before my postings would go through. I too have considered moving to wordpress, but this would hit the Google ranking. However, with all the links to my site it shouldn't be that bigger deal.

Steve said...

Blogger has reviewed my blog and cleared me from the "no fly" list! aah...

DaveFano said...

I think links back to help so i just added one to my site.

Thanks for the link on your side bar.

Dave
designReform.net